News for Nonprofits

Mike Gleason (second from left), Arc of Hilo CEO, with Annemarie Meike, Mark Sueksdorf, Marj Gonzalez and Larry Ferderber of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories.
Lessons learned:

Arc of Hilo creates jobs for community and clients

By creating more jobs in the community, The Arc of Hilo finds opportunities to put its clients to work, too.

“Our latest venture is our Agriculture Product Development Center,” said Mike Gleason, CEO of The Arc of Hilo. The innovative project will be a place where local food producers can come to develop and test value-added food products from the produce they grow via a co-op or membership program with the center.

But the innovation doesn’t stop there, Gleason said. A renewable energy demonstration project, using energy technologies invented and developed at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories in Livermore California, will provide power for the facility. LLNL is interested in moving these technologies to the private market and this demonstration project that will show their applicability for processing or manufacturing.

Many community jobs will be created through this collaboration which will, of course, include jobs for people with disabilities.

“The Arc of Hilo is excited about all of our growing commercial services and is especially happy that these diverse funding streams are able to provide revenue to support programs that are not being supported at their previous level of support by traditional government funding,” said Gleason.

Over the past seven years, The Arc of Hilo, with a mission to improve the quality of life for people with disabilities, has seen its budget grow from $1.5 million to $7 million, its client base increase from 100 to 250 and the number of employees surge from 35 to 209. Meanwhile, it has decreased its dependency on government funding from 75 percent to 50 percent.

“This has been done with a commitment from board members and staff members to diversify funding streams and expand commercial services which create revenue and provide employment for community members and most importantly people with disabilities,” he said.

The Arc of Hilo provides services in residential opportunities, client support, employment training, job placement and commercial services. The Arc ohana believes employment allows a person the dignity of contributing to society while enjoying a better quality of life. To create jobs for people with disabilities, they create jobs for the community as a whole.

The Arc also operates a certified laundry, an agriculture unit, janitorial services, yard maintenance and landscaping, a building materials re-use store, ten bottle and can redemption centers and an agricultural products development center. Revenue amounts to half the organization’s total income and helps sustain and enhance its other client service programs and provide employment for more than 100 people with disabilities.

To learn more about The Arc of Hilo visit http://arcofhilo.squarespace.com, search for Arc of Hilo on YouTube.com or read the news release from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories below:

LLNL News Release:

Hawaii nonprofit to use LLNL technologies for food production

LIVERMORE, Calif., June 22, 2009 — Next year, a nonprofit organization hopes to begin processing tropical foods on the island of Hawaii with the aid of two energy technologies developed by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory scientists.

This vision was advanced last week as Mike Gleason, the president and CEO of The Arc of Hilo, inked a memorandum of understanding with LLNL Director George Miller had already signed the document on behalf of the Laboratory.

Based in Hilo, Hawaii, The Arc of Hilo has leased an 18,000-square-foot warehouse to provide a location where local farmers can develop higher-value food products, such as fruit leather, jams and natural sweeteners, Gleason said.

Founded in 1954, The Arc of Hilo offers a wide range of services to people with disabilities, including employment training and job placement, and seeks to create additional jobs in the community for people with disabilities.

The Livermore energy technologies — a new advance for harnessing solar energy and another for storing and retrieving electrical power — would be used to provide electricity for the food processing facility.

“We strongly embrace this relationship with The Arc of Hilo as the latest example of LLNL's long commitment to education, research and public service in the Pacific region,” Miller said.

“We think working with the Lab and these technologies are a tremendous fit,” Gleason said. “It will allow us to create these job opportunities with much lower energy consumption. “We are looking at these cutting-edge technologies as being the first step in bringing training and jobs related to sustainable and innovative advances to our community.”

It is hoped that the plant's electrical bills could be reduced by 50 percent, Gleason said, noting that the seven-island state has some of the higher electricity rates in the nation.

“Our building will be 'green' from three different points of view,” Gleason observed. “First, it will recycle the layout and some equipment, such as a flash freezer, and cooling and drying rooms from the old food processing enterprise of the owner, Ernie Matsumura. Second, it will integrate LLNL's solar thermal and electromechanical battery technology into the food processing scheme, where each technology is at its best. And third, modifications to the building will be developed with reference to the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) construction standards.”

Annemarie Meike, the LLNL business development executive who has catalyzed and developed the business partnerships, noted: "We are excited by the potential of helping to make some of Mike's vision a reality with LLNL technologies, and thankful to Ernie for recognizing our common interests and introducing us.”

Two Northern California start-up businesses, Amber Kinetics of Fremont and Tassajara Technologies of Livermore, are in the process of licensing the LLNL technologies.

Amber Kinetics is licensing the electromechanical battery/flywheel and electrostatic (ES) generator/motor technologies, while Tassajara Technologies is licensing the solar energy advance.

The LLNL flywheel battery, developed by Dick Post, is a high-tech version of an ancient concept: using a rotating wheel to store kinetic energy, as in a potter's wheel. In this case, the energy is stored in a rotor made of a high tech fiber material that spins above a magnetic bearing at about 40,000 to 50,000 revolutions per minute. The flywheel is used for the bulk storage of electricity.

Post's complement to the flywheel, an ES generator/motor is useful for generating electricity. A new configuration of the ES generator/motor has been developed and its performance has been validated by computer simulation.

The LLNL solar thermal technology, developed by Charles Bennett, can supply electric power for six cents per kilowatt hour at the single family residential scale, and is lower than the current retail price for residential electric power of about 10 cents per kilowatt hour.

About 25 percent of the incident sunlight in the LLNL system is converted to electric power, with most of the remaining solar energy captured for water heating or space heating. In winter, about 90 percent of the incident sunlight is exploited.

The building of the technology prototypes is funded in part by a novel “grassroots” maturation scheme for clean technology rolled out this year by the LLNL Industrial Partnerships Office under a grant from the Department of Energy's Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy Office.

Some of the foods that may be processed into higher-value products, according to Gleason, include papayas, yams, pineapple and passion fruit or lilikoi.

The Arc of Hilo has 205 employees, and about 100 of them have disabilities, according to Gleason.

The agreement between LLNL and The Arc of Hilo also was bolstered by the Lab's National Security Office through the “National Security Field Experience Initiative.”

This initiative aims to promote the growth of science and technology and workforce development in the Pacific Region in partnership with small businesses, nonprofit organizations, academia and government.

Founded in 1952, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory has a mission to ensure national security and to apply science and technology to the important issues of our time. Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory is managed by Lawrence Livermore National Security, LLC, for the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration.

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