Scott Carey: Using solar power to energize community innovation
Coconino County, located in northern Arizona, is the second largest county by landmass in the contiguous United States. While many people tend to think of Arizona as being one big desert, it also has captivating natural amenities, including those around the cities of Flagstaff and Sedona, not to mention of course, the Grand Canyon.
Ask Scott Carey about the county and he will highlight everything from pine trees and mountains to a whole lot of snow. He also will point to it as a hub for innovation, which is backed up by Carey’s experiences with the Alliance for Innovation and its Innovation Academy.
Building Innovative Ideas through Teamwork
At the 2019 Transforming Local Government Conference in Reno, Nevada, Carey – a geographic information system (GIS) analyst – sat down with Municipal World CEO Susan Gardner to discuss his experience with the academy and how it provided him and his community with some significant opportunities.
“It was an assembly of a group of people from different departments in our county. There were meetings monthly, approximately about an hour-and-a-half, and they just discussed how to generate ideas,” he said. “Sometimes, ideas you have are good ideas, but you don’t know how to make those happen. It involved a lot of teamwork, which is always fun.”
After being invited to apply for the academy, Carey and a group of people from different county departments came together, held 90-minute meetings monthly, and began discussing how to generate ideas. Those ideas would then be distilled down, he explains, and used to generate ideas.
Transforming Lives with Solar Power
The group’s efforts led to something that Carey said – while acknowledging it is still in its feasibility stage – could be a transformational idea for the Coconino community.
Simply put, the project would use municipal savings to develop solar power at certain local parks. The savings generated from that effort would then be used to develop scholarships for children of incarcerated inmates.
“That was the innovative part. How do you take solar power and effect positive change in the community?” Carey said. “I think, sometimes, when we think about problems individually, we only come from what we know. When you extend the ideas to other people, other people say we can do this. There is a bigger brain trust to draw things from and know how to put those ideas into action.” MW
✯ Municipal World Insider and Executive Members: You might also be interested in the article: Urban innovation: How hubs, labs, and learning networks are the key to better city building. Note that you can now access the complete collection of past articles (and more) from your membership dashboard.
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