After completing the sustainable business dual degree (MBA + MS) at the University of Michigan with a focus on Behavior, Education, and Communication, I recently joined Harvest Solar as Business Development Manager!
My experience at digital health and food startups has helped me develop a customer-centric mindset and embrace collaboration. My focus on plant-based eating* has personalized the often vague concept of sustainability and clarified its individual, organizational, and structural components. With this background, I'm excited to dive into the solar industry with a great company like Harvest.
If you or someone you know is interested in learning more about Harvest or solar in general, please let me know at mike@harvestsolar.com or on LinkedIn. I'd love to connect!
Thanks for being here,
π mdwestco@gmail.com
π LinkedIn
Plant-based eating can be incredibly beneficial for improving our health and healthcare system, reducing wasteful spending and environmental harm, and ending unnecessary suffering. Unfortunately, these benefits are often underappreciated while the barriers to plant-based eating are exaggerated. So, abillion and Wellwith make it easy to explore the benefits and eat more plants, like beans.**
Beans are inexpensive, earth-friendly, delicious, versatile nutritional powerhouses. To me, they epitomize the untapped potential and misunderstood nature of plant-based eating β and that's exciting! Because when we realize that beans are more than the "musical fruit" we eat more of them, and our health, animals, and the planet are better for it. The same is true of plant-based eating in general.
Updated 23 Feb, 2022
πΌ Experience + Education
- Using HeatSpring prep course
- Grew and engaged our community of brands, restaurants, and nonprofit partners.
- Explored partnerships to reach folks who aren't looking for sustainability apps.
- Researched plant-based foods and sustainable goods markets in the US.
- Wellwith makes it easy to explore healthy resources and turn them into action. Instead of frantic social media feeds, it's a space for thoughtfully curated content from people and brands you care about.
- To keep things simple as we start up, we're zooming in on one practice that benefits several dimensions of well-being: plant-based eating. From there, we'll support content curation for other practices including walking, sleep, meditation, and yoga. This broader focus will appeal to folks who wouldn't otherwise consider plant-based eating and thus accelerate our transition to a vegan world.
- To see a sampling of Wellwith pages, please scroll down to the "Sample Work" section.
- To start exploring content and create your page, visit wellwith.me. Thank you!
- I joined the Imperfect team in January 2020 to create an on-the-ground presence at Bay Area events and help build their corporate partnership offering. Then, COVID hit in early March and both of those efforts were cut off along with the Outreach department itself. I appreciate what the company is doing, look forward to seeing how they evolve, and continue to apply my learnings to create a more sustainable food system!
- HarvestRx is a door-to-door delivery service that makes nutritious, easy-to-prep fruits and veggies more accessible. Through April 2019, Hungry Harvest had mostly partnered with nonprofit health and community organizations to offer grant-subsidized produce for the program.
- As Research Intern, I quickly realized the limitations of this grant-dependent approach. So, I spent most of the summer exploring alternative funding and growth opportunities. Though the program was ultimately determined to be a low priority, my eyes were opened to the exciting potential of healthy food access for public health, fiscal responsibility, and business development efforts, and I continue to apply those learnings.
- Delivered Prevent, Omadaβs flagship digital therapeutics program, to 470 participants who lost a combined 3,314 pounds, averaging 7.1 pounds lost and a corresponding 38 percent risk reduction for type-2 diabetes development.
- Selected as Professional Learning Community (PLC) Leader and Program Lead. Led teams of six to eight coaches in creating and running experiments to develop best practices. Served as liaison between PLC leaders and management.
- Represented Omada at in-person events.
π MBA, University of Michigan Ross School of Business (Aug 2021)
π MS in Behavior, Education, and Communication, University of Michigan School for Environment and Sustainability (Aug 2021)
π BS in Movement Science, University of Michigan School of Kinesiology
πͺ StrengthsFinder Top 5: Learner, Belief, Analytical, Input, Connectedness
πΊπΈ English: Native speaker
πͺπΈ Spanish: Working toward conversational
π Sample Work
Here's a blog article I wrote at the end of my Summer 2021 business development internship at abillion:
Here are a couple of blog articles I wrote after doing business development research for Hungry Harvest's prescription produce program, HarvestRx:
π― Focuses
π Reading: New Morning Mercies (Paul David Tripp) / Solar Photovoltaic Basics (Sean White) / The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry (John Mark Comer) / Bible (especially Psalms)
π§ Listening: All Things New (Rivers & Robots) / Paradox (Rin Tarsy)
π Resting: Praying / Guitaring / Meditating
π± Growing: Managing my attention with Sunsama
π§ Exploring: Music venues / Ways to simplify sustainable behavior change