Women Who Drive Electric
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My name is LaSheita Sayer. I am the executive director for a nonprofit here in Denver called Women Who Charge
For folks who are unfamiliar with women Who charge. What exactly is that nonprofit? What does it do?
Like many nonprofits, we wear a number of different hats. Our overall objective is to be a part of the solution of tackling the reduction of greenhouse gases. We tend to focus on the clean transportation side. Women who charge is taking the. Word charge as in recharging your vehicle or recharging your mode of transportation and recharging other things that are used, this renewable energy. And we w wanted to have an opportunity to recognize the challenges that we were facing as women to adopt these new.
Transportation alternatives and to also celebrate and lift up and recognize some of the amazing women that are already in these industries that are, uh, making a lot of progress and maybe not being recognized because there are so few of them. And so through women who charge, uh, that is definitely one of, part of our mission is to celebrate those women. So on one hand, we want to help make this transition to clean transportation go faster, and recognizing that women make up half of the population, if not more, depending on the city that you’re in. We needed to make sure that. Moving over to electric vehicles, for example, was going to be easy and would make sense for women when we considered things like safety at charging stations. So that’s not a very concise answer depending on who asks. I answer the question of women who charge advocates for women to feel comfortable with the transition to clean transportation.
I love this. Before we get into the heart of our conversation, I do wanna ask, because this is the, the question I ask everybody at the heart of the podcast is this conversation about movement.
I’ve found that as I’ve spoken with people, that question, that idea depends on the person I ask. So I’m gonna ask the following question. How did you get there? And when you hear that question. Obviously the podcast is how I got there, but, um, how you got there. But when I ask how you got there, how do you interpret that question and what’s the story you wanna share with us?
Well, I got here. Yeah. Oftentimes when folks ask a question about me, I like to play back for them snippets of stories that I’ve heard other people tell about me, because sometimes I don’t really know that story since I’m just living it every day. But I do get asked the question a lot of how and why I started Women who Charge and.
You know, it’s, so that’s probably the better story to tell for you as well. So I ran a marketing company for many, many years, two decades, and we were primarily servicing a number of government contracts around the state of Colorado. It’s an oddity. It’s a bit of an outlier for a professional services company that provides marketing communication services to have a fleet of vehicles.
But we did, we had eight cars in our fleet. And at some point or another, I got information around electric vehicles being available. Now I run a marketing agency. This was six, seven years ago, a while back, and EVs weren’t nearly as popular as they are now. And so it was a bit of an experiment for my marketing agency to take on electric vehicles coming into our fleet.
Through that experience though, we learned a lot. Most of the folks that were in those roles going out into the community were women. And those were the drivers of the majority of the cars that we had in our fleet. And they would say, you know, Rashida, this is nice. It’s so fun, it’s zippy, it’s so quiet.
You know all the things that you hear people say that they love about EVs. But at the time, we didn’t have charging at our building. We were renting space, leasing a space, and so we were absolutely dependent on the public charging network and that just wasn’t working. It wasn’t working for so many reasons.
We’d have experiences where charging stations, where public charging stations were set up on the side of a giant building alongside dumpster. No additional lighting and no visibility from the street. And the women in my team, on my team were, did not find that. Acceptable. They would rather take risks of driving without knowing if they were gonna make it to their destination to avoid the public charging network because it just, they felt unsafe.
Right? There wasn’t, there wasn’t, there weren’t enough of the, of the amenities, uh, that we have become accustomed to with things at like gas stations. Um, the design wasn’t really. There wasn’t a lot of other thought, and so as we started moving through the process of trying to get our charging stations installed at our business so that we could recharge our fleet there, I got introduced and proposed this idea that I go to.
A meeting with the Colorado energy office put together by our governor, and in those meetings I met some amazing people. They were talking about these new ideas of how we were gonna make EVs be so great, whether it was gonna be swappable batteries, where we’d have garages. You drive up and drop the battery.
There’s all these new ideas. Given this is six years ago, right? And I went around and I, I talked to several people, a lot of men, mostly men in the room. Although the meeting was run by a woman, I was, but mostly men, which is fine in the industry that I’m in, it’s not all that new. And I would tell them like, Hey, you know, we are running into problems with charging stations that my staff doesn’t wanna stop charge there in one day.
I probably talked to like four different folks and tell this story and. Every single one of them literally looked me in the face with like this, like they just had this epiphany in their mind, like, oh, a woman’s perspective. I hadn’t thought of that. I hadn’t thought of it. And so when it gotta like the, the second guy, I was like, yeah, you know, it is kind of interesting.
Do you have any daughters? Would you want your daughter to charge there? I mean, if I was to describe that charging station to you, is that someplace that you think your daughter would use? And they said no, she would charge at home. And I was like, there are so many layers of things that are just too shallow in those responses for me.
And I also just kind of walked away from that meeting. And another that I’d gone to with very similar set of conversations that. They need to hear things from a a woman’s perspective because apparently they can’t think of it on their own. And I had already had a group of women that we were casually getting, getting together on Wednesdays.
To talk about our charging our electric vehicles and to talk about and drink wine, right? And hang out and just, it was a very casual, small group of women. Just so happened it was like, Hey, you know, so we’re kind of like a bunch of women who charge that get together on Wednesdays and drink wine this, this very casual thing.
But in that group, when I went back and kind of told them what had happened, well, we should just make this official. So we became women who charge. And since then, the conversation around around better design of charging station plazas. Not necessarily the charging stations, the equipment themselves, but the rest of the environment, the visibility from the street, the lighting, whether or not there’s trash cans, whether or not, you know, there’s, there are video cameras.
As a woman, what are those amenities that we’ve gotten so accustomed to that we don’t even articulate them anymore? That we now need to articulate them because we’re designing new ways and new physical locations that we need to be safe in if we’re expected to use them in this clean transportation space. So that’s the origin story. I don’t know if that gets you to where, how I got here.
No, I love that. I, I love that I had no idea what the origin story for women who Charge was and is. And I want to share a story of my own, I’m actually gonna record an episode about this, but I was very intimidated by electric cars because I felt like I didn’t understand how to charge them. Like that was the first thing. I was like, how do I, is it gonna electrocute me? Like, like, like there were just things that intimidated me. Yes. About an electric car. I don’t own a car because I use the car share program. And so it’s a blessing in the sense that I can test out different cars and have different car experiences.
But at the same time, I have gaps of knowledge. So when I’m doing this, I’m having to learn right along the way. So last year I’ve driven in town, but last year I accidentally went on a road trip with a all electric vehicle. Oh, I had meant to get a, a hybrid. But I, I reserved my car too late and so it ended up being all electric and I was like, okay, I’m gonna be my own Guinea pig and see how this goes.
And when I tell you where I went, you’re gonna be like, sweet Jesus. Okay, I’m here now. Which means it worked. You did it. You survived, obviously, but barely. Okay. So I was going on a trip to the sand dunes. I have been there before, however, I have not been there driving. NEV and one of the most disappointing things about the trip were the stations.
And I’m gonna, I’m gonna share the one in particular where I was like, why aren’t there 10 level three stations here? Fair play. Fair play. Makes no sense to me. As busy as it is, as busy as it’s that I’m sitting in a parking lot. On a weekend, everything’s closed because like, like the timing was such that everything was closed.
They have a, it’s not a welcome center, but it was closed, so that wasn’t welcoming. And there were two level three chargers and nobody and four of us. And so there was no coffee shop to go to ’cause it was closed. It just was not, it wasn’t great. Okay. Yes. And so, um, in the midst of like charging, and I’m going down to sand, to the sand dunes for this part of the story.
I am unable to detach the charger. And I’m just like, I don’t understand. So I have to call the company for the car and be like, um, no. I call the charger people and I’m like, uh, so your charger won’t let my car go. It will not let. Right there go. Right. It won’t unlock. And so they had to do an offsite situation to detach it. But the cool thing is people with electric cars are really cool. The other three people were super supportive. I got let free but fair play. I was like, why aren’t there 10 level three chargers? It just doesn’t feel good. Then make my way to Salida and the level three chargers aren’t downtown. I feel like they’re elsewhere. There’s these little itty bitty level twos, level ones, and I’m just like, uh, and it takes forever for them to charge. So to your point, the timing of the day being nervous, oh my God. So I’m running down on juice and no, in fact, on the way down, I didn’t go to s slide up, this was what it was. I was running down and I’m like, oh my God.
Oh my God. And it’s dark. And if anyone listening to this have driven down in that area, you know, it’s remote. And I’m like, I need to get to the sand dunes with the group of people that I’m camping with because it’s pitch black and I’m nervous and this is going bad. So I get to the sand dunes, I overshoot and drive too far from where we are camping, so then I have to go back.
So I’m using more juice. Oh, I get to the campground, I’m like all stressed out and I think there’s 30% left in the battery. I go to sleep, I wake up and again, remember this is my first time doing this. I don’t have the knowledge to know, experience. Yeah, that it’s draining. The battery is draining, obviously throughout the day.
So I go camp, I go hiking with the group and I’m like. I need to check this car because I need to charge it. The plan was go to Alamosa to charge it. Mm-hmm. I see that it’s at 26% and I’m like, oh my God, because I have 40 miles to get to Alamosa. So it’s just literally, it’s, it’s like on a wing and a prayer.
So I get in the car. The minute I saw that, I was like. Bye bye guys. I’ll be back. And I get in the car, I get to Alamosa, I’m like four miles out and I get a notification by the car, and the car’s like, Hey, you’ve got 10 miles to go. Yeah. Like, that’s it. You’ve got 10 miles of juice and I’m, and we’re gonna just stop where we stop.
Yeah. Thankfully I make it to Alamosa Visitor Center, which honestly, out of all the places I’ve charged the best experience, it was fantastic. I go there, there’s four level three chargers. I get my car there, I start charging it. I speak to the 90-year-old, literally like 90-year-old. Guest services person, they are so kind.
They direct me one block over to the coffee shop. I get coffee, I do all the things, but you have to understand that energetically in my body, I was shaking because I was like, if this car. Stops right outside of fricking Alamosa. I’m gonna have to get triple you. I just this a whole host of problems and that was also how my body felt going into the park because I was, I don’t know where I’m at.
I can’t exhaust the electricity that I’ve got. Like it was a learning experience. And so on the way back I was like, oh my God, if I am ever gonna do this again. First of all, I would start the trip much earlier than I did Normally, when I do a road trip, I leave super early, so I leave at 4 35. Like I’m one of those people, I’m like, I don’t wanna be dealing with all you people on the road.
Right? And so I’ll leave really early this time. I left at one. In the afternoon because just things happened. So I had to get the car and just things happened. Imagine adding, charging to that. So I leave at one, I’m up at fair play. And so it just became a really scary, unpleasant experience. And so to your point, there’s just just an approach to using these vehicles in a safe way, in a way that would encourage using them again.
That we have to talk about. So I love that you have women who charge because we can have these conversations. The fact that I was like, I would rather risk getting to the group that I was with and having them tow me out than being out in the middle of nowhere Colorado and no one finding me…
Right. Right. I mean, the fact that those are thoughts that are even crossing your mind during a trip is unfortunate. Right. And while when I heard about some of the goals that we were reaching towards and some of the. So, you know, the, the opposite end of what is predicted to happen, what changes in our lifestyles behind the emissions that we’re putting into the air, that caused a few sleepless nights for me.
Right? And so for, you know, and then when I started going to these meetings with the governors, the energy office. Hearing about, you know, we’ve got this goal, we’ve got semblances of a plan, the tactics aren’t clear. Uh, what about this idea what I mean, the opportunity to be in a room where so many ideas are being shared and then they’re trying to vote and decide and, you know, be sort of smart about how the money is gonna be spent.
And then the business side, you know, because I’m a small business owner. It’s very, very clear to me. You know, the folks that wanna build charging stations want to put them in the places where they’re likely to make more money, and there’s different charging station models. Sometimes they’re.
Releasing the space and owning the charging station. Sometimes they’re selling the charging station. Sometimes they’re ordering charging stations from Amazon and getting it installed by an electrician. And then, you know, maybe it’ll accept payments, maybe it won’t. It’s like, okay, so we’re gonna have small charging stations, fast charging stations, red charging stations, blue charging stations, you know, fast ones, slow ones.
We’re gonna have this, this network, this, this, literally a fabric. Of different colors and different thicknesses of a mesh for our charging station network. And then you, at the time we had our private ones, right, where only if you were a Tesla driver, could you use the Tesla network at the time. Right. And then I remember Rivian was so excited about where they were putting charging stations at places like the sand dunes and some of our other national parks and they’re like, well, we want these to just be for Rivian.
And then there’s me and maybe a few others who are like. That’s, that’s not helping. I would like to see government dollars going towards building out the network in the neighborhoods or in the locations where the rest of the business community has decided there’s not enough money. I. For us to justify putting a charging station there, that’s where I’d like to see our government dollars go.
So then it turned into these conversations. Call it what you will. It ended up having to be an equity conversation to say, we know that this is a chicken and egg situation. Which one comes first? Nobody can really agree. So, but we do know if we have, if we don’t put charging stations in some of these poorer neighborhoods.
Then this electric vehicle adoption is not gonna happen for those families. So what, you know, if, if the market is there and the market is at play in all of its dynamics of being in profitable locations or being in locations where they’re likely to get the turnover that they’re looking for to make the money that they want to make, to justify the cost of installing and maintaining those charging stations, then let’s apply these government dollars to those, you know.
Those less desirable locations so that those communities can be part of this solution. And those are, those initially were very tough, but then it’s like everyone sort of got on enough, people got on board, everyone else got on board and said, okay, ’cause that was still a, that’s still a very big problem to solve.
Mm-hmm. You know, it still, it still means we need thousands of charging stations that are going to be funded by government or with public dollars in some way, shape, or form. Um, one of the things I think about, um, when we talk about charging stations is no, we never say, like, I never hear people say.
Because you’ll hear people say, I don’t wanna deal with electric cars and I’m just gonna drive my car, or whatever. Businesses, or maybe cities. They’re just not about that life. And I’m like, why don’t you just tell people that these, these folks are not trying to, we are not trying to force you to do this thing, but they’re gonna be in your town for two hours sitting for that, for their car to charge.
And on average they’ll spend $107 while they’re waiting for the car to charge. That’s a totally. Different conversation, and I don’t understand why people who are invested in this don’t lead with. Here’s the economic value. We’re not trying to change what you do. Even though low key, we are right, but, but it’s like sometimes you have to play chess and not checkers.
Sometimes you just have to lead with the benefit to people who otherwise would not have any investments. I shared how I loved the experience in Alamosa. Okay. Yeah. That is a, that is really a hardworking country farm town. The fact that out of all the places I would mention to have the most positive experience was Alamosa.
So when I talked to them to the wonderful guest person who helped The guest liaison, yeah, yeah. I was like, why is it that this is set up like this? This is great. And they were like, well, we have a lot of people coming up through New Mexico via TAs. And so we were noticing all this traffic coming through and people were ha, I think people were having problems or stressed out because they didn’t.
Have a way to charge their cars. The other thing is I never found a charger charging station near the sand dunes, so I don’t know where that exists, but I didn’t find it ’cause I was trying to figure that out. And so I feel like there’s these huge opportunities along that 285 corridor and the other corridors that cross the state, but that in order to get buy-in.
The conversation has to just be completely different. You can’t tell people that we are wanting to make you change and help the earth if they’re not there. If they’re not there. Absolutely. It is the day, the day that we’re having this conversation, it is 69 degrees in February. That’s right. I was sweating.
Okay. I was outside in the park. I saw a bald eagle. It was great. I was sweating. I was way overdressed for February. Yeah. And so I’m sold on this idea that we need to care for the environment and, and adopt these practices and these tools to help us mitigate these issues. This greater concern, uh, that we’re grappling with.
There are people who, they’re not gonna do it. And so the question is, what can we get you to do that makes sense for you and to get people to spend at your store, I think makes sense.
Yes, it absolutely does. And now those numbers are out right now, those studies are done and now that is something that they can lead with, however.
Mm-hmm. The way that this is designed with these charging stations mm-hmm. To get a level three installed. You’re seeing a lot of other prices of things coming down, not here, right? Oh, to get level three installed still on average is running most people 35 to $50,000. Whoa. And if your local utility company isn’t set up for you to be able to, to power EVs fast, then they have to redesign reallocate power.
Mm-hmm. It’s unfortunately, I’m a small business owner. I get really frustrated with how slow government moves and. But when you start trying to unpack what it takes to get that much more power delivered to a part of the state or a part of a physical piece of land that wasn’t receiving that much power before, you’re waiting a very long time and it is very expensive.
So. Getting fast chargers installed is a very expensive proposition, and that’s another reason why I was fighting and participating and volunteering. Not fighting, but participating in these meetings to say, if we have the money, let’s put it in these places where they’re less likely to adopt these things because it’s hard.
Even if we can say like, your, your little town, your little business is going to see an increase because people are gonna be sitting there for 45 minutes or waiting for an hour 45. That that’s on a good day. Hey, like, look at, there’s a reason why Flying J and Travel America and all these other places are putting charging stations in because they’re recognizing the value of the time that’s being spent.
Inside their stores. Right? It’s taking the convenience store, gas station model and putting it on steroids. And for this situation we’re, we’re spreading it out. The opportunity, you don’t even need a gas tank, but you do need to be able to get access to that much power. Mm-hmm. A lot of folks don’t understand how much power is in those cars, if.
One battery and I’ll, I’ll spare you the numbers. If one battery can charge the equivalent of five households, so wow. Everything in your house, running your microwave, the TV’s on, listening to your Google, whatever your five households running for one day is the same amount of power in one battery. Average battery. Not a small little fiat battery, but an average like Tesla battery.
So. If I’m trying to get that much power, the equivalent of five households running for an entire day into one car in a half hour, one hour timeframe, it’s a tremendous amount of power. And if I’ve got multiple cars coming in one car per hour, how many houses worth of power did I just try to facilitate with that one charging station?
Mm-hmm.
It multiplies very quickly, so. The level twos and the level ones were likely those business owners or property owners trying to do something to be amenable, trying to participate in some way.
Mm-hmm.
Or finding a workaround to the fact that they couldn’t get access. To enough power to install a fast charging station.
So that’s why it’s so important for us to recognize the need for all the different types of charging options that we need available.
It is 2025 and um, to your point, we’ve gotten a lot of data around EV adoption. Colorado has apparently edged out California, which is. Fascinating to me. I see. Anecdotally, I’m gonna say Rivian seems to be pulling ahead of the pack in my, just walking around town in terms of the, the car of choice.
But one thing I’m curious about is it seems like, and I don’t wanna get deep into this, but it seems like this administration might be signaling that they’re not as excited about EVs as say we are. How do we move forward when there are organizations that were maybe reliant on federal funding and grants and things like that.
How do you move a mission forward when the funding might not be there? What does that mean in the future for the conversation? And what adjustments, if any, are you making now or considering making, or is this even something that’s come up? Uh, it comes up quite a bit.
And it’s easy to get really sad and depressed about it depending on how, on what your why was for doing this work that we do.
I no longer run my marketing agency. I focus all of my time on women who charge because this, I need to wake up every day, me personally, to helping to solve this, this problem and, and this problem being reducing greenhouse gases.
I wanna, I make, I wanna make sure that’s clear to the audience, so, okay.
And yeah that is why I continue to run women who charge, so that every day I can wake up knowing it’s the, if it’s the same amount of work, if I’m still on these very tough conversations and still sitting through hours and hours of meetings. Mm-hmm. And still, if I’m, if I’m gonna be working hard, I need to be working hard towards this goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
So some people are in this space because the money’s good, the company’s good, the, the mission’s all right. Yeah. Yeah. But I’m here to, you know, put food on my table. So for some folks, maybe the impact is a little less. And then for others, you know, it’s, it’s hurting them to their core because for some it’s, it’s, it’s an indicator of, you know, when you hear about funding for programs that are going away, some of those programs are what?
Those really expensive, big charging stations that we want to have more of are going to take longer. But a lot of the folks that have that are in this space have been in this space a long time. And when the Biden administration came in, I’ve never seen some government folks move as fast as they did.
They were like, okay, we got four years. What, what can we get done? We don’t know what’s gonna, it’s obvious. We don’t know what’s gonna happen in the next four years. Thankfully, here in Colorado, we had some very forward thinking folks who, who had the insight. City and county of Denver and the state of Colorado.
We have some of our own, I’ll just call ’em internal fundings now, without the government funding available from the feds. To stack upon that, it means that some things are gonna move slower. It means that some programs that we had, you know, visions of that would help folks feel comfortable with the transition is not going, we won’t have as many of them.
But believe you me, it’s not stopping. We have enticed enough people. We may not be at the Malcolm Gladwell tipping point level. Right. But we have, we have gotten to a point where people recognize and enjoy there’s enough other vehicles of choice. It’s not just Tesla and it’s not just Nissan. But now there are minivans and, and sports cars and the Rivian, and these are beautiful cars. I’m not a car person. And I’ll be honest, they’re beautiful cars.
They’re beautiful. I mean, you get in it and it’s a whole, it’s a great driving experience to be inside an electric vehicle. So whether you’re you, most of the people that are buying them now or maybe not even really thinking about the climate, it’s like a.
Second or third sort of. Oh yeah. And oh yeah, by the way, it’s also good for the environment, but they’re buying these cars because they love how they perform. They’re buying these cars because they were more affordable, because maybe the incentives helped. And now they’re also, you know, at five, 5% of the state’s cars, at least in Denver, if not higher.
Are now electric. And so they’re the cool car to have, right? They’re the, they’re the, the car that you’re proud to be bragging to your friends that you just got. Right? So I don’t, while it, while the adoption might slow down, it’s not stopping and that is reassuring. We’d like to see it go faster. I’d love to see that the charging station network is never fast enough for me.
I always wanted it to be faster and even though when we started Women Who Charge We, there were about oh 600 or so public charging stations throughout the state of Colorado. And now we’re at, I think I like, last time I looked at the numbers, it was like 5,700 charging stations. Wow. I mean, it is a beautiful thing, what we have done in five years.
Wow.
How many charging stations are now in the ground? Operating public facing charging stations is phenomenal. We. Pun intended. We put our foot on the pedal as far down as we could make it go. And now it might slow down and then hopefully the next generation will put it back down again.
We’re coming to the end of our conversation, I do wanna ask this. I feel like. Not everyone can afford to buy an electric vehicle. It is obvious again, that maybe the subsidies might dry up a little bit as well, uh, for EV adoption. And one of the things that I’ve really, as a person who doesn’t own a car, I. Loved seeing is that we have products or services. Services is a better way to say this, such as busting.
I do want Denver’s RTD to get a little better, um, because, but I’ve been, I’ve been riding it my whole life. They’ve gotten me where I need to go. So, you know, some things go up and down so they’ll, they’ll. Get that smooth out. Um, so I love that there’s busting and RTD and Colorado car share and, and I feel like from a multimodal perspective, Denver and the state is starting to really build momentum around.
Okay. Because I remember. As a younger person, you can go to the mountains without a car. It was not an option. And so I guess I’m bringing all this up to say you are really focused on EV adoption, but I want to ask, with all these different modes of transportation available to people, what are some of the things that you would love to see in addition to EV adoption?
Like what are the, the opportunities out there? That you think would help Coloradans move around the state in a economically and environmentally helpful way? Yeah, both to them and to us as a, as a community. That is a great question. And you know, just in an attempt for clarity, women who charge is about helping us reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
Public transit is a great greenhouse gas reducer, especially if we can get. More of those buses to be electric.
Hmm.
It just so happens right now, the places that seem to need women who charge or need the voices that we have are asking us to speak at the consumer level for individual cars. Right. For electric vehicles.
But, you know, we love the fact that young folks can get access to electric. Scooters and e-bikes and the e-bike program with the city of Denver and the cargo bikes with the state of Colorado. We think all of those are great, and they all seem to be moving with a great amount of momentum, as you said, right?
Like the, the numbers are increasing, the incentives are there because of. The programs through CSR and the Governor’s Energy office. The impacts though, and the the lifestyle changes are harder to come by for all the challenges that you had, making it down to the sand dunes for your vacation. You, you do that.
I don’t know how often you go to the sand dunes and I’m guessing it’s not once a week. I’m guessing it’s not every day. I’m guessing it’s a, it’s like a couple times a year I would do something like that. A couple times a year you’ll, you go someplace exciting, right? And you have options of ways to kind of mitigate the transportation method that you’re choosing to ask someone to move.
It’s like that, the graduated scale, I’m sorry, I’m using my hands and I know you’re not gonna be able to see it, but that graduated scale of. Moving from one, the level of change that we’re asking people to make.
If I’m asking them to simply change how they power a vehicle that they 90% know already how to operate, then I’m only asking them to make a small-ish change.
But if I’m asking them to like, don’t drive the car that you’re used to driving every day. And have the systems and the, and the schedules that you’re accustomed to having, dropping off the kids, going to work, stopping by the market, doing the thing, doing, and in a different type of vehicle altogether on a bike or on a bus, that’s a really big ask for them to be a part of the solution. And so, you know, if you, if it starts to feel like we focus mostly on cars. I mean, I can understand why you might see that. ’cause that’s, that’s what I, that’s what I’m asked to speak on, on a regular basis. Um, because that’s where the help is needed right now, so that we can still get people into clean transportation without asking them to change.
And upend their lifestyle. It’s one thing if you’ve grown up and you’ve, you’ve developed, you picked where you’re living because it’s close to where you work because it’s close to a market. But for the folks that didn’t make those decisions and now own homes far away and have to commute half an hour in and send their kids to school, and little Johnny goes to practice and so and so goes to ball, but you know.
Then they need a car. Yeah. To be able to fit the rest of that lifestyle in. And so for me it’s almost like, it’s almost like EVs are sort of the lower hanging fruit versus the ask of switching their transportation method all the way around. I love busing. I love, uh, I love that those things are available for folks to go off and back to Boulder.
I, every once in a while, if I’ve got places I need to be, I love the idea of not driving myself because I’m usually trying to get a lot of other things done. ’cause my, my days are busy. Yeah. But I want us to continue to have those options available for people to have those choices. I believe in choice. I want to have the options available.
I want everyone to have those options available here in Colorado, we will still have our state incentives around EVs. Mm-hmm. And we still have our Cash for Clunkers program, more or less. Uh, that’s not the actual name. It’s a vehicle exchange program. It’s, so, it’s the old cash for clunkers. You have a car that’s over 12 years old or a car that doesn’t pass emissions.
Then when you go to the dealership to buy a car and you decide to get either a hybrid or a full battery electric vehicle, that credit. 5,000, $6,000 applies on, on the hood of the car at the time of purchase. That dollar amount comes off the purchase of the car. That in addition to the the Colorado Energy Offices.
Rebate for an electric car. I mean, we may not have the federal rebates, but here in Colorado we had so many different types of cars, thankfully, but not all of those cars even qualified for the federal rebate. For folks that are still thinking about getting an electric car and you’re afraid that those incentives might have gone away, the two really big ones.
For Colorado are still there. When you heard people talking about a $50 a month lease payment on an electric car, they were serious. That wasn’t a scam. That was real. And now it meant that you had to have good credit. Yeah, you had to have the $2,000 or something to put down. Maybe it was $1,300 to put down.
Yeah, but I mean, my God, 50 bucks a month. $50 a month for a brand new Nissan Leaf. A hundred and those, those cars drive
great. Yeah. I will say I have had the opportunity to use a leaf that’s in the, the car share fleet.
Yeah. You could get leaves and the arias, their little mini SUV were $150 a month on a a two year lease.
Now, some people had problems with leases, but. A fully functional car, and if you had some sort of a scenario whether you could charge at home or charge at work.
That the cost savings was tremendous. Right. Wow. So. I feel like, yes, there are some setbacks, as you mentioned earlier, with the change in the administration and some of their goals we’re, we’re going to see some things slow down, but a lot of things will continue to move because our state insulated themselves from a lot of those types of changes and.
I do think that there are some affordable EVs out there for folks who are, you know, gainfully employed and mm-hmm. You know, have income coming in. If you can find a way to move from $0 a month to 50 or $150 a month, and it doesn’t work for everybody at Women Who Charge, we get it. There’s all sorts of scenarios, but.
I do think that there are some affordable options out there, and I love that our state and our city also is working towards those other alternatives for clean transportation. We just want cleaner. We want less gas emissions. I mean, I grew up. Seeing the brown cloud, which was disgusting. Okay. Yes. I don’t want that to come back.
Okay. I have two final questions. I am curious, what is it like being an African American woman in the EV space in Colorado? I, I feel like you’re a unicorn.
Do do I have, what’s it like to show up though? Like kind of unicorn? Yes. Okay, then that’s great. It’s great. So, you know, luckily climate change does not care what color my skin is.
And I am a fairly confident, seasoned communications professional. And I think. I’m con I I know that that helps me in a number of scenarios. I’m like a triple threat walking into a meeting, but, but we’re not, we’re not there to fight. Right. Right. So I’m, I’m not really there to try to quote unquote, protect anything.
And all, all that I’m speaking and saying is sometimes just a slightly different way of what’s already being said.
I get invited into those rooms. As I mentioned earlier at the beginning when you asked like, how did I get here? Because the people that were sort of leading that were looking for the right word, they were sort of surprised that they hadn’t thought of it themselves to design.
Starting station pauses from a woman’s perspective, not even based on the color of my skin. I mean, and so then to also walk into some rooms and then they’ll be like, gosh, we we’re just really having a hard time figuring out why this program isn’t working. That probably doesn’t really have much to do with the fact that I’m black, but just the fact that I’ve been in so many situations with so many different types of people to be able to point something out to them.
And as a black woman. I think I’m accustomed to pointing out things that I might have that other people might assume are obvious, that apparently are not obvious for people who have not had the lived experience that I’ve had and the circle of friends and the scenarios that I’ve been in. For them to recognize that that’s why that program’s not working.
Oof, so. I feel as a black woman in this space, sometimes it’s a little draining. Um, because when you hear things like this, the effect of greenhouse gases impacts communities of color. Not, it doesn’t matter if, because I speak a different language, but that sometimes. Or, or not. Um, poor communities and peoples of color, communities of color where there’s just a lot of people, a lot of blacks, a lot of browns, a lot of Asians, a lot.
Wherever. There’s a lot of, any of one of those co colors or the social, the social economic impacts as well, that hurts me emotionally longer. Other people might hear it. It’s a fact in one ear and out the other, make note, blah, blah, blah, blah. And for me, I’m internalizing that because I am seeing my community, my friends, my family in that community with more respiratory problems with more.
More problems with their health because this situation isn’t being addressed. And um, and I, I think as a black woman, you know, I will, I’ll hear those things and I’m trying to sort of suppress the. Emotional sort of reaction that I wanna hear, that I wanna have. When I hear those, those facts, when I hear those projections, when I hear this, the, the impact and, uh, so maybe as a black woman, it makes me fight harder.
Mm-hmm. There are no others of me in the room. No, and that’s a lot of a burden to carry. I’m not a scientist. Mm-hmm. And I, I feel like I, I do spend a lot more time on YouTube University and Googling to try to understand what’s being presented so that I can be ready for the next meeting. I, I don’t know if that really has much to do with the fact that I’m black or just the fact that I just didn’t grow up, just period.
Right. So is that, am I working? Am I staying up late to get ready for the meetings because I’m black? No, but because I’m black.
But it’s because you care, right? You’re, you’re invested not just emotionally, but you’re here on this planet. And so it’s not something that is happening to other people. It’s happening to all of us.
So I think that emotional inve investment guides, how you, um. How you move through the space. Yeah. It’s, it’s with intentionality and care and, and, um, with, with this goal in mind, it’s like swimming upstream. And so you preparing is like getting your lung capacity
That’s right. So that you can, you can move forward, you know, it’s an excellent, excellent set of words to describe it.
Yeah. What, so thank you for asking, but No, it’s, yeah. I think in, in fact, I feel like I have a bigger responsibility to try to ensure that others who do look like me, um, and other women period, but see a way to be a part of the
solution easier. I think the one thing I’m not clear on is what was the tipping point for you?
What happened for you to be like, this is, this is the issue for me. Why, why do I, why? Why do you care so much about the impact of global warming and greenhouse gases and what was it that, what happened? Because I feel like a lot of people don’t, like it’s not their issue. They care ish, but it’s not their issue.
But like what’s the thing that comes up quickly for you?
Growing up as a kid with asthma, I know what it feels like to not breathe very well. The idea that my daughter or her children or my nephews might have to someday live like that. The work that I did exposed me to a lot of reports that I think a lot of other people don’t get to see.
Wow. And uh, you know, I volunteer with the American Red Cross and we get sent out for this disaster relief and there aren’t enough volunteers for some of the, there’s so many disasters happening. Back to back to back. Yeah. And, um, you know, it’s like, you know, it’s easy to just get overwhelmed and sad if you’re just constantly being, being forced to consume.
We wanna be a part of what’s happening. Current affairs, you, you know, we wanna be empathetic if something’s happening. In one state or another, and I just need, every time I hear one of those to still be able to get out of bed. Mm. Get on that next meeting. I’ve had to come to grips with the fact that I can’t stop it.
Right. And, but with the work that we’re doing, we can at least slow it down. Okay. I hide inside. Science fiction I love, I love a good sci-fi book. I love audio books. You know, there’s series of books and I love the idea that sometimes, you know, our little heroes inside these science fiction books are sometimes presented with these unimaginable challenges, you know?
Of course they set up the story. It’s, it’s dire, it’s dreary. It’s, you know, it’s, there’s a love story. There’s a family, there’s some emotional connection. I’m like, okay, that’s my life right here. I’m, I’m right there with you. I feel you. I feel I got you. Yeah, I got it right. Yeah. But then there’s this potential glimmer.
Some smart people coming together with a solution. You know, I just wanna make sure that we still have those tables where the smart people are coming together with the solutions so that maybe, maybe we have to change a little bit of our lives in 10 years or 20 years, but maybe we won’t have to be walking around in gas masks.
Maybe we won’t. Maybe, maybe we’ll be able to solve some other things. Right. Maybe that’s what I, that’s my glimmer.
We read the same books. Uh, with that said, how can listeners support you? How can they connect with women who charge? If you could share that, that would be fantastic.
Yeah. I think, well, actually, I was gonna say we’re on all the typical things, like, well, actually, maybe not.
Yeah. We have a website. Women who charge.com, and we are still active on Facebook and for our professional connections and developments. We are very active on LinkedIn. A lot of women connect on LinkedIn that are looking for new roles and careers in this clean transportation space. We accept donations.
It’s always nice when we have volunteers that are helping us at some of our events, talking to other women about what it’s like to drive an EV to the sand dunes. Um, so yeah, we, I mean, because I think it’s fair to tell it those are real as a woman, you know, we, I think all of us want to hear the more real stories and then for us to be able to say, you know.
I don’t go to the sand dunes very often, and I couldn’t even tell you where Alamosa is on the map. Mm-hmm. But you know, how would my charging environment be if I could charge at home? Is there one at King Supers? Yeah. We like to get together for happy hours in the summertime. Have a Sisters in Energy group, another sort of professional development group where we’re mostly working with other women of color that are doing either solar building, electrification, clean transportation.
And policy, energy policy. Mm-hmm. Trying to look for those women of color to, to raise them up and celebrate them. So yeah, I feel like those are still sort of the typical ways. And of course on our website, if you send a a form, right, there’s somebody on our team or a volunteer who usually tries to respond back to those if I can’t get to them.
But yeah, it’s. It’s always great to get support. It’s a, it’s a tough space to be in. It’s not quite like being a teacher where you feel like it’s kind of thankless, but it is a situation where we have to find our own, sort of our internal why. Why am I sitting on this meeting again? Why do I have to go to, why am I getting on this plane?
Like, ugh. So it’s nice when we run into other people in the community who can be supportive. Mm-hmm. Um, thank you for asking that question. That’s very thoughtful.
I hope people connect with you. I hope they send money and support the work that you do. I will definitely be, uh, attending one of those happy hours this summer, and I just appreciate your time and just everything that you shared.
