The Story of
a Social Entrepreneur

Hi, my name is Drew Alcoser, I am the Project Leader and Founder. Before we had the Global Climate Strike, Cascadia Stack was just a spark in the heart of a Gen X social entrepreneur, I was finishing a degree in leadership during the pandemic, graduating in 2021. I continued my education at Portland State University for a master’s certificate in social entrepreneurship. This whole time, I was learning while volunteering with Citizens Climate Lobby for the Portland chapter.

It is here where I encountered the concept of climate resilience.
This experience challenged my feelings of helplessness. I received learning opportunities and took grassroots actions, advocating for political will, sprouted feelings of empowerment. In hindsight, I now see that I had been stuck in the negative space of anger, panic, and grief about the climate crisis. The negative feelings and visceral reactions stagnated my ability to empathize with the movement. My motivation for advocating, marching, and having conversations about climate action slowly dissolved.
The whole thing eventually made me cynical and essentially, I became checked out.

I took action, started my emergency preparedness “hobby”. I view it as an ongoing “practice” preparing my household and anticipating potential dangers from long-term impacts of the changing climate to our usual-way-of-life. Short term emergencies are easy to identify, but long-term changes- I can prepare for by learning to grow my own food, for example.

Cascadia Stack is my contribution to challenge the existential crisis, it encourages me to acknowledge all those feelings and move to empowerment. Like me, you may know about some resources for preparing yourself mentally, and you might even have an emergency kit in your car. But there is more to learn.
And learning is better in community.

Read more of the Founder’s Story here.