Category Archives: Current Highlights

CommitChange Aims to Transform Non-Profit Fundraising

Posted on by
Reply
Roderick Campbell and Jay Bolton

Jay Bolton (left) and Roderick Campbell (right)

Roderick Campbell ’10 and Jay Bolton ’11 never crossed paths while at Evergreen, but with more than $700,000 in seed investment from the likes of Mark Cuban and Tim Draper, this odd couple has taken internet startup CommitChange to the Major Leagues of Silicon Valley.

Roderick described the way he came to partner with Jay as an “arranged marriage” by Merchant OS, now a part of LightSpeed Retail.  Merchant OS was a client of Roderick’s small web development business, which helped Campbell pay for school. Fatefully, Jay was an intern with the company at the same time. To this day, Roderick and Jay still remember the offer of a year’s salary to do whatever they wanted, as long as it was with each other, as the most bizarre offer they’ve ever received. But that’s when the seed of CommitChange was born.

While Roderick and Jay are business partners now, they took vastly different paths to where they are today. Roderick was a theatre student at Evergreen, studying with faculty like Sean Williams, a big influence for Roderick. While a student, Roderick was the Assistant Director of local theatre fixture Harlequin Productions. Roderick took advantage of travel opportunities while he had them, traveling to 32 countries, and spending two to three months abroad every year since high school.

Meanwhile, Roderick describes Jay as “the smartest guy he’s ever met,” even in the one of the world’s leading hubs for high tech innovation and development. Jay studied computer science at Evergreen, and Roderick described him as a person who can “learn a new computer programming language in a weekend; someone who can build anything.”

When they started working together, under contract with the booming Merchant OS, they keyed in on an app which allowed consumers to pay rent online. Several months into their work, they had something of an ‘aha’ moment and went back to the drawing board. Their goal: a billion dollar company that could help a billion people. Otherwise, they might as well work for Google, Campbell conceded.

They came up with an idea for supporting non-profit philanthropy efforts. The reason: Roderick estimates that over 2 billion people on the planet are directly impacted by non-profits. When they performed an environmental scan of the products and services available for non-profit development, Campbell described an industry stuck using old technology and widespread lack of innovation. With the fees companies levy on non-profits for online fundraising, Roderick discovered it is often less efficient than using direct mail! CommitChange aspires to develop a product for non-profit philanthropy in the way that Linkedin is the product for professional networking. With the right technology and product at the right price, they believe non-profits will move more of their fundraising efforts online.

While Roderick and Jay are far from where they were when they first started CommitChange on the top floor of the Evergreen Plaza Building in downtown Olympia, Roderick insists Evergreen is “the most underrated school in the country” and is hopeful to hire Evergreen students as his company grows in the years ahead. Roderick Campbell and Jay Bolton are definitely two young alumni worth watching for.

Read more about Roderick and Jay in The Olympian, linked here.

Alex Stupple ’00 Reports On GTMO Trial

Posted on by
Reply
Pictured: Alex Stupple '00

Pictured: Alex Stupple ’00

When Alexandra (Alex) Stupple ’00 was offered the opportunity to observe a pre-trial hearing at the Guantanamo Bay prison detention camp, she jumped at the possibility. Stupple was nominated by her law school professor, who was also then-president of the National Institute of Military Justice (NIMJ), the NGO responsible for sending her as a trial observer. Stupple didn’t know what she was in for, and with the hearing date continually postponed, she wasn’t sure if it was even going to occur. But finally, last February, Stupple boarded a military plane to Cuba for the chance of a lifetime, where the alleged perpetrator of the suicide bombing of the U.S.S Cole in Yemen was standing trial. The experience, which Stupple reported on with only ten other NGO observers, was mentally somewhat of a struggle. Stupple recalled:

“Everything was so contradictory. Beach bars and barbed wire. Secret roads. Gift shops with ‘I heart GTMO’ merchandise without even a sense of irony. We stayed in MASH-style tents, with one for men and one for women. There was another tent surrounded by barbed wire. They wouldn’t tell us what it was for.”gtmo6

What might have been most difficult for Stupple were not the accommodations, but the fact that “the hearings themselves weren’t as blatantly unfair as [she] imagined they would be.” Stupple described a place where nothing was black and white, clear cut, or totally fair. In Stupple’s eyes, “the law strives for fairness and ways of dealing with conflict without violence. The problem with the GITMO situation is that we did resort to violence.” But sorting out these questions is something Stupple is well equipped to do.

Alex Stupple described her Evergreen experience, where she focused on American Studies, as where she “learned how to think.” While attending the Hastings College of Law at the University of California, Alex came to appreciate her Evergreen education more. She views the traditional model of education as “a ridiculous way to learn,” and recounted one class at Evergreen in particular, with David Marr, where she was tasked with the challenging assignment of “writing one perfect paragraph.” When she arrived at law school after spending ten years as an English teacher in China, then as a science editor in Scotland and in D.C. working for the National Academy of Sciences and the American Journal of Public Health, she wondered what traditional colleges actually taught students. Since Alex’s law school experience, she concedes Evergreen has “since been dear to my heart” especially during three and a half hour exams that comprised 100% of her class grades.

Alex is an Attorney for the California Department of Public Health in Sacramento and in her spare time is “still obsessed with international and military law.” You can read more about the significance of her experience to observe the pre-trial hearings at Guantanamo Bay in her other proud alma mater’s news release.

“Terry Oliver ’73: Saving the World One Kilowatt Hour at a Time”

Posted on by
1
Photo Credit- BPA

Photo Credit- BPA

Winning the “Oscars of Bonneville Power Administration (BPA),” officially known as the Administrator’s Excellence Awards Program, is a big deal at the Portland, Oregon-based nonprofit federal agency. BPA is in the energy marketing business, and Terry Oliver ’73 has been leading and directing research and development there for decades. Receiving the Administrator’s Meritorious Service Award is an acknowledgment of a career built on Oliver’s mantra: “Saving the world one kilowatt hour at a time.”

After trying everything from grassroots organizing with the now-defunct Citizens for Solar Washington to land-use planning and even working in a Minute-Mart, Terry Oliver has worked for BPA since 1981. He also took “maybe the world’s longest period of leave without pay” from BPA (from 1992 to 2000), during which he served as the Managing Director of the International Institute for Energy Conservation in Bangkok, Thailand, and worked on sustainable energy issues in the Middle East, South Africa, and throughout Asia.

Oliver studied International Relations at Evergreen, a school he chose as a community college transfer student because of its coordinated studies, and he heard it was a place to “combine things into interesting puzzles.” Evergreen was where he “learned how to learn,” which Oliver calls “the key theme” of his career. Of his “leave-without-pay” experience, Oliver recounts that he “picked up some of what I learned from a U.S. context and something from Evergreen… [getting] to recombine things in an interesting way.” When he started at BPA, managing programs like the Hood River Conservation Project was only going to be a three-year job. But with groundbreaking success on a global scale, even when Oliver returned from leave, coming back to work at BPA “was like putting a familiar shoe right back on. It was a good fit.”

In 2005, completing the circle, Terry Oliver was named BPA’s first Chief Technology Innovation Officer, responsible for energizing, focusing, and managing BPA’s research portfolio. Since then, he has restarted the BPA’s R&D program and created a publicly articulated research agenda, shifting its philosophy to “Copy people like Apple or Boeing who do R&D, not because it’s a hobby, but because it’s vital to their business.” When asked if he’s figured out the formula for success, Oliver laughs, replying, “That’s what they finally wrote up the award for!”

With such honors as this award and being named a Fellow by the Portland International Center of the Management of Engineering and Technology, Terry Oliver is able to confidently say his work “has actually delivered value to BPA.” In the R&D world, that is “a really big deal.”