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This year’s Bright Night guest of honor is Danny Kennedy. Rising Sun is delighted to have such an exemplary leader speak at our gala. For those of you who may not know about Danny Kennedy’s work, please allow me to share the reasons behind our excitement to host Danny Kennedy at our fourth annual fundraising event.
Champion of environmental protection
Danny Kennedy began his green career as the Director of Project Underground, a Berkeley nonprofit focused on supporting communities resisting mining and oil operations. Kennedy worked mostly with indigenous communities struggling for human rights and environmental justice, including climate change.
Danny left Project Underground and went on to work with Greenpeace, where he ran the political and solutions campaign in Australia. Kennedy also successfully ran Greenpeace’s California Clean Energy Campaign. Kennedy was a key reason for the current California Solar Initiative and enabled the city of San Francisco to issue millions in revenue bonds to finance renewable-energy projects through his campaign efforts.
Champion of clean-technologies
After his time with Greenpeace came to an end, Danny Kennedy moved to Oakland were he co-founded the residential solar company, Sungevity. Sungevity arose from Kennedy’s passion to stop harvesting from harmful resources and focus on generating resources from the sun. Kennedy put it best when interviewing for the New York Times,
“Think about it this way. We’re killing people in foreign lands in order to extract 200-million-year-old sunlight. Then we burn it . . . in order to boil water to create steam to drive a turbine to generate electricity. We frack our own backyards and pollute our rivers, or we blow up our mountaintops just miles from our nation’s capital for an hour of electricity, when we could just take what’s falling free from the sky.”
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Champion of leading innovations
Kennedy currently serves as the Managing Director at the California Clean Energy Fund. The innovation of California Clean Energy Fund is an investment into creating a more environmentally aware and sustainable future. As a service that helps fund startup clean energy companies, California Clean Energy Fund has invested in more than forty companies, including establishing the nation’s first academic center for energy efficiency at UC Davis and partnering with San Jose State to create the first Masters in Engineering with an emphasis in batteries. The big idea is to create a new clean energy economy that is affordable and easily accessible to all by providing startups with the investments, connection and breakthrough solutions to any barriers they may face.
Bright Night Guest of Honor Danny Kennedy is a native to California and a local resident of the Bay Area. We are so thrilled to welcome Danny Kennedy to our fourth annual Bright Night event. For information on attending or sponsoring our event please visit our website at https://risingsunopp.org/bright-night/
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Sources:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/12/magazine/the-secret-to-solar-power.html
http://www.gosolarcalifornia.ca.gov/csi/index.php
http://grist.org/article/kennedy-projectunderground/full/
https://www.greenbiz.com/article/danny-kennedy-activist-turned-entrepreneur-takes-investing
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