Three Syracuse University students are bringing renewable energy education and vocational training to communities in need.

The Thrive Project is a nonprofit organization at SU that aims to promote sustainable energy integration and occupational-based education to underserved global communities.

Brian Kam, the organization’s co-founder and CEO, said carbon emission, pollution, energy access and independence remain critical issues across the world.

“We at Thrive Projects firmly believe in the power of renewable energy education and integration to be the medium to address obstacles,” Kam said.

Ryan Brinkerhoff, co-founder and CFO of the organization and a senior in the College of Arts and Sciences, said the group’s goal is beyond just to go into communities like many other non-governmental organizations do.

“Through educational and community-driven initiatives, we help our students develop skills to solve their problems to alleviate dependency,” Brinkerhoff said.

Brinkerhoff said Thrives hopes to give a voice to their students who often feel like the world has forgotten about them and the struggles the communities are facing, noting that 1.3 billion of people around the world “are living in the dark” and that Thrive hopes to bring power to as many of them as possible.

In summer 2015, Kam said he served as an earthquake relief coordinator in Nepal, where he saw that people living there were in need.

Seeing this, Thrive decided to go back to Nepal this summer.

“We knew we had to return to do everything in our power to help them,” Brinkerhoff said.

Joshua Moon, co-founder and COO, said there is an increasing population of Nepalis who are leaving Nepal to make a living.

“We want the communities to sustain themselves,” he said. “If we can educate and empower the communities, we hope to show the people of Nepal that there is a way to restore and sustain a life in Nepal rather than leaving it.”

Brinkerhoff said he and Kam worked with a team of translators and local coordinators to run classes in three communities around Kathmandu, Nepal’s capital.

The program has now trained more than 50 young “solar entrepreneurs” who have built more than a dozen energy systems and provided more than 5kW of clean energy to the communities, Brinkerhoff said.

“This experience truly changed my life,” Brinkerhoff said. “I didn’t just learn a lot about the culture and people of Nepal, but they taught me a lot about myself and me truly appreciating the things I have and the life I have lived.”

Thrive also created its own educational platform, the Solar Powered Auxiliary Relief Kiosk, a system Thrive uses to teach students in the educational and vocational programs, Moon said.

Brinkerhoff said he spent most of his childhood and young adulthood working with his local communities. For him, there is nothing more important or rewarding than helping communities in need, he said.

Moon said he has been interested in entering the health care industry since he was 7 years old. Although Moon still wants to pursue the goal of entering the medical field, he said Thrive has allowed him to accomplish the same goal of helping those in need at a much more in depth level.

“While Thrive is not an organization that provides medical aids, it has opened my eyes to show me that it’s not simply medical aids that need to be brought out to people and communities in need,” Moon said.

Brinkerhoff said he and other Thrive officials are planning to look for their next objective after they graduate in December.

Moon said they are looking for communities with situations similar to those the people in Nepal face.

“Eventually we want this to be a global project,” Brinkerhoff said.

Published on October 12, 2016 at 10:43 pm

Contact Chieh: chchen@syr.edu