Volunteer of the month

Doug Beach - an energy chair chock full of energy

You're not exactly down and out, but for a year you've been looking for work, and you're finally wondering if maybe it was a mistake to move to the Bay Area. So what do you do?

If you're Doug Beach, you step up your Sierra Club volunteer activity and become acting chair of the Chapter Energy Committee.

Doug had been anything but a Sierra Club slouch before this "promotion". Since his arrival in California two years ago, besides working on the Energy Committee, he had been putting in two days a week at the Chapter's Berkeley office. Jonna Papaefthimiou, the Bay Chapter's conservation manager, says, "Whether it was organizing a mailing or calling voters and elected officials or painting protest signs or just doing a big pile of data entry, Doug would manage so capably that you would forget he was a volunteer or that there was anything unusual about his coming in twice a week with a cup of coffee and a briefcase, sitting down at a desk, turning on the computer, picking up the phone, and setting to work. `Wait a minute!' we'd have to remind ourselves. `Doug is a volunteer.' Unlike almost everyone else sitting at a computer, he wasn't getting paid anything to slog away inside on a sunny day."

Environmentalism runs in Doug's family. Back in Iowa, his parents bought him his first Sierra Club membership. His sister, who became a Californian a few years before Doug did, moved to San Francisco because her car had broken down - and rather than fork out the money to fix it, she thought she'd like to live in a city where she didn't need a car.

So when Doug graduated from the University of Nebraska, with two bachelor's degrees, one in math and one in business administration in finance, he looked at the job opportunities in the Midwest. He required better than the restaurant/bar work he'd done to support himself in college, though that at least gave him a variety of experiences - making deliveries, bartending, even slaving over the stove. Popping up on the prairies were numerous insurance companies, but the life of an actuary didn't have much appeal. For a job in investment research, the places to be were New York, Chicago, and San Francisco. In San Francisco were a sister - and better weather. In the spring of 2003 Doug came west.

Loving San Francisco means trying to make it better. Almost immediately, Doug joined the Energy Committee and immersed himself in the major issues that still concern the committee today: the sluggishness of the city in issuing bonds to do more solar projects and eventually shut down the southeast power plants at Hunters Point and Potrero Hill, and the demotion, from top priority, of community-choice aggregation (see his article, page 9).

Last summer, Tom Roberts, then chair of the Energy Committee, and his vice-chair both underwent overwhelming career changes. It was Doug, says Tom, who at this critical time "stepped up to the plate". After Tom adjusted to his job, he and Doug decided they would co-chair the committee, Tom focusing on the East Bay, Doug on San Francisco and Marin. Doug is an excellent leader, asserts Tom: he is "grounded and pragmatic", but he aims high. It was Doug who took the lead in proposing that San Francisco's energy plan comprise a dazzlingly high percentage of renewables. "He takes big steps," says Tom, "not small ones."

Doug does have a life outside of Sierra Club volunteerism. A nice day might find him bouncing a basketball in a pick-up game in a neighborhood park. He likes to hike in Marin and the East Bay and to explore the beaches on the Peninsula. He also confesses to being something of a nerd, tinkering with various computers. He owns both a Mac and a PC running Linux, and plans to turn the latter into a digital juke-box. (Perhaps this will help him display his encyclopedic knowledge of early hip-hop.) This year he has been too busy to congregate with avid football fans at the Marina bar which attracts Midwesterners.

Doug hasn't limited his volunteer activism to the Sierra Club. According to Tom Roberts, Doug almost always sports on his lapel a political button - sometimes local, sometimes national. He was an avid supporter of Matt Gonzalez's mayoral bid. He spent a week in Iowa City working on the Kerry campaign, and the weekend before the election, he flew to Las Vegas to get out the vote. He notes that Clark County was the only county in Nevada that voted "blue".

Yes, last fall Doug did land a job that should keep him off the streets. (Actually, he tries very hard to keep off the streets unless he is walking or riding the Muni or BART.) He now has some personal goals - to do a little traveling, perhaps in the south of France. He liked a visit to Spain a few years ago. But the goals he seems most comfortable discussing are environmental: get San Francisco to be more energy-efficient, to grow from 3% renewable energy sources to at least 40%.

Were the Bay Chapter staff happy for Doug's success? Yes and no. "We were heartbroken," admits Jonna. They just knew that Mellon Capital wouldn't give Doug two days off each week to help with mundane, day-to-day Sierra Club operations. "Not many folks who chair committees," Jonna explains, "also come in to lick stamps."

Karen Rosenbaum

 

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© 2005 San Francisco Sierra Club Yodeler