Donnel Baird

Baird grew up in the Brooklyn^[2] borough of New York City, raised by parents who immigrated to the United States in 1980.^[3] His family started life together in a one-bedroom apartment with a shared bathroom with a neighbor in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. His father worked at night cleaning boilers, while his mother was a home health aide and student in a teachers program at York College. Living in a decrepit building, his family relied on natural gas powered stoves for heating during the winter, while opening windows to release harmful toxins.^[4][5]

In the early 1990s Baird's parents divorced, and his mother and both children moved to Atlanta, Georgia.^[3] Baird attended 6 years of public school, then won a scholarship to a prep school. Baird attended Duke University. During his time at Duke, the exoneration of the police who shot innocent Amadou Diallo had a profound effect on Baird and sank him into a depression. His relationship with historian Larry Goodwyn, Dr. Marie Lynn Miranda, and classmate Mariana Arcaya persuaded Baird to study the African American non violent civil rights movement, the 1890s American agrarian Populist movement, and to pursue environmental issues and racial equity.^[4]

Baird earned his bachelor's degree at Duke University,^[6] after which he moved back to New York City and spent several years as a community organizer in a housing non profit, working to bridge the gap between the privileged students he encountered at Duke and the underprivileged kids he grew up with in his neighborhood.^[4] He wanted to create a business that could address the intersection of climate change and providing employment opportunities for low-income families.^[7] Baird spent 18 months as a senior Voter Contact Director for then Senator Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign in 7 states. In 2009, he become National Field Director with the Change To Win Labor Federation, focused on partnering with the Department of Energy to help create living wage green energy jobs under the Obama Administration. He continued his graduate study at Columbia Business School, where he earned a Master of Business and Administration (MBA) in 2013.^[6] during business school, Baird served as the national Get Out The Vote director for a labor union that independently invested $70mm in President Obama’s reelection campaign. These experiences helped him launch BlocPower in 2013.^[5][8][4]