By Jess Wilber
Jivahn is an Economics major and Sustainable Energy minor at Princeton University. He was also President of the Princeton Climate Initiative, a student coalition affiliated with CCL’s Campus Leader Program that works on local and state level carbon pricing initiatives, a role he recently passed on to someone else. Though he was born in Colorado, he grew up in Paris, where he attended high school. He feels a strong connection to France, India, and the US due to his time living abroad and his parents roots. Part of his drive to get involved with climate advocacy was a direct result of the knowledge that the carbon emissions associated with traveling to visit family and friends in other countries was ethically questionable. The rest of his motivation stems from his love of the outdoors. When he is not working on climate initiatives, he can be found participating in French theatre, giving tree climbing tours to friends on campus, leading wilderness backpacking trips through the Princeton Outdoor Action Program, and making crepes.
What do you like about CCL and what inspired you to join?
Last year, I became President of the Princeton Climate Initiative. I was recommended for the position by Jonathan Lu, the previous president, who also worked with CCL’s Higher Ed Action Team. I appreciate the fact that CCL’s work in the US has a nationwide reach, since many other environmental groups have a more local focus. I think that the decentralized structure of the organization has allowed for fantastic coordination and organization amongst local chapters working towards the same goal. CCL does this by providing access to key resources that can be applied to operation strategies that best fit different localities, rather than pushing one specific way to organize. In my experience, the trainings and online resources are great!
I also appreciate CCL’s nonpartisan nature. Climate change has become a divisive political issue, so for CCL to use nonpartisan language and avoid excluding members of one side or the other allows for politicians and everyday people to start reaching across the aisle. In the past, when I would say that I support climate action, people would make immediate assumptions about my political ideology. I always find these situations demonizing a particular side to be very dangerous; they immediately rule out the option for constructive conversation.
Why do you support a Carbon Fee & Dividend model for carbon pricing?
The general reason CF&D works is because it’s a good economic model. As an Economics major, it just makes sense. It’s not banning fossil fuels- which we will need during our transition to a green economy- it’s just marketing them at a fair price. It’s a good policy for not going “too overboard”, and as such, it is more likely to appeal to conservatives.
What kind of work have you done with the Princeton Climate Initiative?
The group’s focus and development has undergone two phases since I joined over two years ago. Jonathan Lu was the first president of the group and one of its founding members. At the time, the group was focused on passing CF&D in the state of New Jersey. I previously had negative opinions about the efficacy of campus organizations, but I stepped up to the plate and decided to take on a small leadership role: organizing a research team to focus on the effects of CF&D in our state. I structured an assembly line system in which a political strategist would be sent a research task that could be delegated to someone else in the group. This would continue on until each person had a task that fit their level of involvement in the group and their unique skill set, or until we had exhausted all necessary research projects. That system was very efficient and helpful for our project. I also coordinated a team of students to summarize our legislative proposal at the 1st International Conference on Carbon Pricing in 2019.
By the time I became the new president of the group, the group had three main working groups: climate entrepreneurship, zero waste initiatives, and the Princeton Climate Action Plan. I once again recognized that the structure of the group as a whole was inhibiting independent members from tackling their work. To address this, I started by having dialogues about recruitment, pooling resources, and funding for each working group. I thought about CCL’s decentralized structure and decided that applying the model to our organization could allow individual groups to have more autonomy. I organized one meeting to have people brainstorm about the group structure and various positions we could have. Once we had come to a consensus, I decided to make general meetings shorter and more efficient to ensure better attendance and morale. Since each person knew what their exact role was, all we had to do at meetings was to provide brief updates and discuss upcoming events. In the end, this decentralized model allowed us to maximize our time and planning constraints.
Moving forward, I want to collaborate more with other campus groups. I have an idea for coordinated events of dialogues or demonstrations with other CCL campus chapters across the Mid-Atlantic region, though I worry about the difficulties associated with coordination across states and universities with different schedules.
What do you struggle with most as a leader? How have you begun to overcome those difficulties?
I just ended my term as President, I have taken on more of an advisory role, rather than an active leadership one. I fill in the gaps wherever is needed and encourage other people to participate when they can. I am trying to respond more to what people want instead of imposing a structure on them. At the start of my leadership, I had so many ideas, but I would have to push hard for people to accept them. I had to decide to let point people from each working group make decisions. By doing so, it was less work for me, and it encouraged others to step up. I have found that people need to have skin in the game. Sometimes, when organizing, the people who I thought would be less likely to participate would be encouraged to step into a position of leadership. By giving people positions of responsibility, even if it is not an official leadership position, they can more easily identify the importance of what needs to be done.
Something else I have struggled with is knowing what to do when a person is not right for a particular task even though they think they are. Recognizing who the right person for the job is instead of just blindly asking for volunteers is so important because there has to be some element of evaluation in mind to play to the strengths of each volunteer. During Johnathan’s leadership, he would have introductory meals with new group members to establish a relationship with them. I decided to expand on this tradition by organizing meals with existing members once a semester to see how they were feeling about their work and position in the group. At these meals, they could say things they wouldn’t necessarily feel comfortable voicing during meetings. It helped build and maintain relationships so that I can better understand the strengths, ambitions, desires, and personalities of each member. It also allowed me to have a better idea of how the group was going for everyone beyond the tangible results of our work.
How do you see your work with CCL and the Princeton Climate Initiative tying into your future career?
In the long run, I see myself gravitating towards the fields of entrepreneurship and policy formation. The things that I will bring with me from my time in climate advocacy are the mindset of sustainability and social consciousness. I will undoubtedly benefit from the leadership skills I have developed as well, as I have gained a lot of insight on communicating and working with people. I have learned that you cannot please everyone, but even so, you have to keep in mind that the entire world matters. People you don’t agree with still matter, and though you may not want to, it is important to reach out and be willing to communicate with them. Finally, I have learned that no project is ever the result of a single person’s effort. Every student in the Princeton Climate Initiative is invested in the work we were doing, and that is what allows us to succeed.