The Epicenter for Action Research joins the UCLA Institute for Carbon Management
On December 16, 2021, UCLA and monday.com formally accepted the MoU with the Epicenter for Action Research. This provides the Epicenter with up to 250,000 professional licenses per year to the monday.com SaaS platform for five years and enterprise features to enable us to run the growing network of allies we serve. The Epicenter distributes the professional licenses for free to students, faculty, staff, and the outside allies working with university teams, along with free customized onboarding. We have learned that good works get done by broad coalitions of sometimes small organizations. I insisted we had to extend the platform to outside allies. While the in-kind value of $16/user/month might be discounted heavily in a university environment where we expect to get a lot for free, these are real savings to community agencies throughout the world that want to engage university teams in their efforts. We are creating a worldwide network addressing the many crises we face. Do the math and the grant brings in-kind support worth up to $48,000,000 each year over the five-year term. We grew from zero to over 1,200 distinct users helping 36 centers at UCLA, a dozen more over 11 other universities, and 15 outside allies. The challenge is to scale rapidly.
The in-kind grant provides the platform for building an intelligent information system for each ally of the Epicenter. We provide free training and certification in project management and monday.com’s SaaS platform. Monday.com co-certifies all graduates of our 25-hr training. We provide free custom on-boarding for allies and ongoing consulting, on a training-the-trainers model when we work with major centers and other campuses. We created and maintain a learning library that covers all topics in our training. The?Student Project Management Certificate, our first-year growth, and the caliber of the allies we’ve attracted are three reasons monday.com awarded the UCLA Epicenter its Academic Partner of the Year in the Global Awards for 2021.
The Epicenter was graciously incubated through this first year by the Healthy Campus Initiative under the leadership of Wendelin Slusser, Vice Provost. We needed a permanent home for the Epicenter to help deal with the coming hypergrowth. The UCLA Institute for Carbon Management (ICM), a founding member of the Epicenter, stepped forward and UCLA’s Executive Vice Chancellor/Provost has granted the Epicenter a permanent home in ICM as of the 26th?of January.
ICM, under the faculty leadership of Gaurav Sant and with Ed Muller as the chair of the Advisory Board, just won the Carbon X-Prize for its technology for permanently sequestering CO2?in concrete. This technology launched the ICM startup, CarbonBuilt. A second ICM startup, Concrete-AI, uses machine learning to minimize the cost and carbon footprint of concrete. A third ICM start up is developing a revolutionary method for extracting CO2?from sea water, turning it into calcium carbonates and magnesium carbonates as permanent carbon stores, with pure hydrogen and pure water as by products. The technology can scale to the 35 gigatons of CO2?produced annually worldwide. More, major innovations are in development.?
ICM is the premier technology incubator at UCLA. I feel privileged to be part of ICM and hope to help its ambitious agenda. My 2004 book, Midlife Startup, centered on technology entrepreneurship by university faculty who wanted to be something more, rather than something else. ICM is the epitome of that spirit. A place in ICM is a strong asset to help attract the next generation of leadership for the Epicenter. As I have said in other contexts, I may have been the right person to take this from zero to 48 centers at 12 universities, from zero to over 1,200 distinct users. I am not the right person to grow this from 1,200 to 250,000. ICM is an exciting place to be. I’ll be around to help where I can.
领英推荐
We are well down the critical path to a stable home and base for growth for the Epicenter. Thanks to everyone who has helped this process.
Cheers,
Lee
_____________________________________
Lee Cooper, Prof. Emeritus & Faculty Director