Alice Min Soo Chun

Hillary

Alice Min Soo Chun and her parents moved to the U.S. in 1968 when she was three years old, leaving behind poverty in South Korea and hoping for a different, brighter future in the United States. Growing up in a low-income neighborhood in Syracuse, New York, where none of the other kids looked like her, Alice focused on tuning out the bullying in order to simply survive. But she was always creative—a trait encouraged by her father, an architect; and her mother, a painter. Alice remembers helping to load a massive pile of wood onto the roof of the family car so her mother could bring it home and use it to build a fireplace mantel. “We were always doing things like that,” she said, laughing.

Her parents moved back to South Korea when Alice was a teenager, and for a while, she stayed with them. But she wanted to go to school in the United States, and that’s exactly what she did, putting herself through college at Penn State and graduate school at the University of Pennsylvania. Balancing school and work was grueling, and she didn’t see her parents for nearly nine years. Through hard work and laser focus, she built a career for herself in New York City, eventually becoming a professor of architecture and material technology at Columbia University and at the New School’s Parsons School for Design.

When Alice’s son, Quinn, developed asthma, her life changed forever. On one of their frequent trips to the doctor, she looked up to see that the waiting room was crowded with worried mothers, looking on as their children puffed on inhalers or waited to be hooked up to a nebulizer. More than once, Alice and Quinn wound up in the emergency room. “When your child can’t breathe, and their lips are turning blue, you would do anything to help them,” Alice said. “I kept saying: Why is this happening to our kids?”

She had once heard a saying: “A worried mom does better research than the FBI.” Alice delved into books and mined reports, searching for statistics and confirming soaring childhood asthma rates due to air pollution, especially in places like New York City. The more she learned, the more outraged she became. Her concern shifted from her son, who at least had access to quality medical care, to children around the world, particularly in places where families relied on dangerous, outdated technologies like kerosene lamps and solid-fuel cookstoves. They were breathing polluted air not only outside but inside of their homes. She learned that each year nearly 3.8 million people, mainly women and children, die prematurely from illnesses related to household air pollution. While electric lights and stoves could offer a safer solution, 1.6 billion people around the globe have no access to electricity, and Alice knew the urgency of climate change would require alternative energy sources. “I wasn’t sure what to do, but I knew the risk of doing nothing was greater than the risk of being wrong,” said Alice.

At work, she turned her focus to sustainable design and began looking for ways to incorporate solar energy into everyday life. As a materials lab director at the Parsons School of Design, Alice knew the material technology trends were becoming thinner, lighter, faster, and smarter. Why not literally weave solar energy into the fabric of her work? In 2008, she started sewing flexible solar panels to fabric and thin plastics, creating a canvas that was both beautiful and useful.

Alice began developing a prototype inflatable solar light in 2008. In 2010, after the earthquake in Haiti, Alice offered a challenge to her design students: Come up with a solution for disaster relief that could be used immediately by an individual. She and some of her students built the prototype for the solar light as a detail unit for a class project.

In 2011, Alice realized she could use origami techniques to create a cube shape that filled with air on its own, eliminating the germs that came from inflating by mouth. She named it the SolarPuff. Alice started a nonprofit called Studio Unite, trying to get the SolarPuff mass-produced. She soon realized that unfortunately the charity model was not sustainable for what she was attempting to do at a much larger scale. In 2015, she established Solight Design and launched the SolarPuff via a crowdfunding campaign that raised almost half a million dollars in thirty days. Alice set aside her teaching to be a full-time social entrepreneur.

Alice couldn’t stop thinking about how to bring relief, safety, and security to disaster areas, along with hope, wonder, and awe. Her company sent SolarPuffs to volunteers who climbed Nepal’s hillsides with Sherpas, bringing light to small villages. In the central plateaus of Haiti, farmers saw the lights and started to sing and dance and cry. Children laughed with delight when they saw how the SolarPuff popped up into a cube. Around the world, where SolarPuffs are, children can see at home to study in the evenings without a fire or a kerosene lamp, and mothers can cook food more safely. In a refugee camp in Greece, a wedding was lit by SolarPuffs. At that same camp, Alice and her “light warriors” put a SolarPuff by the bedside of a teenager who had been badly burned and faced a long recovery. After Alice left, she always wondered what happened to the girl. One day her team received a photograph: It showed the SolarPuff on a dining room table in Germany, where the young woman now lived.

After Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico, Alice sent three thousand SolarPuffs to Carmen Yulín Cruz, the mayor of San Juan. The mayor began handing them out everywhere she went. People on the streets started calling the SolarPuff the “cube of hope.” The next year at Christmas, disturbed to hear how many neighborhoods were still without power, Alice packed a suitcase with SolarPuffs and got on a plane. She had seen pictures of Puerto Rico and the island of Dominica showing fields of houses with the roofs ripped off from heavy winds. So she went to those places herself. She knew from her time in Haiti that children are often the most vulnerable after a disaster. She distributed hundreds of SolarPuffs at local schools for children to bring home so they could do their homework at night and light their families’ homes. “What I realized was that children are the best teachers in the world,” she said. “I would tell them: Even more powerful than the sun is the light in your mind, your imagination.”

“In order to survive a terrible situation, you have to have hope.”

—ALICE MIN SOO CHUN

“It wasn’t easy, starting a company and becoming a social entrepreneur,” Alice said. “At times, it was extremely difficult. There were people who told me I wasn’t good enough, I wasn’t smart enough. Many times, I wanted to give up, but I didn’t, because I kept thinking about my son—the life his children and grandchildren would have in an environment where pollution is compromising their health. I just kept going, and I didn’t give up.”

At the 2019 Clinton Global Initiative (CGI) conference in San Juan, I met Alice. She told me that the SolarPuff was available in twenty countries around the world and sold in the United States at camping stores like REI. Alice took the stage at the conference carrying her newest innovation, the QWNN solar lantern, named after her now-fourteen-year-old son. “It’s individualized infrastructure,” she said. “Every person has the power to harness energy and use it for their life, their livelihood. And together, we can bring light to the darkest corners of the world, one person at a time.” By turning her outrage on behalf of her son and children everywhere into hope for millions, that’s exactly what Alice has done.