JR Diaz-Hernandez - The World's Too Big of a Place to Be Bored

[00:00:05] Dominique: Welcome to Green Champions. 

[00:00:06] Christy: Thanks for joining us in a conversation with real people sharing sustainability success stories.

[00:00:11] Dominique: This podcast is a platform for green champions to share their stories and plant new ideas. I'm Dominique. 

[00:00:16] Christy: And I'm Christy. 

[00:00:17] Dominique: Today, we're delighted to welcome another guest as part of our miniseries with the Mid-Ohio Regional Planning Commission, also known as MORPC. We're highlighting their initiatives driving sustainability across central 

Ohio and promoting MORPC's annual summit on Sustainability. 

[00:00:30] Christy: In this miniseries, you'll meet a few of the people you can expect to see at this year's summit, and we'll be there also to experience the event alongside of you. Today we're joined by Mauro Diaz-Hernandez, or JR. So we're so excited for you to join us, JR. You are the air quality and sustainability program manager at MORPC, and you work to protect public health and improve air quality across Central Ohio through forecasting alerts and neighborhood-level air monitoring.

We're excited for you to share with our listenersthe importance of this work and what you do every day, but we are excited to get to learn more about you in our first episode. Thanks for joining us.

[00:01:07] JR: Absolutely. Thanks for having me here. I'm really looking forward to the conversation.

[00:01:11] Dominique: Awesome, JR. Well, I know we got a lot of questions about your kinda early upbringing, and we'll get in personal story, but should we talk about your name first? Do you wanna share why JR matters so much to you?

[00:01:20] JR: Yeah. Given name is Mauro or Mauro. JR, those are the initials of my great-grandpa on my grandpa on my mom's side. The, the R, Roberto, is my grandpa who helped raise me for the first nine years of my life. So it's just a way of honoring them and how they got me here today and what an influence they had on me.

So, yeah, JR. JR from Dallas, Texas, so if anybody here is a Dallas fan, that's easy to remember.

[00:01:43] Dominique: Well, that's a perfect segue, and I love that you get to kind of carry that family story with you every day. And I'm sure that has sparked a lot of great conversation too, of kicking off your introduction to people as with such a deep-rooted part of who you are. Tell us about Dallas. What was it like growing up there?

How has that shaped who you are now?

[00:01:58] JR: Yeah, absolutely. You can see I always have a cowboy hat on. So today I've got my Stetson Open Road on in the background. So I carry a part of Dallas and Texas with me always just because, you can't grow up in a place and not have that influence, what you do and who you are. So I grew up there, born and raised in Dallas, Texas, little neighborhood called Oak Cliff. Cool place to grow up. Was within walking distance to almost everything I needed, the little house that my family bought. One of the things that we noticed, without me even really connecting the dots until much later, say like in college and as an adult, we lived in a fairly walkable neighborhood, if we wanna bring in our technical jargon.

Walkable neighborhood, multigenerational neighborhood. We had everything within walking distance. But you see those changes happen over time. Of course, your neighborhood that you grew up was-- it's not the same neighborhood that it is now. So part of what we saw was folks having to leave.

They had family that they had to get back to in their original countries. They couldn't keep up with just the changes and how expensive it was getting. So it was a cool microcosm of what I eventually saw and started applying to the work that I was doing outside of Dallas into my college career and into my professional career.

But it was a fun place to grow up. I miss the food. I miss the people. It was a really cool neighborhood to grow up in. 

[00:03:08] Christy: Dominique and I both love food. I have to ask you, tell me about the food that you loved, and what memories does thinking about that elicit?

[00:03:16] JR: Yeah. We grew up in a Mexican household, so like big meals all the time. Neighbors cooking constantly, the neighborhood always smelled really good. But one of, my favorite spots that has since closed was actually a family from El Salvador, and they cooked pupusas, right?

So the delicious pastries filled with cheese. that was within, I think it was a half block from the elementary school that I went to. So it was fun going over there and getting two pupusas for a dollar, and then eventually they became a dollar each, and eventually they became like $3 each.

But, hey, they're still good no matter what. 

I love it. That's amazing. Well, how did that experience, it sounds like an outstanding experience growing up in Texas, influence how you decided to get into anthropology and sociology in college? Yeah, absolutely. So when I went to college, Amherst College in Massachusetts, a couple of decisions that went into it. Number one, I wanted to be at a school that was different than anything I thought growing up. So shout out to one of my high school teachers, John Sloka, who's the one who actually pushed me to think beyond just like a big university where I would just be a face in a crowd to something smaller, where I was one of 14 to 20 people on average in these classes.

So it was nice to have that experience, that smaller school experience. And truthfully, it was a financial one. Amherst gave me some pretty good scholarships and we grew up low income, and I was the first person in my family to go to college. Sopart of the decision was based off of, I don't wanna get saddled with debt, and this is a great school.

And so that's how I ended up there. This will be a common thread speaking of the Summit on Sustainability, the common thread with a lot of the roles that I've had in life is that I didn't quite know what I wanted to do in college. I didn't know what I wanted to major in. I thought I had an idea.

So I kinda bounced around a bit. I think I started as like a physics major, and then I bounced over to English and poetry, and

[00:04:54] Dominique: Oh, you couldn't plan your entire life at the age of 18? 

Right? 

Right? 

[00:04:57] JR: I was the one 18-year-old who didn't know how to plan their entire life.

So I bounced around a bit, took Russian for a while.

[00:05:03] Dominique: Ooh. Okay, hold on. I gotta know was there a reason for physics, a reason for Russian? These are, I love your broad spectrum of interests.

But I eventually, to get back to the original question stem here, how did I end up in anthropology? So that was a moment of sitting down, looking back at all the work that I was doing and trying to figure out which one of the building blocks was the most interesting to me. And it was always people.

It'll always be people, right? People are just so massively interesting and different and unique. So that's what brought in this idea of anthropology 'cause of course, I'm sitting in the library thinking, "If only there was a field of study that studied people," and kinda hit me like a big revelation there.

And as I was taking those classes, there was also the interest in environmentalism and environmental science. We happened to have a new professor come in who was an environmental sociologist, and I was like, "That's very interesting. I don't know what that means." So I took some classes with Hannah Holleman.

Again, surprised I remember all my teachers and professors' names, but clearly they had a great impact. 

Yeah, I'm very impressed.

 Hannah Holleman brought in the environmental sociology lens, so studying, people and movements and things that have happened through the lens of changes. And it was just so vastly interesting and a way of understanding and thinking that I had not truthfully done before.

So that's what led me there. It was always that, again, that interest in people, how we act, how we react, how we do things. And that's what led me ultimately to fitting the last two years of my, my college career after exploring a bit, trying to get the anthropology and sociology degrees, which I fortunately was able to do.

That's awesome. And I really love this very compelling portion of, I think, your passion, which is people. I mean, even thinking about the way that you very intentionally carry the family in your life with you all the time. The way you talked about the core parts, the things that stand out to you about home were the people around you. And then wanting to study people and understand ultimately the way they think and the ways that culture impacts how we do everything. I love this through line for you. 

And it sounds like that connected at some point to public health, for you specifically.

And that's gonna start getting us closer and closer to the work you do today. But was there a reason public health stole your heart when you were deciding between physics and Russian and just a love of people?

[00:07:13] JR: Yeah, absolutely. 

So to your question, Dominique, how did the public health come into play? So when I graduated, I got a job with a program called the Williams-Mystic Maritime Studies program based out of Mystic, Connecticut, which is how I ended up going from Texas to Massachusetts to Connecticut. So there I worked in the admissions department because I wanted to do that program when I was in college. Unfortunately, I just never had the time. I couldn't fit it into my schedule, so I decided next best thing is let me experience being a part of the organization. So I worked with them for a few years, again in the admissions department, which involved a lot of recruitment and going out and trying to get students to experience this.

But what I really appreciated about the way that they approached their staff is that they said, we can't expect our staff to talk about and advertise our programming without having actually experienced that programming." So I did get to go onto a few of the field seminars that they offered to the students, so it was a very much like learning in place. You wanted to learn about maritime studies and ocean studies and the environment, we're gonna do it in the places that we're reading about in books and papers. 

But, as I mentioned, some of those field seminars wanted to talk about land erosion in Louisiana, so we actually went down to Terrebonne Parish in Houma and Cocodrie, Louisiana, so like right on the edge of the Gulf of Mexico. They wanted to talk about salmon fisheries, right?

So we ended up in Oregon and Washington talking to folks who were from large scale salmon fisheries or like traditional salmon fisheries. So speaking with folks who brought in the perspective of here it is from the state level perspective environmentalism, but also like traditional food ways and Native Americans in the area who were saying, "Here's how we interact with our food and our food ways."

I went sailing for a while aboard a 100-foot tall ship in the Caribbean. But another experience of hey, you wanna read Moby Dick and understand better what people were doing, you're gonna work on a ship for a while.

Very tiring, but very pretty to do that. 

[00:08:57] Dominique: How long were you on the ship?

[00:08:58] JR: Three weeks? Three weeks, something like that. But I can tell you stories about dolphins, but we'll get to that in a second. I was doing that, and again, just that thread of, I'm seeing people, I'm seeing how climate change is affecting people in different parts of the United States.

I mean, you wanna talk about climate change, go down to Louisiana, right? A site that I visited 10 years ago no longer exists 'cause it's under five to 10 feet of water,So you see these things happening. You see it happening to the people. You're trying to understand how it's affecting folks. And again, I had that moment, as I mentioned earlier, if only there was a way of understanding how the public is being affected by large scale climate change systems and how it's affecting their health. Oh, well, I had that thought on the walk. And again, it took me a while for the gears to click. It's wait, there is a course of study called public health. So I ended up applying to the University of Connecticut since, I was in the area. Got into their public health program.

And they were very understanding about the work that I was trying to do, right? It was environmental health, it was climate change, it was public health, it was all these things mixed up in one. And they didn't necessarily have exactly what I was looking for, but it worked for my schedule.

The professors really wanted to work with me to make it happen. So fun fact, it took me six years to do my master's degree. Started in 2017, finally graduated in 2023, 

Because you were busy hopping on a ship. 

Well, I was doing that around the same time I actually switched jobs, and that'll get into another interest of mine. But trying to balance, the interests that I had, the opportunities that I had, what I could afford, honestly, to, to do. So trying to like mash all of that together. And that's how I ended up in that field. I'll add that during that time, as I mentioned, I switched jobs over to an organization called Higher Edge based out of New London, Connecticut.

They were aiming at getting low income and first generation college students into and through college, which is exactly what I did. I worked with, at one point my caseload I think was 170 students. But it's also great to meet students that were in my shoes just years before and they're like, "I don't know what to do," and what's a FAFSA?" "What, what is that?" So helping them and their family like navigate that process, while at the same time going to school. So, it kind of all interwoven there.

[00:10:54] Dominique: Yeah. And I really appreciate just the kind of transparency and reality of getting your master's when you have to also take care of yourself and maybe don't have the means to just be in school. Because I can relate to that. School sometimes is a really great transition point, but, it sometimes is a point of privilege to be able just to jump back into school.

You alluded also to this idea of seeing climate change show up for you, in these different experiences you had.

Can you give us like one or two tangible examples so that maybe we can also see how these communities are feeling the impacts of climate change even many years ago? what were you seeing that was like, "Oh, public health and climate change are deeply connected"?

[00:11:33] JR: Yeah. Yeah. So I'll add, growing up there was always a thread of environmentalism, making sure that you're taking care of like the plants and the trees, and that's just something that my mom taught me. Recycling plastic bags, reusing them, doing something else with them. So before I even had the vocabulary for it, I was kind of already experiencing it.

There's a great thread of most people understand the struggle of like going to your fridge and opening up the butter container, but it's actually like rice. So reusing all of the plastic containers that we were getting from the store, that was just something that happened, you know, that never had any specific language to it.

That was coming from "We needed Tupperware. We got Tupperware after we bought butter," right? At least, according to my moms, and she was right. Absolutely. Please reuse your containers. So, we had that going on. We also had the, again, in Texas, it was very hot. it's just gotten hotter.

The other day when I was speaking to my mom, she was like, "Oh, it's 106 here. No big deal." you see these changes happening, whereas, summers a couple years ago, you wouldn't have it be that high. It'd be hot, sure, but it wouldn't be consistently that high for a number of days.

So I was seeing some of those experiences. I was seeing some friends and family, who grew up in certain parts of the city of Dallas, the affordable houses were closer to, say, like the airport and the municipal dump. So trying to connect all those dots of like, well, why is it that my family and the people who have names like me or look like me, why are they located near certain sites?

 it took me a while to get that vocabulary and fully understand th- these concepts of environmental justice and environmental racism. But that was language that I started putting together in college, thanks again to the academic study there. But specific to experiences that I was seeing elsewhere, fisher communities know their environment like nobody else, right?

 fisher folk, outdoors people, anybody can tell you, "Hey, last year my catch was X amount, and this year it's about half of that, so we gotta figure out why that's happening." that was a thread that kept popping up everywhere. We just, we kept hearing, the catch isn't what it used to be. It certainly wasn't like this last year, and it definitely wasn't like this 20, 30 years ago when some of the older folks were telling us, 'Hey, you could just dump a net in the ocean and pull back a, a huge haul of fish.' Whereas now you're lucky to get like a handful. So you're seeing those changes to the food ways, to the way people experience their life.

You're talking to folks who are saying, "Hey, the winters were never this warm," or, "We haven't gotten snow in years." So it was kind of all of those combinations of we're seeing these small things. We're seeing these little changes that folks are talking about. At the end of the day, it was just due to, larger climatic changes, and seeing how that's affecting people.

So that's the thread there between climate change and public health.

[00:13:56] Christy: One of the things that stands out to me is you have this connection to experiential learning,Because you took your experiences in Texas all the way through Connecticut, all of this, and I can see how you're applying that with your students to the admissions. 

I gotta know. You've gotta have some really cool hobbies or something, right? What else do you have going on besides work these days, JR?

[00:14:20] JR: Yeah. Yeah. You could ask my mom. She knew I could never keep still. She definitely was like, "Go outside and play. Go outside and do something." Which is carried forward to this day. So yes, I have a couple of hobbies, and again, my partner could tell you that I have probably way too many hobbies.

But we have a garage now. I keep my things in the garage as much as I can. It does bleed into the inside though, 'cause there are some things I have to keep inside. if you're in my home office, you can see that we have guitars hanging on one side.

I like to play music as much as I can, trying to learn piano now. I built one of my guitars. And then on the other side, we have a little hydroponic system that I built. So we have like spices and herbs growing. 

We have that there in the garage right now, so this is a skill that I had picked up, again, thinking back on childhood experiences, we didn't have money to fix our houses if anything broke down, so, very much like you gotta figure it out. my mom's the one who would always be like, "Hand me a hammer, hand me a wrench. Let's figure this out." So I learned how to do a bit of like woodworking then, which has carried over to this day.

one of the things that I did at the Williams Mystic Program was I helped build some canoes and kayaks, and repair some older things, oars. There was no shortage of wooden things in a seaport town. But that carried over to some of the work that I do, shelving, as I mentioned the guitar.

I'm working on a ukulele right now. My ultimate build is a violin, so I'll get to 

that eventually. Can't play the violin.

[00:15:40] Dominique: I don't know if this is a reference that, will resonate with you, but I feel like you're adding to your Ron Swanson lore as a community contributor who loves woodworking.

[00:15:49] JR: I've gotten that comparison before, so.

[00:15:51] Dominique: Okay, I'm sure. Well, I think something else that we notice in some Green Champions is also an interest in volunteering and being willing to volunteer sometimes to get experience, contribute, whatever it is that's opening a door for.

And you've also had some volunteer roles. Can you share about those? I think it's also important to your personal experience and your story.

[00:16:13] JR: Yeah, absolutely. while I was working full-time and going to school part-time, I was also a volunteer EMT with the Mystic River Ambulance Association. So that was important to me, number one, to give back to my community, but number two, I wanted a bit more actual experience. The public health, the core courses are very academic and very broad, and I wanted to better understand what was happening in my community.

 I was volunteering a bit when COVID hit, so talk about a great opportunity to get actual experience with what's going on in the community and applying, what's happening in your public health courses.

I worked a bit with therapy horses at a place called the Lighthouse Stables in Connecticut. Really I was a glorified cleaner-upper, but also got to help folks with disabilities, and veterans who were going through treatment processes work with animals, work with horses primarily, to help in their journeys to get better. I was a volunteer at a nature center for a while as well, so another great way of helping kids learn about what's going on. 

[00:17:08] Dominique: I don't know how you find the time. 

[00:17:10] JR: Look, I, I don't know 

[00:17:11] Dominique: I just want you to know I'm sitting here being like, "I need to see a timeline to believe you."

[00:17:18] JR: If it was like a Gantt chart of things that I did, it would be way too colorful. I have a problem that I find, as I mentioned earlier, people are very interesting, but also the world's too big of a place to be bored, there's always something to do. There's always a cool thing that's happening.

But you're right. Yeah, now as I'm thinking, I was like, "Wow, I did a lot maybe." 

[00:17:35] Dominique: Are there any key experiences you wanna share in terms of what led you to the work you do today? And then we can talk a bit about air quality.

[00:17:42] JR: As I mentioned, it took me a while to get my master's degree. One of the things that I did during that time was take a course online through Yale University through the Yale Center on Climate Change and Health, which was just climate change and public health, right?

That really zeroed in on exactly what I wanted to do. Just so happened around that time they were officially starting the center through the School of Public Health at Yale. I'd just done the course, and I was like, "This sounds really interesting. Let me see if there's any positions open." So I applied to be the program admin for the Center on Climate Change and Health.

Got that. Left my position with HireEdge, moved over to Yale, and again, it was just like trying to take steps, either big steps, small steps, over to the things that I really wanted to do, in this case was get experience in public health and climate change. And hey, look at that. It was exactly what I wanted to do.

So I worked with their program for a while, working with students, working with community members, working with the people who were doing that online course was still going on. I got to experience everything from the other side, right? So from being a student in one of these courses to helping administer some of these courses.

So getting a lot of experience there, especially within the New Haven, Connecticut area, like doing this deep understanding there. And, footnote, then I met my partner, and my partner is very smart. She's wonderful. She was working towards getting her master's degree in clinical psychology.

 she was in DC, so we were long distance for a bit. Another great way of experiencing climate change and public health. I took the Amtrak down to go visit her every so often, and seeing the changes happening in DC, the cherry blossoms like blossoming earlier, small things like that,

The river flooding again, seeing all of that happen in person. So I'm working at Yale getting this experience, and then she's applying to graduate school, and she says, "Hey, you know what? I got into multiple schools." Amazing. "My top choice right now is Ohio State," which I now, know I should say The Ohio State.

No, it was The Ohio State University. And I'd never been. She came out to visit. She had the experience with some current folks at that time. Loved it, came back and said, "That's my top choice." And I was like, "Wherever you're going, I'm going." So it was just a straight line between what happened, right? She liked it, so we're like, "All right, we're moving." We packed up the truck, left Connecticut, made our way to Ohio, and I was looking for opportunities here to apply everything that I had learned, So a lot of environmental health, a lot of public health, and other moment of truth, right?

It took a while before I found any positions. Ohio's doing so much, Central Ohio especially. There were so many connections I could make. Unfortunately, nobody was hiring. So that's eventually when I found MORPC, and they had a program admin role that was open, so I applied to that one. I get a call about a week or two later, and they say, "Great. Happy to consider you. Hey, there's this other position open. Are you interested in it?" It just so happened to be the air quality role. And I share that because it was luck. I found a great organization that wasn't even advertising the role that they were looking for.

They reached out to me. They took a chance. And MORPC has just been so wonderful in learning alongside people and getting to know colleagues and getting to do deep engagement with the community. I tell people I lucked out, And within a few weeks, I was like, this is kind of the best job I've ever worked," because there is trust here for you to do the job the way that you wanna do it, the way that you think it needs to get done, as long as it's reaching those programmatic roles.

There's a lot of support. There's a lot of community support. There is name recognition, so it carries a lot of weight to be a part of an organization that has built up that trust over decades here in the area. And the air quality work was just a wonderful opportunity to really drill down, again, on that environmental health experience and background that I had and put the lens in understanding what we're seeing happening in Central Ohio.

So, again, I lucked out. 

[00:21:06] Dominique: Yeah, I think they lucked out. They were like, "Oh my gosh, look at this amazing human. We think he'd be perfect for this role." I think It's like just a serendipitous match, for both of you, And I know from talking to the team at MORPC, and we only got to do with so many speakers from MORPC for this partnership series, and you were the first on the list, which I I think speaks volumes about just the ways that you've contributed and then what you're bringing to this role. So, no more about that luck stuff. I think you have a lot of experience you bring with you.

[00:21:34] JR: I appreciate that. Thank you.

[00:21:35] Christy: I know we're gonna get into so much more about MORPC and your role in the next episode. So maybe it might make sense though, just to help people think about the upcoming Summit on Sustainability that's happening. And you'll be giving a PechaKucha presentation. Why don't you give us a little teaser about that presentation?

[00:21:54] JR: Yeah, sure. So for anybody who's not familiar with the PechaKucha format, although if you've been to a previous summit, you'll know that we do them every year. We have a rotating roster of folks who participate, and if you're listening to this podcast right now, two of the people, half of the speakers who will be there 'cause Dominique will also be giving a PechaKucha talk at this year's summit.

So that's a formatted presentation. There's 20 slides. There's 20 seconds each. They're all auto-timed. So you're giving this talk about items that are important to you within sustainability. You have no control over when the slides advance. Again, 20 seconds, they will auto-advance for a total of six minutes and 40 seconds per speaker.

I'm really gonna try to hone in on, what it means to take time to play outside.

I was thinking, it's like what, what haven't we done for a while? And, we were in the dog park and somebody was saying to their dog, it's like, "All right, come on, let's go. It's time to play outside." And I was like, when's the last time like we did any deep engagement and play as adults with our environment around us for however that might look?

And again, thinking through me growing up and my mom always being like, "Go play outside." Which probably was not a punishment, it was more of just "Hey, you gotta get your energy out somewhere." So bringing in all of those experiences and really trying to understand what do we do now as adults?

Why is it important to us? Why is it important that we're talking about play at the Summit on Sustainability? So, fingers crossed that I do a good job trying to weave all that together.

[00:23:07] Dominique: I am such a big fan of that idea, and thank you for giving us this little teaser. 

Thank you so much for all you shared. And I know we're gonna lead next time into talking more about your champion story in terms of the work you have done in this air quality role. If you don't mind, I want you to leave us with one thought.

For someone who's listening and is like, "I'm not super interested in the next episode," why is air quality important?

[00:23:29] JR: Yeah. Why is air quality important?

[00:23:32] Dominique: the big question

[00:23:33] JR: Yeah, the big question, why is it important? Why is the work that you do important? Well, I have a question back for folks. Did you breathe air today?

[00:23:40] Christy: Right? 

[00:23:41] Dominique: Beautiful question.

[00:23:44] JR: If so, you should care about what's happening to your air quality.

[00:23:47] Dominique: That was great. I think we take it for granted. I think there's so much we're gonna get into why this role is important, what exactly you do day to day, and the things you have on the horizon that we can learn more about.

JR, how can folks connect with you or follow the work that you're doing?

[00:24:01] JR: So if you visit morpc.org/airquality, that'll take you right back to our programming pages. You can find information about the general air quality program as well as the neighborhood air quality program. Again, morpc.org/airquality. You'll find us fairly regularly at different events, different community events.

So tabling, we'll always have information about our air quality programming. And then finally, if you wanna get ahold of us, me, you can email airquality@morpc.org, and that is a general email that I monitor, and I'll be able to get your message that way. 

[00:24:30] Christy: I love that you're just air quality. I am air quality. I will take all the emails. I have them. 

[00:24:35] JR: Anything air quality related, put it in that bucket, I'll get to it.

[00:24:38] Christy: You've got it. JR. Each guest brings a different approach to sustainability. We're here to highlight the people doing the work that inspires others and us because climate action takes many forms.

[00:24:48] Dominique: As always, you can find our episodes and support the show at thegreenchampions.com. If you enjoyed the episode, you can follow, subscribe, and leave us a review on your favorite podcast platform. You can find us on LinkedIn and Instagram, @greenchampionspod. Music is by Zayn Dweik. Thanks for listening to Green Champions. We'll be back with the second half of JR's success story in our next episode.