Tonight.

A single mom turns a dream decades in the making into a thriving boba tea business.

We'll hear her story.

And in bolder innovation and sustainability, are shaping a greener future for the next generation.

Then we dig into the power of seeds, and we meet the volunteer, helping cultivate growth.

That's making a real impact across the community.

And women are leading the charge to reshape our planet.

And the documentary Women of Carbon.

That's all coming up right here on studio 12.

From the Five Points Media Center in the heart of Denver, Colorado.

This is studio 12.

Hello.

I'm Ryan here, and I'm bossy.

Kainani.

Welcome to studio 12.

Starting a business is never easy, but doing it while raising three kids on your own is on a whole other level.

Tonight we meet a single mom in Denver who turned a long held dream into reality.

After years of setbacks, career changes, and starting over.

It was a hard road to get there, but still she did it.

What began as an idea decades ago is now a space built on resilience and family.

PBS Twelve's Erica McLarty introduces us to the woman behind the boba and tea shop called Teehee in Denver's Little Saigon district.

In a small tea shop tucked in to the Little Saigon district.

Okay, let me read it out for you.

There's something more than Boba being served.

I'm here at teehee, where everything is handcrafted and a piece of art.

But what makes this place really special is the story behind it.

For one single mom of three.

This place is years in the making.

So we're in my little space called Teeny Little Tea House.

She calls it her little space.

But getting here took decades.

The year 2000, I started my own boba shop, and, wanted to introduce it to everyone in Denver.

I think it didn't work just cause it was too new of a concept.

But I did feel, you know, like a little frustration.

Kind of like, why are we so behind on trends?

Because Boba back then had already been around for 20 something years.

So, after a couple years, yeah, we decided to call it quits.

So she walked away, tried new careers, raised a family.

I pretty much did like different jobs, got married, had kids, and at that, you know, I'm still a full time mom and doing everything so.

And just not happy.

Then life changed.

My ex and I separated.

I would say before Covid hit, a single mom, three daughters and a lot of uncertainty.

I always in the back of my head was like, I'm not happy.

What would make me happy?

And I always it always led back to the time, that I had the shop.

I mean, it's okay.

Okay.

Sorry.

During Covid, it's kind of when, she he started basically stuck in the house together.

So I was like, okay, well, we need to do something like to get our minds off of everything.

So we started an Etsy shop.

We started a craft, and it was soapmaking.

So like, the soap era was kind of I feel like it was throughout the first kind of year or so of being just like with my mom, only.

So she was like a single mother.

Then first time we were on the house and she wanted to pick up a hobby, so we all started making soap together in her basement.

Then something unexpected.

And so all of a sudden, I got, like, this big giant order for soap.

First of all, I soap.

And it was a very unusually large order.

And so after everything was done, I was like, let me, research this person.

Like, who are they?

I thought it was like, maybe a teacher.

And I found out it was like a Hollywood producer.

I don't know if I could name it.

I'll tell you, but, it's Jon Landau.

Yeah.

So I tell that story a little because from that money, Yeah.

So I got the seed money.

Now, with the seed money, a second chance at the dream.

She never let go.

But it didn't happen overnight.

And then I moved to, like, a little horse trailer that I sell out of.

I looked for, like, maybe almost three years.

Like, I felt like I was looking at plate spaces and nothing's all right.

And until one day, the right place found her.

The space just felt right and, like, very nostalgic to me.

So I was like, okay, I really like this feeling.

It was hard because doing everything, like, alone pretty much.

And it's kind of like, I don't have anyone to, like, kind of lean on, like, I didn't even tell my parents.

Olympic support.

But she wasn't really alone.

Her three daughters are.

Why?

I'm proud of my mom.

Because she's hard working, and she loves me and my sisters and her family.

And she's never gives up.

She opened this shop all by herself.

Sometimes I'm like, wow, how can she even do that?

Watching her be solo is a really good role model for all of us.

At the end of the day, loving yourself and giving yourself grace isn't just for you.

It's for your kids.

When they see their mom happy, they realize that they could do anything they want in life, too.

I think it's very admirable what she did.

Like waiting to make sure we're all okay first before kind of starting her dream.

We got this.

Like, you can go do your thing.

Like just seeing her grow and the shop become everything she want it to be.

It's just been very inspiring.

It's the pantheon coconut cream.

And it's the most popular drink here.

So, like, whenever something happens or she's struggling, she always just finds a way to just push through it.

Like a almost like a superhero.

She's very passionate.

She loves people.

I she's extremely hard working.

She's here every day.

She's committed.

Thank you so much.

It's an incredible story.

And the drinks live up to it.

We call it the tiger salted cloud.

And it's more like a traditional boba tea.

That's the lychee berry shortcake.

Yeah.

Just being a full time parent.

You don't really have that much time for yourself.

It's like that five minutes right there.

That you're just brewing the octopus, brewing the tea itself.

Like gave you my moment.

Oh, my gosh, it's so good.

Running a business and raising kids all at once can be challenging.

I honestly don't know.

I just had, like, this is what I have to do.

Pretty much all the trying to just do it.

I think it was probably it's probably one of the most difficult things in the world to raise children.

Well, especially alone.

And she was able to do it with three girls, and we're all extremely close knit.

This is a very personal thing.

Like, I think when people come in, like, you can feel that it's a very family centered business, like everything in here, every single drink, every single.

I guess choice in here was a very personal thing for my mom, and we kind of together came up with the name Tiki.

So Tiki is like something cute.

Like, you know, when you're laughing.

And I think for me, I love everything cute because it comes.

It comforts me a place to share with your friends and laugh and with community.

She's like a light hearted, fun vibe.

You can get boba and hang out and have a good time.

We.

We get really busy.

Like, I will get emotional as well.

I'll step back there and, Yeah, it's just like seeing people in here and that makes me happy.

Wow.

Incredible.

One huge soap order from a famous Hollywood producer.

And she got the seed money to start her dream business.

It's also really sweet how close Kat and her daughters became in the process.

They're really touching to see that.

To learn more about T, you can go to Teco.

As climate change becomes more visible in our daily lives, from unpredictable winters to rising energy costs, the need for solutions has never been more urgent and here in Colorado, CU Boulder is stepping up, bringing together research and education to lead the way toward a more sustainable future.

At Climate Week in Boulder, Frannie Matthews sat down with Andrew Mayock, CU Boulder vice chancellor for sustainability, to talk about what that leadership looks like and why Colorado is uniquely positioned to make an impact.

Here's more with Frannie.

Andrew, thank you so much for sitting down with us today at Climate Week in Boulder, Colorado.

You have a new role.

Well, about a year old, but it's a new role for you, the vice chancellor of sustainability for CU Boulder.

Can you tell us a little bit about what that role is and why it was the right thing for you?

First of all, thanks for the opportunity today.

Thanks for your interest in Colorado Climate Week.

It's an issue that affects every coloradan.

And we it's, you know, made even more profound, right, by this strange winter and unique winter, so-called winter that we've had.

And the real impacts it have, it has on Coloradans lives.

So unfortunately, in this period of climate change, we have examples like that almost every day and every week.

But it's really profoundly showing up right in Coloradans lives uniquely this year.

And so I'm grateful to be here, grateful to be doing this work and a little bit about the job and the role.

You know, when the Chancellor came in to this, to this, to his office as as chancellor three years ago, Justin Schwartz, he made climate and sustainability one of his top three priorities.

And when he did that, and he brought his experience as a PhD in nuclear engineering, as a mechanical engineering professor, he had a deep appreciation for the power that the whole university could bring to the issue of climate and sustainability, and he wanted to make sure that that power of the university had the right positioning and leadership, and created this inaugural role of vice chancellor for sustainability.

So that, yes, we're really focused on walking the walk when it comes to the climate and sustainability impacts of our operations.

And extremely importantly, we are all in as a university when it comes to our extremely powerful research arm, our education, and developing the leaders of tomorrow, our community outreach to beyond Boulder and Boulder County to Coloradans and the globe is the real power that we bring to this moment.

And this role could help elevate and fully achieve that that vision.

So that's really the role and and short that I'm excited to go into different aspects of that.

And then why why Colorado?

Why now for me, in my own climate and sustainability journey, I had the great opportunity to work on the Biden transition team in 2020 and work prior to the Biden presidency with a group of former Obama climate colleagues from the Obama White House to develop a transition plan to see how we could accelerate action.

Should President Biden or one of the other, candidates gain office and doing that work in the transition, both in the Biden transition team and with this project climate 21?

Really solidified my interest in, being part of the administration and part of the white House to go do that work.

And so I was happy, really extremely happy and privileged to join, the Biden White House on day one, to be the US government's chief sustainability officer and work for the full four years on, decarbonizing the federal footprint.

A couple days after I, started the job, I was introduced to, an alumnus who was very interested in giving back to the university, by the name of Spike Buckley, who wanted to respond to the students demand for more sustainability curriculum and the education and how we grow and create more climate leaders for tomorrow.

And so I sat down with with spike and worked together to design what was would be where has become the Spike Center for Sustainability Education.

Which we were announced that gift in August of 2025 and launched the Spike Center in September of 2025.

And now we have tens.

If we're not into the hundreds of engaged faculty students, researchers are working from the hub at the hub of the university and the Vice Chancellor's Office for sustainability, working out to all the schools and colleges to do exactly that, to deepen the learning for our students, the research for our professors and our researchers, to really harness the university as a whole.

So that's one example that was, just an immediate opportunity to help, elevate and accelerate the work that we're doing.

Another example came up in the form of the Carnegie Elective for sustainability, and that the Carnegie Foundation was looking for a university to host, what is basically an accreditation and education badge, to be awarded to those universities that are showing that they are doing the hard work of sustainability when it comes to education, operations and research.

And so they provided us that opportunity in May of 2025, we launched it and announced it at Climate Week in New York City in September of 2025.

And Chancellor Schwartz and myself were in Chicago just a few weeks ago to open the application process for the Carnegie elective.

And so we're looking forward.

We already have tens of universities, raising their hand, picking up the phone, sending us an email to say, how do I become part of the Carnegie elective?

How do you look at the university role in a really broad sense, for, leading the charge in many of these areas, it's sustainability.

One of the really exciting things about, CU Boulder and Boulder and the Colorado community as a whole is what an active, sustainability and climate tech ecosystem there is here.

It's a big theme of, Colorado Climate Week.

And you can see it, on display in the panels in the plenaries that we're we have we've been having for the last three days.

But most importantly, you can see it in the businesses that are out there in the in the Boulder community, in the Colorado community as a whole, we're creating real products to help solve today's challenges.

Like Prometheus, for example, is a company that was moved from lab to market with NCAR Boulder to help get us to zero and, carbon free concrete where the most polluting and most common substances in the world.

So we've got that kind of ecosystem that is birthing companies that are bringing real products, to the, to the world that are, helping to solve, the climate crisis.

And, you know, one of the things that we hear a lot is when we talk about sustainability, there's there seems to be this preconceived notion that it's always a trade off, that it's not good for business.

I what are the biggest misconceptions in that area that you see?

Oh, I think, and we're feeling this more today and, as the United States is, is involved with the war and, and the prices of oil are now above $100 a barrel, is that but even before then, the price of the alternatives when it comes to energy, just over the past five years, in particular.

But the 20 years, the slope of the reduction in the costs for solar wind and their competitiveness with fossil fuels has brought it to parity.

And when you're, a business owner or when you're like myself in government, I spent a number of years in the Office of Management budget in the white House and, the whole job there is to invest wisely for the American people and also save for the American people.

And we could do that when it comes to a fleet, for example, of 650,000 vehicles that I just mentioned, was part of the work of the last job.

When you look at the total cost of ownership over what it takes to drive a postal truck around for 20 years versus internal combustion engine, that meant real dollars savings for the American taxpayer.

It meant postal rates would not go up because of the savings that an electric vehicle fleet could provide versus, internal combustion fleet.

So I think the, the, the savings are there.

And the ability now, particularly as these technologies of wind and solar and long duration storage, short duration storage, the battery revolution that's going on right now, is also an extraordinary and extraordinarily new feature in the marketplace that provides, the, the business owner to not only gain that resilience but gain, custody and savings.

Yeah, I agree, I think we're going to see amazing innovations in the battery and, solid state kind of batteries coming in.

We've got some cool work being done in Fort Collins area on on solid state.

So you've been in this job for a year.

You're settling in as a Colorado resident, looking down the end of the road in five years, what would you consider big success?

How much time do we have?

This interview?

I in brief, let me, I see so much opportunity for success, and I see it across that framework that I mentioned before when it comes to research, when it comes to education, operations, community engagement, the ability for this university and this state to not only continue to shine, which it has when it comes to climate sustainability, but further lead and accelerate.

That work is is manifest.

And so I think when it comes to those, those components that I mentioned, it is a matter of, graduating.

Yes.

Those students who show up and they want are they want to, graduate with our new masters in sustainable business or our new masters in sustainable engineering, which are starting this fall, or there's others who want to be in marketing, want to run a small business, and their ability as an, as a, as somebody who might not spend 100% of their time in sustainability, but to be big but to become well educated, to be, an empowered citizen is a really critical part of the work that we're doing here.

So I think we have benefits for the student body as a whole across those who are dedicated and deeply focused on climate sustainability and those who choose other paths.

So that's 11.1 pathway I mentioned, vibrant startup ecosystem and this university's ability to connect more and better.

Entrepreneur in the lab who doesn't know she's an entrepreneur right now, that she's cracking away at a climate solution that has the opportunity through the university's tools and helping her, take that, invention from the lab and out into the marketplace, the communities that's showing up today, founders, investors, nonprofits at Colorado Climate Week to help her go birthed that idea.

Get that product out into the marketplace is manifest opportunity for us.

We're doing a great job at it already, and we can do so much more.

There's a couple of ways that I think that we're going to do.

You're going to see concrete action building on the strong foundation that we have that's going to, not only make C.U.

Boulder and, and Boulder and Colorado, stronger than it is today, but also, more of that model that we talked about.

Well, Andrew, thank you very much for your time today.

I look forward to your success.

And we'll, check back before five years from now to see how things are going.

I appreciate it.

I'd love to talk anytime.

Thank you.

Funding for the Business of Colorado on PBS 12 is provided in part by Collegiate Peaks Bank.

I bought up and from the generous support of viewers like you.

Thank you.

make sure to look for more stories from Franny Matthews from Climate Week here on studio 12.

In the coming weeks.

what if growing your own food was easier and more accessible than you ever thought?

A new program is helping people do just that.

Professor of landscape architecture at CU Denver, Jodie Beck is volunteering his time to teach a group of students how to start small and grow with confidence.

This is in partnership with Denver Urban Gardens, and is a new program with an impact that goes beyond what's on your plate.

PBS Twelve's Erica McLarty went to check out this seed starting program to learn more.

From apartment shelves to background greenhouses in Denver.

Something small is growing into something much bigger.

A new seed starting program is teaching people how to grow their own food and rethink their connection to it.

All right, so what we have here.

So these are all of my, these are peppers.

You can see there's all the different, varieties there.

Leading the effort is Jody Beck, a professor of landscape architecture at CU Denver, who says this goes far beyond gardening.

It's the ability to feed yourself is the basis of political sovereignty and autonomy.

And so giving, you know, helping spread that, helping make that more available because it feels so mysterious and it's really pretty basic.

These are all 16 different kinds of tomatoes I started.

And tortillas, and a ground cherry.

Jody grew up around agriculture, but came back to it with a new purpose.

Now he's teaching others how to grow at scale not just for themselves, but for their communities.

So yeah, I just planted this side.

So this is all lettuce and then radishes.

So you can see here's some radishes sprouting.

This is collards.

These are collards I started last summer that came all the way through the winter.

And I got the idea to start teaching more people not how to start seeds.

A lot of people do that, but how to start at this scale and what it would take to do neighborhood distribution or community distribution or small scale sales.

Through a partnership with Denver Urban Gardens, Jody mentors a small group of students helping them grow hundreds, even thousands of seedlings.

The goal to create a network of growers across the city.

I'm hoping that you know that an additional five or so people every year want to do it, and that everybody, you know, slowly scales up their operation until there's a real network of of people doing a lot of different varieties of starts and seedlings.

But the lesson isn't just about plants.

It's about understanding food itself.

There's been a lot of research that's shown that if people grow some plants, they understand what tomatoes taste like, what they should taste like, and they get more selective and they look for local produce and actually boost the local economy for farmers.

And that understanding is already taking root in the.

For Danielle, entering the mentorship started with a simple idea.

It would be nice to be able to provide these started plants for my gardeners, as well as have some of my own, without necessarily needing to go buy a $6 started plant.

It's kind of taken over, one of my bookshelves.

And so, you can start small.

So over here, we've got loads of started seeds, as you can tell.

So, what I do is I organize them and I use tape to identify what it is that I'm growing.

So you got two variants of kale?

Definitely some basil, different spices, a rubella, eggplant, bell peppers down here.

We've got some flowers.

We've got some, herbs.

And then down here we've got to break down that.

We've got snapdragon, rosemary, spinach, Brussels sprouts, lemon balm, carnations.

And despite what people might think, she says, it's not as complicated as it looks.

I would not classified as challenging, but I will say that there's a little bit more thought process than you might think that there is.

Once you've set it up, once you've.

I just use command strips for the lights where once the seeds are in the dirt, I put it on.

I missed it with water once a day, but, I check to make sure there's water in the tray, and that's kind of it.

Danielle has been happy to have Jodi as a mentor along the way.

I also grew a mushroom, in one of my, cells, and I took a photo of it, and I'm like, this is just mean that it's healthy, but there's a good decay in my soil.

And Jodi was very quick to say, well, you should pick it, because it's mushrooms.

Have spores.

And you don't want that to spread across the rest of your cells.

So we did.

But it's it's really been a lot of, I would say, like, how often should you water or, you know, something's growing and that wasn't what you expected to grow or, maybe the different soil compositions.

I got a lot of that insight from Jodi as well.

Jodi and Danielle say that with just soil light and a little consistency, anyone can do it even without a yard.

The reason that we're using these here is because you want to make sure that your plants are closer to your light source.

The intent is that you get less leggy plants, because if your plant is focused on reaching the light and getting enough light source, it's not going to be focusing on actually growing the plants in a healthy way.

It's it's it's busy stretching and sort of growing out.

I live in an apartment.

I have planters on my patio.

And so what comes out of this?

Some of it may go into the ground of friends and family, but a handful of it is going to stick here on my patio growing or herbs that I might decide to grow, and keep inside of the apartment.

So it's it's not truly, but depending on what you grow, you can keep it pretty manageable in size.

It's very therapeutic to just not be sitting in front of a screen, which is most of my job.

But I think the, another big thing to consider is that it's expensive to not only go to the grocery store and find the right produce picking between different variants of this sort, what's available, what growing the garden does is it allows me to not only, again, kind of get away from my screens and kind of focus on something that I can bring back into the house, but it's also a place where we're like, oh, we know exactly what went into growing this produce, right?

We know where these we know that there weren't pesticides used on these tomatoes, or we know that the squash that we grew last season is going to last, you know, so it gives you the opportunity not only to actually grow the things that you're, you know, feeding your body, but it also saves you a lot of money in doing so.

Right?

Kale sauteed in scrambled eggs is my favorite breakfast.

I was a little irritated recently when I went to, the grocery store and like, a bundle of kale, was like $3.

And I was like, I can grow that.

So.

So I went a little crazy on growing Miguel.

And so I think that people understanding what it means to grow food and what kinds of foods are available and is important, anything that gets people outside and off their phones, I think is important these days.

What starts as a seed becomes something more a skill, a connection, a community, and maybe a new way to grow together.

For PBS 12, I'm Erica McLarty.

it is amazing to see how something so simple can have really such a broad impact.

Yeah, and so cool that Danielle is able to grow all of that just in her apartment.

For more information on programs that Denver Urban Gardens offers, you can go to their website.

Doug.org.

Colorado Inside Out's Kyle Dyer is traveling this week, but guest host Alton Dillard stepped in and led a conversation.

You will not want to miss.

His panel tackled Colorado's child care crisis nearly 14,000 kids on a waitlist, federal dollars frozen, and centers are closing their doors.

Here is that discussion.

Only a year ago, the line of families waiting for subsidized child care was a manageable, if daunting, 5700.

Today, that line has exploded to nearly 14,000 children.

A small city of toddlers and infants left in a state of administrative limbo, according to the Colorado Department of Early Childhood.

The crisis isn't a fluke.

It's the result of a deep freeze.

In some counties, the doors to these programs have been shuttered for over two years, leaving the state's most vulnerable parents scrambling.

For these family market rate, childcare isn't just an inconvenience, it's an impossibility.

Without the subsidy, the cost of a safe place for their children to stay while they work exceeds their entire take home pay.

Carlos, what is going on with Colorado's childcare system?

Well, first I want to just say that childcare is not charity.

These subsidies are not charity.

They're really about economic development because it really allows the family to go ahead and go to work, contribute, and also build up, their, economic independence.

Here in Colorado, child care is funded through various ways, but the most common way is a Colorado childcare assistance program, which is a federally funded program.

A lot of those federal dollars have been frozen by the current administration.

And blue states, Colorado being one of them.

And so, yes, that has gone ahead and created a long, waiting list.

I know of several, childcare centers who have just said, you know, we're not even going to do a waiting list because we just want to hang on to the subsidies we have right now.

And the waiting lists are getting longer and longer.

Our organization used to support, this childcare center, which just went out not too long ago because they couldn't make the economics work without those subsidies.

So, that that is probably the biggest program here in the state.

But other, cities may have a different tax funded initiative around childcare.

And we see that, that that's also be able to go in and help.

Right now there are a couple of cities in the mountain area who are looking to see if they could go ahead and develop a district to develop a funding, initiative to be able to go ahead and support these communities.

That's in Gilbert, Gilpin County, Aspen.

So how do these communities come together?

So right now we see different cities looking at different ways to go ahead and do that.

The Denver preschool program this year celebrates 20 years of and it's actually, has its first cohort graduating from college.

And so right now they're doing an evaluation about that first cohort now graduating from college.

What the impact has been, and the early signs are saying that childcare pays off.

Really childcare pays off.

And that is something we should be looking at.

All right Patty.

That report is going to be fascinating because as you say, it's both an economic development issue for the parents.

So they can get out and work in jobs that otherwise people might not be taking.

That's one of the other things to think about.

But how it grows future people for careers, if they go into childcare early and if they get ahead of things.

So in Denver, farsighted and fortunately is continuing.

It's not in the same crunch that so many places across the state are.

The feds drying that up.

There's no money.

14,000 people waiting.

And also there are no places, even if you could come up with the money, especially in rural areas, there just aren't childcare systems because they can't make the economics work out easily.

So it is really tough, even if the federal money comes, which I doubt it will.

Then you have to find out where it going to go, because where can these kids go?

David.

Well, the the Common Sense Institute did a report on this, which was actually we talked about on this show last fall, that even before all the Trump shenanigans, the system in Colorado wasn't working, that the providers weren't getting paid nearly what they they ought to be.

And that there was a huge backlog.

This is a proper safety net thing because it helps, you know, of a young parent who's trying to do the right thing and provides for his or her children, being able to work and make some income.

But again, the legislature doesn't prioritize things like this.

We have a huge program that's going on to buy free school lunches and school breakfasts for everybody, regardless of income level, not just poor people whose families can't afford the food.

We have Medicaid giving out free health care to people, to able bodied adults who refuse to work or even engage in job training.

We're spending $10 billion a year in corporate welfare for the film industry, and that's not even getting started on the vast amount of welfare this state spends on people who aren't even legally present in this country.

You know, it's very nice to say we're going to be virtuous and be the welfare state for the whole planet.

But before you do that, you ought to take care of the citizens in Colorado first.

And the legislature has deprioritized Colorado's children ahead of behind, all these other, folks who I think deserve much less of a safety net than the Colorado children do.

You just you take the legislature trying to tackle this issue.

And I don't think in the ways that that David would approve of, but, it's interesting to see them with without money available on the budget to throw at this.

They're trying to kind of, help families that are on the lower end of the income scale with tax credits, and some of those had to be pared back or were turned off because of the state tax revenue reductions caused by the One Big Beautiful Bill act.

Lawmakers responded.

Some, more liberal lawmakers in the legislature have responded by trying to rollback some tax breaks for businesses and shuffle that savings, that money into and do tax break for, families with with children who are on the lower end of the income scale.

But maybe be a thousand, a few thousand dollars, a year for them, obviously not enough to pay for $30,000 worth of child care, whatever it cost these days.

But, it's certainly an issue that's getting a lot of attention.

I want to just shout out, my colleagues at the center have been reporting on this very closely and looking at it.

We've got a whole series that's, going on, and I encourage people to check it out.

If this is an issue that's important to you.

carbon is the foundation of life on Earth.

Present in the air we breathe, the ground beneath us, and even within our own bodies.

But today, it's also at the center of one of the greatest challenges of our time.

In partnership with the Colorado Environmental Film Festival, we are able to show you a documentary that highlights a group of innovative women working to transform how we understand and use carbon.

These trailblazers are not only reshaping industries, they're also transforming how society thinks about our planet and humanity.

The documentary is a full hour, but here we're showing you just the first 15 minutes as a preview of our Earth Day programing.

Here is Women of Carbon.

I love that term.

Woman of carbon.

It just struck a chord.

A deep chord that I hadn't articulated in that way.

And how do you take those people in that passion and you and uniformly harness it for a power that's bigger than them for good, to help make real systemic change that's much bigger than any one person.

To bring these systems together in a way that moves things forward.

What has taught me this is a good one.

We are an ecosystem, whether it's talking about us as humans or just the natural environment in general.

We need each other.

The Earth is telling us that we're doing everything we can to make it habitable for us.

But if we fail, the earth is going to be fine.

It will heal itself and actually take a little bit of solace in that.

In the construction sector.

Historically, it has been a very male dominated industry.

But I think as a woman in that space, the way I've been able to break through is just know that it doesn't matter if I'm a man or a woman, it matters what my intentions are and my will to actually achieve those things.

The mass timber industry and community is really filled with some incredible badass women.

They are interested in having a different kind of conversation.

Why are you so committed?

I'm.

I'm committed because I have a real stubborn optimism about me.

I think that anything is possible and know is exactly when I start to get excited.

I share my work with my daughter.

I've realized how much of an impact we can make, even at such a young age, on the coming generations, and how much they can value that.

It's really hard to balance work and family life, and I'd be lying if I said I did it beautifully and I could do everything perfectly.

Sometimes I feel like I completely suck as a, you know, a teammate, and I completely suck as a parent.

When I was a kid, I lived in Northern Nigeria for a couple of years.

You know, on the edge of the Sahara desert.

I saw a lot of issues with water, lack of water or lack of resources.

So that kind of was an early impression on, you know, the link between humans and the environment.

There was a massive wildfire and I couldn't have been more than ten.

And I remember just looking out from our deck on hills that were burning.

Oh, what's going on?

Why are we experiencing this?

Why is this happening within our culture?

We don't take more than we need and we always give back.

Every year and throughout the year, we honor the relationship with our Earth.

So in order to build for our future, we really need to pass these teachings on to our children to ensure that our children are going to come up here and they're going to take these jobs, that they're going to be able to fill our shoes in the future when it comes to protecting our resources.

When I was a little girl in Colombia, I was following the space program.

That was when man went to the moon and, you know, to me to see something like that.

And I wanted to be an astronaut.

But then I realized, you know, I'm not in love with the idea of being an astronaut.

I'm in love with the fact that you can solve massive problems through science.

So I became a scientist.

Cities serve as dynamic canvases shaping our lives.

Tapestries of our experiences.

They're not just physical structures.

They're narratives influencing our dreams and desires.

These spaces serve as the arenas where we work, play, love, and find solace.

Yet how much do we truly understand about these environments?

The structures, the infrastructure, the materials they consist of, and their profound effects on our well-being?

The other reason I'm not afraid to fly.

Oh, I. We just have, this feeling of urgency that we have to care for our environment.

But.

We don't take action.

Our whole world that we know right now is going to change so dramatically that we won't be able to enjoy, you know, summers at the beach.

This is our home.

This is where we live.

This is where we play.

This is where we source our food.

It's our source of life.

It's our habitat.

I have, many friends that I've grown up with that have made the choice to to not bring life into the world as the state that it's in.

Carbon is all around us and essential for life.

Yet excessive amounts of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere intensify the greenhouse effect.

This can lead to rising global temperatures detrimental to the planet and human health.

An invisible, silent threat harming our future.

In a time when change was forged by fire and steel.

The Industrial Revolution ignited a revolution of its own, sparking visionary city transformations.

But progress came at a price.

Pollution, waste and toxic gases seeped into the air from fossil fuels and human activities, disrupting the delicate balance of our carbon cycle.

Today, the construction industry adds 40% to carbon dioxide emissions.

It's now or never, really.

I mean, I think we're at it.

We're at a point where we have to decide to make this change.

And if we don't, we're just moving down that slope where it's going to be harder and harder to rewind the clock and go back to the planet as we knew it.

Innovative women are seeking solutions.

Reshaping our carbon footprint in the built environment.

Our technological advances are allowing us to fix these in real time.

We're discovering the problem, and we're also discovering the solution.

And, we're really evolving and adapting so rapidly.

It's a really fun time to be to be a scientist and to be a human.

Frankly, I never thought actually I would be a woman of carbon.

I always dreamed of, you know, big bridges and towers, only to realize is that in the future, we're not going to be building any bigger bridges or towers unless we embrace this challenge of carbon, you know, all around us.

We just need to figure out how to use that carbon in a very different way than we have been today.

And as soon as we figure out how not to waste carbon, we'll solve the problem.

Buildings have so many opportunities to be part of the climate solution.

Building materials, the materials that we put into making them have incredible potential, both in terms of reducing the impact of conventional materials like steel and concrete, but also innovative new materials where we can store carbon in the materials that we're building our buildings out of them and store them.

For a long time, we will be adding in New York City to the planet every 30 days for the next 40 plus years.

We can use that as a mechanism to continue to harm the climate, or we can all use it as a mechanism to heal it.

What we have to do in order to decarbonize building materials and the built environment is that we have to reinvent these tools of the Industrial revolution.

Cement is the most used manmade material on the planet.

Pioneering startups are developing sustainable cement alternatives free from fossil fuels and limestone.

There's a misconception that in order to continue building at the rate that we are used to and need to in order to sustain society, that is necessary to go through the route of making Portland cement.

We think this is a much better way.

We're now developing an electrochemical system for making cement.

So I like to say this is the electric vehicle of cement making.

So cement is made in these giant fossil fuel kilns.

And what we're doing is replacing high temperature combustion and fossil fuels with a system that works electric chemically at ambient temperature, can be powered by renewable electricity to avoid all of the CO2 emissions that come from cement making, which amount to about 8% of global CO2 emissions.

Really, the magic happens at the material scale.

If we want to have an impact on a building scale, it really all starts with the chemistry, the biology of how we make materials.

So we're really laser focused on learning from nature and applying nature's fabrication methods to the way we make building materials today.

What this living material is, is a vision that we can use bacteria, algae to produce a different type of binder that doesn't create CO2, but instead sequesters carbon into the material.

If you drive around town, you might have noticed once or twice that our infrastructure, the roads, the bridges, buildings around us that are made of concrete, that crack they break.

We spend billions of taxpayer dollars to repair them every year.

Having a material that actually repairs itself when it is damaged would be ideal.

Our bodies do that.

We want to mimic more of a living system in the materials around us.

And so the idea of this technology is that we would put it on the surface, and since it grows, it will grow down and find the damage and then start living inside the concrete, really keep our existing concrete infrastructure alive for decades where we would have had to tear it down and rebuild it on our earth.

Many things happened in a cycle and I see materials is also being made.

Therefore, eventually they need they need to die and they need to disintegrate.

The more we fight that, the more we'll end up with materials that require a lot of energy to manufacture, resulting a lot of emissions create bonds that won't fall apart and that, in the end, is not working with the Earth because we are fighting this cycle of creation and degradation with time.

If we embrace the fact that a system that can naturally deteriorate and that we are willing to repair and maintain is part of a cycle more, then we will be able to work with materials around us that are better for our environment.

There are organisms all over the planet that take CO2, reacted with a metal like calcium and magnesium, and fix it in mineral form.

If we look at that as a starting solution to make materials, we're already starting in the negative with carbon.

There's basically no one else doing it in the way that we are.

Where using carbon negative limestone that's produced by living organisms through bio mineralization to make cement and concrete more carbon negative materials.

For us in the United States, thinking about buildings in a circular manner is critical.

We have tons of existing buildings, and those buildings can be reused and the materials in them can be reused.

And how we build now should be thinking about 100, 200, 300 years from now, how people are going to take these materials and reuse them for the future of materials is circular.

It makes absolutely no sense.

It's not possible for us to continue with an extract and throw away model, because we're running out of things to extract.

I think there's an understanding that this problem is urgent and important, and an understanding of of the massive role that cement has to play in, you know, the development of the human species.

As the world's population grows between now and 2050, it's expected the floor space on Earth is going to double.

We need cement now more than ever.

We just need a different way of making cement.

Can we design a building prototype that no longer lowers?

Of course it lowers, but it goes beyond that and actually absorbs carbon from the atmosphere.

The carbon it absorbs is more than the carbon it would emit during the construction process.

Can you imagine a world where every building absorbs carbon from the atmosphere, rather than emits carbon into the air?

Urban Sequoia incorporates a couple of innovative concepts.

Of course.

It tries to reduce carbon emissions of building as a whole.

However, it also uses nature based solutions such as bio brick, for example, bio cement.

It uses innovative technologies such as direct air capture systems that absorb carbon directly from the atmosphere.

One of our colleagues actually introduced this idea, presented this idea to his children.

So he explained to the children that this is a building that acts like a tree.

It absorbs carbon from the atmosphere.

And the children's reaction was, wait a minute, don't the buildings already do that?

So intuitive, so right, so amazing, so beautiful in a way, I think one of the first lessons that I want to teach her son is that he isn't immune to his surroundings.

As humans, we have a tendency to think that we are removed from the environment around us.

But I think something I want to instill very early on is that he is actually a part of the ecosystem that surrounds him.

I do love how the women in the film demonstrated that solutions don't just come from technology, but also from perspective and persistence.

We will be airing the full hour of this award winning documentary right here on PBS 12 on Sunday, April 19th at 9 p.m.

so make sure to tune in for that.

Thanks so much for joining us for this edition of studio 12.

And don't forget, you can also check us out on YouTube and on social media.

I'm Bosie Canady and I'm Ryan here.

Until next time.

Have a great week.