As a child, Alison Derevensky loved going to the beaches in and around the Sheepshead Bay neighborhood where she grew up. It was within this unique backdrop—of breathtaking nature among urban sprawl—that Derevensky began to develop what would become a lasting interest in nature, and the people within it. While a student at LaGuardia High School, Derevensky enrolled in AP Environmental Science and cultivated a passion for the discipline. She also realized that she could use her own career as a path toward enacting change, so she searched for colleges that offered earth and environmental science-related programs. A friend of her mother recommended the Macaulay Honors College. Subsequently Derevensky discovered Brooklyn College’s urban sustainability degree program—at that time, the only one of its kind in the city and one of only a couple in the country with a multidisciplinary bent. She knew exactly where she wanted to be. By addressing the three pillars of sustainability—society, the environment, and the economy—the urban sustainability program “looks deeply at the societal and environmental issues that lead to climate change,” Derevensky says. Combined with the curriculum offered by the Macaulay Honors College, which includes a certification program in New York City studies, Derevensky cultivated an environmental science–focused, public-facing, and ethics-minded education that further inspired her to continue her studies at the graduate level, with the goal to prepare herself for work in the public or federal sector. While conducting graduate research in crowdfunding at SUNY Binghamton—where she received a double master’s in sustainable communities and public administration with a certificate in nonprofit administration—she discovered BlocPower, a Black-owned, Brooklyn-based company specializing in energy efficient technology. She now works for BlocPower as the community coordinator for the Electrify Ithaca program. BlocPower won a competitive Request for Proposal from the city of Ithaca to assist in the city’s goal to completely decarbonize all buildings by 2030. Derevensky views the future of urban sustainability in electrification, or the replacement of appliances that use fossil fuels and with electric-based ones. But this movement, she says, needs to be done in such a way that simultaneously “brings these benefits and technologies to the people most impacted by climate change” while not “pricing people out of their communities by doing so.” With BlocPower, Derevensky collaborates with stakeholders, community members, and building owners to make them aware of the costs and potential incentives of electrification, and also works to ensure that the local community is involved in the overall outreach of the program as much as possible. “We’re learning more about the things in our home every day, and figuring out how to make things better,” she says.
