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 CU Boulder professor Alex Fobes partners with The Mission Zero Fund

From ravaging fires to late season snow storms, the city of Boulder has seen firsthand how climate change can affect its communities, but students and faculty alike are determined to find ways to help the cause.

Along with being a Teaching Assistant Professor in the Program for Writing and Rhetoric, Alex Fobes is a member of the sustainability committee at CU. One of his goals with the sustainability committee is aligning the committee with organizations that are trying to meet the same goals and have a greater impact. Insert Mission Zero.

 Mission Zero is a donor-supported initiative that aims at helping university students work on climate solutions, with an overall vision of inspiring a university movement to save the planet. 

“One thing that I really liked about Mission Zero is that they’re focused on empowering students to be a voice for the change they want to see in the world,” Fobes said. 

Fobes has similar values and interests to Mission Zero, so he partnered with the organization to help with their vision. 

“Even though I studied literature, I’m an avid outdoors person, and it’s important to me to give back in some way, to do something in my own work that helps to conserve our natural world, protect the planet in some way.”

A class that Fobes teaches in the Program for Writing and Rhetoric is called Technical Communications and Design. In this course, students partner with a client working on projects that the student is passionate about. This class style allows students to experience writing for a real world audience. 

“I want all the work the students do for the course to make a difference,” Fobes said. “There’s a way that every student can think about what matters most to them and promote that aspect of the organization, of its mission.”

This course is one of the ways Fobes has begun to work with Mission Zero. Scott King and Paul Grignon, the founder and COO of Mission Zero respectively, attended one of Fobes’ classes to describe the work that Mission Zero does, and he generously offered to be an audience for donation proposals.

Fobes describes this connection, and particularly this course, as providing students with the tools and opportunities to continue to work on their passions. 

“I’m going to be doing this for, I don’t know how many more years, maybe 20 years if I’m lucky. But at some point other people are going to have to carry on and lead the way, so we are trying to empower them and give them all the tools they need to be effective,” Fobes said. 

After working on projects in the Technical Communications and Design course, students are given opportunities to participate in showcases such as the Sustainability Solutions Showcase in April, or to be a part of the UN summit on climate and health in December.

In addition to helping students find their path and connecting them to Mission Zero, Fobes works with other faculty in the Writing and Rhetoric program to discover the best ways to teach these profound topics. Together with the help of Dr. Eric Burger, Dr. Rebecca Dixon and Dr. Jay Ellis, Fobes has led Mission Zero Workshops for Writing and Rhetoric faculty working to find the best approach to teaching climate change storytelling. He is also working with the Hindsight Journal on a feature edition specifically about Mission Zero and climate change. 

Science and communication are two genres seemingly on opposite ends of the spectrum, but finding the connection between them is vital in determining solutions for climate change.

“CU Boulder as a whole wants us to collaborate across the disciplines,” he said. “It’s one thing I love about being at a large university. There’s so much going on, and we have experts in so many different fields. We need to be proactive sometimes to take advantage of all the university has to offer us. We need to reach out to people in other departments and other programs and combine our knowledge to tackle a lot of challenges. We can be stronger that way.”

From the larger scale of the CU community down to each individual student in his classroom, Fobes is determined to make a difference in the climate change world, and partnering with Mission Zero is allowing him to do so.

“I would say Mission Zero is about readying ourselves for the future,” Fobes said. “It’s been said that the future is here, we are it, we are on our own, so I’d say it’s about preparing ourselves for the future.”