Kirk Brown’s work offers an unusual answer to a familiar problem: how do you explain a future that people have never touched? At REACH Strategies, the communications firm he founded, one answer has been to arrange a test drive. A person can read about an electric vehicle for months. Sitting in one creates a different set of questions. The conversation acquires a steering wheel.
Brown has spent years working in the space between a clean-energy idea and someone’s decision to participate. He is also CEO of Recharge America and co-host of Let’s Hear It, a podcast about foundation and nonprofit communications. Those roles involve different institutions and different audiences. Each requires him to consider what makes an invitation useful to the person receiving it.
It is tempting to describe communications as the last part of a project, the bit that announces what everyone else has accomplished. Brown’s career gives it a longer assignment. The work includes finding the people who need to be involved, making room for their questions, and helping them see a next step they might actually take.
A place where the world came calling
Brown grew up outside Des Moines, Iowa, with two parents who taught in public schools. He remembers a childhood in which he felt that he mattered. He also remembers presidential caucus season bringing national politics into local rooms. Important people arrived in an ordinary place and had to spend time with the people already there.
The agricultural economy provided another connection to the wider world. Weather and distant markets could affect life close to home. In his account of that childhood, the local and the global were always tangled together. He later left for college in Minnesota and worked in Washington, DC, before moving to California.
That background helps explain the appeal of community work. A town has its own institutions, employers, expectations, and arguments. Anyone hoping to introduce a change there must contend with those particulars. The place is already full of people making decisions; the visitor is joining a conversation in progress.
Hollywood, at parking-lot level
REACH’s early electric-vehicle story includes a call from the CEO of Paramount Pictures, who wanted a test-drive event on the studio lot. The firm’s account describes recruiting dealers and involving a national automaker. The setting was Hollywood; the activity was an afternoon of people encountering unfamiliar cars.
For a communications strategist, there was plenty to notice. A demonstration makes the subject available for inspection. Someone can examine controls, ask a follow-up question, or decide that the experience differs from what they expected. The technology has to share the encounter with the person’s own judgment.
REACH dates its founding to 2011. Its subsequent work has combined communications planning with outreach and campaign delivery across the United States. The original studio-lot encounter remains an effective introduction to that work because its premise is so accessible: give people a useful opportunity to investigate.
“We just put something in your hands and then you tell us how important it is.”
Kirk Brown, on experiential outreach
There is a modest transfer of authority in that sentence. The organizer has arranged the opportunity. The participant gets to decide what it means. For a profession accustomed to polishing the message, that is a useful reason to leave some room around it.
The first drive has homework
Brown’s involvement in electric-vehicle outreach extends beyond the appealing afternoon. Plug In America listed him alongside San Diego Gas & Electric’s April Bolduc and Massachusetts official Linda Benevides for a 2017 webinar on making a first EV drive effective. The program brought together experience from Massachusetts and San Diego.
The agenda included incentives, charging infrastructure, and survey work to track consumer attitudes. That combination is revealing. The drive provides an experience, while the surrounding information helps a participant judge its relevance. Feedback gives organizers a way to examine what people took away.
There is work before and after the moment that photographs well. An event has to assemble the right partners. Someone has to answer the practical questions. Someone has to determine what the encounter accomplished. A line of cars supplies an attractive picture; a useful program needs the less picturesque machinery too.
An editorial reading of the topics in the 2017 First EV Drive webinar.
The conversation moves to a school
In October 2021, Brown and Jon Olseth of the Olseth Family Foundation appeared on KYMN Radio to discuss an upcoming Recharge Northfield event. The location was Greenvale Park Elementary School. A national technology question had acquired a local address and a Saturday on the calendar.
The detail matters because community participation depends on arrangements as well as arguments. People need somewhere to go. They need a chance to ask questions in a setting they can reach. A school event creates a different invitation from a technical presentation or an industry conference.
Olseth and Brown were identified as key organizers. Their radio appearance placed another familiar local institution beside the event itself. The work of introducing a technology could travel through a community’s existing channels, carried by people explaining what would happen and why someone might want to attend.
Beyond the driver’s seat
Brown’s work also reaches the people buying and operating fleets. At the Transportation Authority of Marin’s 2024 Clean Fleet Expo, he moderated a panel on moving to electric fleets, covering benefits, procurement strategies, and funding opportunities.
The panel brought together Wes Lowe of Kingsburg Trucks, Brent Johnson of NV5, and Richard Battersby of East Bay Clean Cities. The discussion addressed operational efficiency and fuel and maintenance costs. The audience’s decisions involved organizations and purchasing processes as well as vehicles.
That setting adds another dimension to Brown’s public role. He is a facilitator between expertise and a decision someone needs to make. Procurement and funding are prosaic subjects, but a new vehicle still has to pass through them. An invitation becomes considerably more useful when the person issuing it understands the paperwork.
What a community wants to keep
Recharge America gives Brown another setting for the same practical concerns. The nonprofit works with local leaders, businesses, schools, and energy and transportation groups, using philanthropic resources to support community participation in clean energy.
Its stated areas of work include education, innovation, and planning. Education encompasses training and retraining for the people needed to install and maintain new infrastructure. Planning brings the needs and voices of different participants into decisions about what happens locally.
This widens the cast well beyond a prospective car buyer. Electricians, educators, employers, and local officials all have questions that deserve an answer. A community can consider technology alongside the skills, relationships, and opportunities it hopes to develop. Brown’s work sits among those questions, helping connect organizations that may approach the same change from different directions.
Recharge America’s account of 2025 describes support for four communities, five community-based nonprofits, and more than 20 higher-education teams. Those are the organization’s reported activities, rather than a measure of Brown’s individual output. They show the variety of institutions involved in the work.
Looking toward 2026, Brown’s message in that annual report connects EVs with charging, grid readiness, workforce development, buildings, and energy systems. The ambition is to help communities consider the connections between them. A useful local plan has to accommodate more than the technology that first brought everyone into the room.
The founder has to listen indoors, too
Brown has also written about a less comfortable kind of participation: what it feels like to work inside his company. In February 2025, he described a period when REACH’s growth outpaced its management capacity. Recruiting had failed to establish reliably whether applicants suited the work and its pace.
He outlined changes that included executive coaching for managers, group interviews with senior staff, skills assessments, and invitations for candidates to read negative commentary about the company. Internal check-ins would address employees’ experience of work alongside the tasks waiting to be completed.
These were Brown’s descriptions of changes and their reception. They are useful because they make his management thinking concrete. An organization can believe strongly in its purpose and still have to revise how it recruits, supports people, and hears criticism. The founder’s certainty about the mission does not complete those jobs for him.
A microphone, and a movie recommendation
With Eric Brown, who is no relation, Kirk co-hosts Let’s Hear It. The podcast gives nonprofit and foundation communications a place for extended discussion. Eric has described Kirk as the person who proposed making the show, an idea he initially regarded with considerable skepticism. Their continued banter suggests the objection has become part of the arrangement.
The format also creates space to reconsider an interview after it ends. Eric has described their post-interview discussion as a way to process and contextualize what they heard. For Brown, it is another setting in which asking a further question is part of the work.
His movie preferences supply a welcome change of subject. He has named Harold and Maude as an enduring favorite and enjoys Yusuf Islam’s songs appearing in films. He also remembers laughing particularly hard at his first viewing of There’s Something About Mary. The communications executive has room for the absurd.
Brown’s career keeps circling back to an encounter: a drive, a local event, a panel, a conversation with a colleague. The settings change the questions people can ask. His continuing assignment is to help make those settings useful. There is plenty of future to discuss. Someone still has to arrange the afternoon.