This month we sat down with Outlet member Aaron Wilcher to talk about his work with California Community Colleges. I start with the most basic of questions- what do you do? “I manage a program for the California Community College System and work at the Los Rios Community College District,” he says. His project is called the Centers of Excellence, which is a project for the State Chancellor’s office for the Community College system. It turns out that California has one of the largest college systems in the world. Aaron informs me “there are 115 community colleges in the state of California and last I remember it is the largest system of higher education in the U.S.” I ask him to tell me more about his project. “What we do is we provide research and other internal consulting services for regions of colleges around the state. It’s really a technical assistance program so I am an analyst and a researcher. It’s a lot of regional economic analysis. Basically what we are trying to do is to to inform the colleges about where there is opportunity areas for workforce development. Especially around career technical education.” That sounds like a lot of data to analyze for 115 colleges, and Aaron informs me that his program covers 15 of the colleges around Sacramento and the northern part of the state

I ask him to tell me more about the type of data he is collecting and analyzing. He tells me, “the kind of research we are doing is called cluster analysis and it involves engaging partners around strategic planning efforts on a community wide or regional scale.” At the time of our interview he is preparing to release a report about hospitality and tourism in the Sacramento region. “There is a lot going on with hospitality and tourism here in Sacramento. Farm to Fork, agrotourism, the Convention Center, the soccer stadium coming in, and Golden One Center. All these different things and the big concern is the quality of jobs that are being created with all of this development.” I ask what specifically is addressed in the report, he tells me that, “We’re asking the question of; What should the role of community colleges and organizations like the Sacramento Employment Administration be? Should they be targeting industries that have some sort of wage challenges and frequently don’t produce good jobs? So it is an interesting question.”

“I had been working at a community college and at the time it was during the recession and the work to be had was in trying to help people find work. So I just kinda landed there and I have been doing it ever since.”

Aaron has been working in workforce development for the last 10 years. “I sorta fell into doing this because I went to school for urban planning and studied economic development. I had been working at a community college and at the time it was during the recession and the work to be had was in trying to help people find work. So I just kinda landed there and I have been doing it ever since,” he says. Aaron has been a member at Outlet for the last two years but he already had coworking experience when he joined. “I had done coworking in Reno at a place called The Reno Collective. I was briefly trying to live in Reno and I was doing coworking when I was consulting for the organization I work for now,” he told me. I asked him why he likes working at a coworking space and he said, “I think part of why I came here was because I frequently work a lot of overtime and I needed a safety relief valve so to speak from the office to be able to work late nights and weekends.” Aaron can often be found in the Outlet front room on weeknights and occasional weekends, and he jokes with me that, “the thing that happens the most often that is funny is when I am here late people walk by and they are out partying and they are like, ‘go home! What are you doing? That guys still there!.’ That has happened to me more than a few times.”

“It’s easy to move around. I like that there is a lot of stuff to do but the bustle level is so much lower than San Francisco. I don’t miss San Francisco at all.”

To wrap things up I ask Aaron to tell me how he ended up in Sacramento. “Part of it was for work and another part of it was to get closer to the mountains where I spend a lot of my free time skiing and riding my mountain bike,” he says. “I come from the Bay Area, grew up in San Jose and moved to a lot of areas while I was going to school. I lived in L.A. and Saint Louis, I got my Urban Planning Degree from UC Berkeley. Like a lot of people I am following the herd out here to escape the traffic and cost of living.” Although he thinks that Sacramento is getting more and more busy, he still really enjoys his life here in Sac. “Mostly I like cruising around. I love that it is very walkable. It’s easy to move around. I like that there is a lot of stuff to do but the bustle level is so much lower than San Francisco. I don’t miss San Francisco at all.” Even stating matter-of-factly, “I prefer Sacramento to San Francisco.” Don’t we all! Before we finish, Aaron makes sure to include a message to his fellow Outlet members: “Stop by and say hello! I am always happy to meet new people. Especially if people are interested in the community college system or education and workforce development. Actually I am pretty interested in data visualization but that is not a skill that I have so if anybody does that, or if anyone is interested in public policy or just wants to have a coffee and talk about local politics or what’s happening in the city with all the development thats going on. I’d be happy to meet members and talk about what we do.”

If you would like to learn more about the Centers of Excelence then please visit http://coeccc.net/

After we hung some of his striking photography in the front room at Outlet, I sat down with member Garrett Cotham to learn more about his work and career as a freelance photographer.  “I’ve always been interested in art, even when I was a little kid,” he tells me. “But when I was in high school I took a photography class which I just really took to. The first time I was in a darkroom and I watched the print come up in the chemicals it was like magic and just remember being blown away by it. I had no idea that’s what happend. Since then I just took to photography.” Garrett enjoys both the adventure of getting out into the world to capture unique scenes as well as developing, printing and framing the work afterwards. “I just really enjoyed doing the work- capturing scenes, working in the darkroom, the blend of art and physical labor.”

Garrett specializes in travel and landscape photography, but he is quick to try out new concepts or techniques when the opportunity arises. “Mostly I try to stay open to learning about new processes. If something interests me to try to figure out either how to do it or read about it more, study it more and figure out how much it interests me. If I really want to pursue it.” Curious, I ask him about different techniques that he has tried out. “One thing a couple years ago that I got into was wet plate photography. I saw some work that just blew me away, it was really fantastic. Old school. Really old style like 150 years old. So I took a couple classes in San Francisco about how to do wet plate photography. It was really fun, I’m really glad I did it.” So, has he ever thought about switching specialties? “I’m open to learning new things but I always come back to the travel and the landscape things that I think are just closer to my heart,” he tells me.

At this point we move on to the question that every freelance artists worries about constantly- how do you make money? Garrett is ready with a quick quip, “if someone can tell me how to do that it would be fantastic.” We both share a laugh, then he then gives me his real answer, “I have done a lot work for Kaiser Hospital in South Sacramento, I have done work for a couple law firms here in town. Done some work for Pipeworks, the climbing gym, and had some shows up there also, and as well as a few publications around.” I then ask him about what the future holds, asking about the stereotypical ‘5 year plan’.  “I have no 5 year plan to speak of. Maybe I should,” he jokes, “In general I just keep plugging away trying to find places to show my work, to publish my work, just to get it out in the world and, little by little, it grows. And it has been growing for the last couple of years.”

We move on to the self promotion portion of our interview, when I ask him to tell me about what he has coming up. “Other than the show here at Outlet, which I am very happy to have, I don’t have any big projects upcoming at the moment but I do have work up in the world,” he tells me.  “I mentioned Pipeworks. If you ever go there in the bouldering area there is a large mural that is 9 feet tall by 27 feet wide. It’s a panoramic shot of a place called The Buttermilks by Bishop. It is a popular climbing destination.” I tell him that I am familiar with his mural, since a close friend of mine regularly climbs at Pipeworks. Happy that I am familiar with his work, he tells me, “I love doing big stuff like that. If I could do huge mural prints and cover an entire side of a building with a photograph, that would be phenomenal.” He also tells me of some of his recent travels, and possible shows that could come from his work there. “A couple months ago my wife and I spent a month in Vietnam and it was phenomenal and I am hoping to do a show of Vietnam sometime in the coming year.”

Then I move on to talking about Sacramento. I start by asking how Garrett ended up here. “I grew up in the Bay Area. East Bay. But I came up to this region in ‘99 to go to school at UC Davis. Stayed there till about ‘05 or so and then went and traveled for a while,” he says.  “When I came back I just kind of landed here. I had some friends who had moved here and when I came back from traveling I didn’t have a job or place to stay so I stayed with them for a little while. I found a job here and shortly after is when I met my wife. We got together and I just ended up here.” I ask him what he loves about the city itself. He replies, “I always liked it, even when I lived in Davis. I would come up here for Second Saturday shows and see galleries and stuff. It’s a great place to be.” When I ask him what he enjoys about it now he says, “the ease of Sacramento. It’s not crowded like the Bay Area. It’s not as busy. When it does feel busy, if I want to get out of here, you know, an hour, hour and a half and I can be up in the mountains. I can go hiking and be away from traffic and people and noise.” He continues, saying that, “it’s also easy to get around. I live just off of Broadway and pretty much anywhere I need to go, I walk. I walk here (Outlet) all the time. It’s just easy to get around. And great restaurants. Actually, phenomenal restaurants!” It’s always the food.

Find more about Garrett Cotham Photography at

garrettcotham.photoshelter.com

Come see Garrett’s art work in the front room at Outlet through January. 

Special Saturday Afternoon Showing January 26th, 11AM-2PM

Craig Trombly, owner of CJT Strengths Consulting, became a member of Outlet on December 6th of 2017. He remembers the date specifically because it was the day after he retired from his 36 year career with the Department of Water Resources. “I got my fictitious name two or three years ago, but I really opened my doors in an official way and updated my website on that day, December 6th (2017).” he tells me. “I wanted to have an ‘Encore Career’ is what they call it. So when people ask me if I am retired I tell them, ‘not really.’” he says. He wasn’t ready to stop working, but he was ready to start following his own path.

As our interview gets started I ask Craig to tell me more about CJT Strengths Consulting. “I provide workshops and individual coaching and team building using an assessment from Gallup, that I am a certified coach in, called Clifton Strengths,” Craig explained. Clifton Strengths, formerly known as ‘StrengthsFinder’ is an assessment that is designed to help identify an individual’s highest competency. “I use that assessment as a tool to help groups and individuals perform, work better, work more effectively, grow in their career. Develop world class performance really.” I ask him for more specifics about what kind of services he provides. “I don’t have a package that I drop on them and say, ‘I do this for this much and this for this much.’ To me that is too cookie cutter. So I look to find out a lot of where their pain points are, what the good is in their organization, what the areas for improvement are and then propose something… I am very much individualizing what their needs are and trying to really help them with the things they want to improve or grow in.”

 I want to know more about Craig’s previous career at the Department of Water Resources, so I ask him about how he got started there. “I am a civil engineer by profession. Graduated from UC Davis in 1979 and worked for almost 3 years at a structural engineering firm. The work was interesting, the pay was horrible. I say that on tape but it’s true,” he says with a laugh. “So I sought and got a job for the Department of Public Resources and very quickly became involved in the field called hydrology and flood forecasting. From there I grew in my technical career to really want to be in management and leadership.” After having such a long and successful career in public service, I ask him what made him want to go into this business for himself. He tells me, “I went into this because, in April of 2006 when I attended a Gallup workshop, I pretty much was inspired that I wanted to be a person who had an impact on other people’s lives, like my own trainers were in that class, and I wanted to be one of those.”

After hearing about Craig’s background, I am curious to know about what his interactions with his clients looks like. “I teach a couple different all-day classes using StrengthsFinder as a focus to help the groups understand their talents and strengths and go through a number of activities to grow that,” he says. “I also have a small private company that I have as a client. Who was a company of one and she wants to grow to having team members and she knew about StrengthsFinder and having a strengths approach being a world class performing way to approach managing and having a firm operate. So she hired me to coach the individuals and to do team building and we are in the middle of that now.” He goes into more depth about his program and what the reasoning behind it is. “Instead of focusing your whole growth and career development where you try to fix your weaknesses, that is really just a strategy for being barely good enough, what Gallup has found through analyzing great managers, great companies, great leaders is that they are great because they help themselves, and especially their staff, focus on what they are already naturally best at.”

To close our interview I ask him about how he ended up in Sacramento. “I applied to UC Davis and got in. While I was there I met my wife at the church that I still go to, where we got married and all 3 of our children got married now. Because of our church community I could honestly say, we decided, a whole bunch of us when the church was still small and we were all young and just getting married, that we were gonna try to put down our roots down and find our jobs in this area,” he says. I ask him about why he loves Sacramento, and why he chooses to work here. “I think that Downtown Sacramento is starting to have some pretty cool restaurants and places to eat, its developing. Whereas downtown wasn’t in such great shape 15 or 20 years ago, it’s really changed. It has a kind of a community, upbeat feeling to it and there is lots of good food to be had,” he says. “And because I work with the public agencies around here a lot and the businesses that support them, its very natural for me to feel comfortable here in Downtown Sac.”

Learn more about Craig and CJT Strengths Consulting at

https://cjtstrengths.com

It’s late afternoon in July. After checking the conference rooms and the kitchen I find Scott Akers lounging in an adirondack chair in the courtyard at Outlet. With a smile on his face and a cold pint of Oak Park Brewery’s Citra IPA in his hand, he says, “Let’s do this, I am ready to go.” His casual attitude, most likely originating from still being at work at the end of a long day, disappears as he quickly becomes all business. He begins to tell me about his new employer, Odem.io, where he works as a Blockchain Solutions Engineer. “ODEM is building a global on-demand education marketplace to help students and educators connect, conduct educational programs, and issue authoritative certificates using the blockchain.” he tells me. Despite the fact that we are close friends, Scott doesn’t talk about the specifics of his work very often, so I am interested to learn more as our interview continues.

Scott is a native of Sacramento. He attended University of the Pacific in Stockton, California for his undergrad, then went on to receive a Master’s in Technology Commercialization at the University of Texas in Austin. “I’ve been working in Education specifically since 2013 where I helped produce 2 massive open online courses in math and science and helped develop education application systems as a part of my graduate school studies.” He tells me, “those experiences really helped me understand the good, bad and ugly of the education system today.  Since then, I’ve been focused on working with people that are as passionate about education and finding routes to success that recenters and refocuses education around student success, not administrative overhead.”

Spending most of his time working as a contractor for seed stage startups and small businesses, Scott has learned a lot about what it takes to get an idea off the ground. “A large portion of building solid companies has been public awareness and education about products, processes, and tools that can improve people’s quality of life.” Scott is also no stranger to coworking spaces, having worked out of one while living in Texas, he was quick to join another when he returned to Sacramento. “I started coworking in 2012,” he says, “I travel a lot for work and don’t have the need for a full office.  Coworking gives me flexibility and consistency but what I really like is the chance to meet people in a community that are all working on different projects that can bring you inspiration from completely different industries and experiences.”

The conversation turns back towards Scott’s current employer, ODEM.io. “We are currently working on a project to help refugees repatriate their identity through their educational achievements.  It’s a very ambitious project, but we will be deploying our proof of concept very soon.” he tells me. Their goal is to allow refugees to recover their educational certifications after a forced migration. To put it in simpler terms, “to have a trained and talented chemist or mathematician working as a cab driver is a waste for society.” Scott explains. He thinks that ODEM has what it takes to fix this problem, “we’re going to be one of the top resources for international education.  In five years we expect to have a network of top universities and will be providing educational services to hundreds of thousands of students.” 

As we finish off our beers and the interview starts to wind down, I ask Scott the obligatory question: What do you like about Sacramento? “Pretty much everything!” He exclaims, “Location is great, weather is great, coffee is great.” he goes on to say, “I’m a born-and-raised Sacramentan. I came back after living in Texas for a few years and it’s been really great to see how Sacramento has changed, and to see how it can improve!” He looks at the now empty pint glass in his hand and continues, “I hear we are fast becoming a powerhouse in the ‘beer-making world’. Some of the best IPA’s in the country, maybe the world, are being brewed in this region.” he says. Obviously the beer has a lot to do with it.

 Learn more about ODEM.io and find Scott on Linkedin and Twitter as @scottmakers.