Todd Parker, Director of Programs at Michigan Saves

Michigan Saves is for the most part comprised of project managers. We were developed as a project with some grant funding a decade ago and there is a need on staff for someone who has strong financing skills. So far, we've learned as we've gone and developed products, but this program helps me fill that finance person role and allowed me to provide that expertise to the organization. 

The ultimate goal for us here is to allow us to develop some new financial products to offer our customers in Michigan and to move beyond the unsecured lending that we currently do. So that could be PACE. That could be some more creative financing mechanisms for larger projects. It could be PPA mechanisms for solar, or even broader things like green infrastructure or climate resiliency project. 

Having this experience and this education is going to give me the background to conceive and develop some of those new financing products and markets.

For me, a mid-career professional, I felt like I had hit a plateau in my career. And as I have done in the past, whenever I hit a plateau, I always find that education helps me break out of that and move beyond. In many ways I act as the right hand person for our CEO, but I felt like that if I didn't have more education, if I didn't have a broader and more detailed knowledge about financing and clean energy in particular, I couldn't take that next step and maybe become CEO in a few years when the current CEO retires. So this program is advancing my career. It's breaking through that current plateau that I'm on, and allowing me to advance to bigger and better things.

So this is a fun story. Whenever I go to conferences, my boss always challenges me to meet so many people. I have to meet five, eight people, whatever the number is. So my goal coming to the on-campus week was to see how many people I could meet. And that's more than just introduce yourself to them, but really talk to and interact with people for a good period of time to start building up those connections.

And I took notes of this, I met 48 people out of the 75 other people in my cohort, and more in-depth than just in passing, which I was pretty proud of actually!

I also enjoy the various speakers. Now when I go to a conference and I see a speaker from the program, I can walk up to them and say, oh, you know, I saw you speak in the FDCE program. 

I like the geographic diversity. I love the diversity of backgrounds. It's nice to be in a room that is not just all financing people. You have your engineers, you have your funders, you have your policy folks, your state regulators. I think that brings in the best perspectives. You get the perspective of both the finance and the social side or the state regulators side, and it adds a lot of value and a lot of depth to our conversations. You can see it when you read people's responses on the platform, particularly in the policy course; it really adds to and expands learning.

This is a great fit for green bank financing professionals but also for utility staff and state regulators. NGOs as well. I can think of some state-level environmental nonprofits that do some solar consulting or solar development that would really benefit from this. Foundations that have an interest in renewable energy and in clean energy or climate resilience in general should also look at the program; I think they bring a very interesting perspective since they control a lot of money.

The flexibility is key. The ability to work at my own pace. I like to start things on Monday and be done by Thursday. I don’t want to do this over the weekend because I have too many other things going on over the weekend. So that's my goal. I couldn't do that if it weren't online and if I couldn't work out my own pace or my own hours. It’s been really convenient. 

So I've been really impressed with the level of detail and the comprehensive nature of it. I think my expectation coming in was that it would be a series of webinars with a 50,000-foot level view. But I've been pleasantly surprised at how comprehensive the program is. And on the tech side, it’s also getting back to the basics and understanding just how things work. That's something I had been missing from my background and career; I could explain in broad strokes what solar does, but I couldn’t really explain how it works. Now I can. From that standpoint, it's been very interesting to learn. (Laughing) The math has been challenging, I will admit! 

On a pragmatic note, it’s also been a good value! That's always a concern, particularly from my organization paying for it; is it going to be worth the money that we're spending? And I would say that it has definitely been worth every penny. I've enjoyed it.