Interview with Michelle Montague on Advancing Equity | From Founding WRISE to Electrifying School Buses

Catherine: Hi, I’m Catherine McLean, Founder and CEO of Dylan Green, and today I have with me Michelle Montague. Michelle is a business development manager with Texas Electric School Bus Project. Thank you for joining me today.

Michelle: My pleasure. Thank you for having me.

Catherine: So Michelle is part of the WRISE 20th anniversary series that we’re doing, interviewing incredible women who’ve been part of the organization from the very beginning.
Can you introduce yourself and share a bit about your role at the Texas Electric School Bus Project?

Michelle: My name is Michelle Montague. I currently serve as the business development director at Texas Electric School Bus Project. We are a little non-profit with a big mission, a speedy and equitable transition to an electric fleet in Texas. And we are a little non-profit, we’re run by a couple of people. So as you can imagine, despite my title, I’m busy doing a lot of things in this startup non-profit.

Catherine: You began your career as a communications coordinator at the American Wind Energy Association, which is now American Clean Power, for those who don’t know. What drew you into clean energy and how did that first role shape your path?

Michelle: I knew early in my career that I wanted to be in the environmental movement, as it was called several decades ago, and put myself in Washington, D.C. quite intentionally. Less than a year with being there, I landed a wonderful opportunity at AWEA, now called American Clean Power, ACP, working for and working with the awesome Randy Swisher and late Tom Gray, as well as other great leaders at the American Wind Energy Association. I was there for a couple of years and really enjoyed my, frankly, indoctrination into renewable energy. It really cemented my love and my passion for renewable energy and the campaign work around it and introduced me to corporate America and how corporations were building out renewable energy. So it was a really wonderful start to my career.

Catherine: Take us back to the early days of WRISE. What inspired you and the founding team to start it and what were some of those early moments like?

Michelle: It did not take long working in the wind energy industry to see at programs, events, conferences, you name it, walking into a room and sometimes you were one of a handful of women there. When I learned about the very first meeting of WoWE, Women of Wind Energy, as we called it back then, I stepped in, I heard what they had to say, and immediately I knew that I was hooked. I knew that these were the women and the people that I wanted to align myself with. I boldly stepped out of my comfort zone. I asked if I could be part of the steering committee in my young age and I was welcomed. And it was the beginning of a very exciting time in my career in wind energy and renewable energy. The early moments were really out there trying to understand the critical issues that women were facing in this field. So our steering committee did a lot of reflection because we had women that were established and women that were younger. And often they brought those experiences to the table. That formed our early days in figuring out what our mission would be.

Catherine: That’s interesting. So looking at younger people, what younger people were saying that they wanted to see. That’s great. What are some of the things that you’re most proud of when you look at how WRISE has grown and evolved over the past two decades?

Michelle: Early on, I believe we captured the essence of women’s sentiments and their concerns. And we built a mission around addressing those concerns. That mission-centric focus and ideal is carried on today. A lot of the programming and work you see WRISE do today still is around that mission that we built. And so I’m proud that we were able to capture that even a couple of decades ago. Also, we established a really quality program. A particular program that we established called the Fellowship Program was very tangible and hands-on in moving young women from the beginning of their careers up through the industry. And it was able to focus and amplify that work that really made WRISE a differentiator in the work we were doing. Finally, the chapters. The chapters were a beautiful organic development and growth from the local level where we were able to take the national mission and drive it down to the local level. So those three things, I think, stick out for me as the most important aspects that we developed and have grown over the decades.

Catherine: Having that sort of local presence with the national lens as well is great.

Michelle: It was not easy to do because a lot of local chapters had their own flair and their own flavor, which we wanted to encourage. But at the same time, we had a larger mission and we had to keep everybody cohesively together. So it was not easy, but we were successful and you can see there’s dozens of chapters across the country and I believe still in Canada today.

Catherine: As a woman leader in clean energy, what are some of the major challenges you’ve faced and how did you navigate or overcome them? I’ll try to keep this together because at the end I get a little verklempt. Because I think about some of the challenges. So my journey isn’t unlike many professional women where we’re trying to keep our skills current, develop ourselves professionally. We want to realize our fullest potential in the professional realm and we’re trying to balance it with what’s going on in our personal lives. Whether that’s caring for family members, doing multi-generation care up and down the generations, health challenges, all of these things, moves in life, all of these things are very challenging. And so I’ve met, been met with these as well as most professional people. That work-life balance that we’re still seeing as part of conversations today where companies are still not moving that forward is an area that I think WRISE has made a profound impact and I specifically want to call out Casey Peters, a beautiful late Casey Peters who until she couldn’t anymore really pushed this issue of work-life balance and made it an important topic for so many people to look at. Casey and I connected on a health level. We were both meeting health challenges at the same time in our lives and she inspired me so deeply. And so on this topic, specifically work-life balance, I think WRISE has been able to bring incredible people together like Casey Peters and so many more to impress at every level and ensure that companies are still working to bring that balance that we need to the workplace.

Catherine: Yeah, thank you for sharing that.

Michelle: She was incredible.

Catherine: Yeah, I knew her a tiny bit, not obviously as much as, as I have the pleasure of knowing her as much as others.

Michelle: Really inspirational, that’s for sure.

Catherine: You’ve worked across various sectors from EVs and wind to solar. What trends or shifts in clean energy excites you now?

Michelle: I was excited to be part of the transition where wind energy went from margins to mainstream and be part of that. I saw the same happen for solar and of course later on in energy storage. As the cost of those technologies has dropped and use cases have risen, particularly with energy storage coming on the scene, it was evident to many people, me included, that the web of opportunities for clean energy was going to proliferate. Back then, we didn’t always call it decentralized energy. We didn’t always call it distributed energy. But the lack of a label, we still saw the incredible opportunity and interconnectedness that was going to be the model of the future. So upon working in all these wonderful spaces in wind and solar and microgrids and distributed generation, I started to find an interest in e-mobility. I saw how e-mobility was connecting to the grid, connecting to buildings. I saw the transition of making charging infrastructure sustainable using renewable energy. All of these excited me. So I do, I’m trying to stay optimistic and despite the federal funding environment that we’re in, I believe the interconnectedness of all these energy assets has been established and is rooted. So I’m really looking forward to seeing and learning how the use case for all these assets and all the sustainable energy will further embed themselves into our lives every day.
So I didn’t share too much about my role. I was very general in that it’s a two-person nonprofit. So she and I do everything. And despite my title, I honestly am a bit Renaissance and I do everything. But I can add that I was very motivated to move into this space because I have a child with asthma who rides the diesel school bus every day. And I understand the profound impact that EVs make in our world in reducing emissions. And so we have a huge task to tackle the half a million school buses across America today and try to electrify them. So we’re doing a little part in Texas and trying to convert the fleet here, which is 50,000 strong.

Catherine: For emerging leaders, especially women and people of color, what advice would you offer about finding their voice or advancing in the industry?

Michelle: For me personally, I found empowerment through speaking roles or creating speaking roles for my peers or for the people I worked with. And I would have to develop the speaking notes or the messaging and watching that be delivered. To me, that was very empowering. I thought it was a true test to position myself behind the podium and share a program, share an idea, share an initiative and be able to deliver that. So when I spoke to women over the years, particularly young women who would ask me these questions, I would say, try to put yourself in a leadership role when you can. If you’re uncomfortable with speaking behind a podium, then take a program that’s at your company. Try to create a program at your company. Try to look for a campaign that you could lead. All of these were ways that I felt people could help develop leadership roles and leadership skills. And finally, if they say they couldn’t find one, then I would suggest try to create one. For me, what I did is I actually started two chapters. So I had a lot of opportunity to speak because I was leading a chapter. And so when you can’t find something within your own workspace, try to create your own opportunity.

Catherine: What does it mean to be an ally to you? And how can allies support the WRISE community?

Michelle: Being an ally is walking the walk and talking the talk, in my opinion. It’s that simple. Are you willing to have a conversation about the importance of diversity in the workforce? Are you willing to share the imbalances that we’re all seeing out there across it to talk to your management, to talk to executives about this topic? If you’re truly passionate about it, then you need to put yourself in an uncomfortable place and push this topic and have these conversations. It was in the early days of WoWE and WRISE, we saw this over and over again.
As you can imagine, a couple of decades ago, there was a lot of men that were leading these companies, and we had to approach them with this mission and talk about it and push this topic. It wasn’t easy to fundraise around. It wasn’t easy to talk about it. But if you can find that inner mission and connect with that WRISE mission, connect with those messages, then you’re going to find those allies pretty quickly. When we hit hurdles, whether it was personally or professionally, it was often that WRISE and that WoWE chapter that we leaned upon to help us get us through those challenging moments. WoWE and WRISE have been an ally to me for years.

Catherine: Yeah. Do you ever work with, what’s that company, Highland School, Highland?

Michelle: Oh, Highland Electric. Yes. Highland Electric is a member of our non-profit, and I do work with them. Yeah. Do you know somebody there?

Catherine: I always see them in the press. Hopefully, fingers crossed, we’ll get some respite in Virginia. We’ve made a lot of inroads with solar. We are very proud of the work that we’ve done in solar as a state, but we seem to really be laggards when it comes to EV, public transportation and school buses, which is so ironic to me because one out of two people drives a Tesla here. You would think that we’re very supportive of EVs is what I’m saying as a community, but anyway.

Michelle: Yeah. School buses are a very, very different market. It’s interesting because we’re making big steps and big strides and step bands and heavy-duty vehicles and all of that, but school buses, I think, frankly, because schools have very limited budgets, right? It’s a very complicated industry to work within. So it’s not a low-hanging fruit. While it looks like it is because there’s a half a million of them, it’s still the environment and community that you have to work within, which can be financially restricted and politically challenged.

Catherine: Yeah. That’s fair enough. That’s fair enough. Okay. Well, thanks so much for speaking to us. We’ll see you in New York next month?

Michelle: Excited. Thank you. Thanks for your patience and time.