Nominees for Top Forty Innovators
Steve Mitnick is Editor-in-Chief of Public Utilities Fortnightly and author of the book “Lines Down: How We Pay, Use, Value Grid Electricity Amid the Storm.”
We received these two nominations for the Fortnightly Top Forty Innovators, for Lizette Miranda of Sacramento Municipal Utility District, and for Josh Byrnes of Osage Municipal Utilities:
"SMUD Career Ambassadors participate in a wide range of workforce-related activities in local schools and colleges. These activities include career fairs, career exploration events, classroom presentations, mock interviews, resume reviews, competition judging and student mentoring.
To date, about ten percent, more than two hundred and seventy SMUD employees have volunteered to be Career Ambassadors. In 2017, our Career Ambassadors participated in a hundred and twenty-two events, volunteered more than three hundred and seventy hours and reached more than thirty thousand students.
SMUD's Career Ambassador program was started six years ago by Susan Wheeler when she recognized that we needed a sustainable and scalable way to reach the more than three hundred and eighty schools in SMUD's service area. Career Ambassadors receive training in how to effectively tailor their message to different age groups.
The program is run by Lizette Miranda, a management analyst in SMUD's organization workforce development area, with support from Jennifer-Christine Madamba, SMUD's internship program coordinator in the human resource services department. Lizette has really taken the bones of the program and made significant improvements. She's increased the number of Career Ambassadors from ninety to over two hundred and seventy and developed tools and hands-on activities that help the Career Ambassadors be more effective in reaching students."
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"Our main office for Osage Municipal has an upstairs community room. This community room has not been used for years and had a full-size kitchen space as well. Osage's general manager, Josh Byrnes, offered this space to our school district and it is now home to what is called Iowa Big North.
Iowa Big is a program for students of all academic and socioeconomic backgrounds. These students spend three class periods a day in that space and learn about creativity, entrepreneurship, business, communications, and perform project based learning activities. The students are juniors and seniors in high school and bring a variety of talents to the table.
The ultimate hope is that this creative work space generates a new business that can expand beyond the workspace and into the community. These students also work on special projects in partnership with Osage business and industry. This has been an amazing project that is gaining statewide attention."
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Seems to us that Lizette Miranda and Josh Byrnes are contenders for the Top Forty Innovators. In November's PUF, we've announced, we'll publish our new annual list, the Fortnightly Top Forty Innovators.
As we've said, everyone making the Top Forty will have distinguished themselves during the last year, serving the public interest. Invented costless clean electricity generation? That would do it.
Or you could have developed or advanced the adoption of a technology, application, method, regulatory approach, or public policy that has the potential to serve the public interest. Understanding that such projects are predominantly the product of groups of people, rather than lone wolves like Nikola Tesla, a nominee can be an organizational or project leader that urged and stirred action and achievement.
The Top Forty issue in November will be a big deal. Interviews. Photos. Audio. Video. It will highlight some of the most outstanding leaders in our field. Like — perhaps — Lizette Miranda and Josh Byrnes.
