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Our Climate Journey with Daniela Jacobo

“Sustainability is one of the reasons I joined Zum in the first place. What we’re doing—to make student transportation more safe, efficient, and sustainable—is so inspiring, and it encourages me to do my part as well, even if it’s small.”

Daniela Jacobo
Director of Revenue

Daniela leads the Revenue Accounting team at Zum and previously spent 15 years in Accounting at Salesforce and PwC. She lives in Oakland with her husband, her 3-year old son, and her cuddly dog Cali. In her free time, she loves to travel, attend Orangetheory classes and is an avid reader.

1. Sustainability

At Zum, we’re revolutionizing student transportation in order to build a green, sustainable future. What does sustainability mean to you?

Sustainability is one of the reasons I joined Zum in the first place.

What we’re doing—to make student transportation more safe, efficient, and sustainable—is so inspiring, and it encourages me to do my part as well, even if it’s small.

In my house, it’s me, my husband, our three-year-old son, and our dog. We make sure we recycle and compost everything. Not just in the standard curbside bins—a few months ago, we joined a service called Ridwell, which provides us with special bins and bags for various items, like multilayer plastics and clothes and sneakers that are too used to donate. There are so many things that curbside recycling won’t actually take so this really helps reduce the amount that goes in our trash every week.

Again, it’s small, but to me, sustainability is each of us doing our small part.

2. Climate Change

Climate change is the single greatest threat to our way of life, but it can sometimes feel abstract, far away, a problem for another time. How has climate change affected you personally?

I’ve lived here in the Bay Area for years. I grew up in Sacramento but lived in San Francisco for ten years, then moved to Oakland in 2020.

In all that time, I’ve noticed summers getting hotter and hotter. We’ve never had air conditioning in San Francisco or Oakland, but until recently that hasn’t really been a problem. Now, though, in the summer, my family and I, we close all of our curtains, we turn on all the fans—it just gets so hot.

And of course there are the wildfires. I got married in 2017, up near Santa Rosa. The week after the wedding, there was an enormous wildfire. The houses where my friends and family stayed, the wineries they visited, they all burned down. Thankfully my wedding venue survived, but it still felt really close to home.

It takes so long for these communities to bounce back, and we’re just going to keep seeing more things like this happen.

3. Leadership

What can Zum do to be a leader in sustainability, to spearhead the charge in the fight against climate change?

It’s really exciting that we’re electrifying our school bus fleets. We just announced a fully electric fleet in Oakland (where I live), which is incredible—and now, our Accounting team is responsible for the financial component of that. When we send power back to the grid at peak hours, there’s a financial incentive that will help offset our transportation costs, and also a great benefit to the local community by providing a clean, sustainable energy resource. So our team is helping align financial and environmental incentives, which is really cool. I’m excited to see Zum continue to grow this program and continue to expand to additional markets.