Black-Owned Startup Changes The Game With ‘ChargerHelp!’ To Improve Air Quality In Her Community

Reducing air pollution is personal for this Black, woman-owned business founder.

When Kameale Terry lost her mother to lung cancer, she set out on an electrifying mission to improve air quality in her community.

Terry is driven to keep electric vehicles (EVs) on the road. EVs reduce air pollution and respiratory problems, according to a study by researchers at the Keck School of Medicine at the University of Southern California (USC). Terry founded ChargerHelp! with Evette Ellis to fix broken EV charging stations.

“Mass EV adoption is really important to me. My mom passed away from lung cancer just about a year and a half ago, and I live in a community where we have very poor air quality. Getting folks to trust infrastructure, to drive electric, sits near and dear to my heart,” said Terry, per CNBC.

ChargerHelp! is the “only national electric vehicle supply equipment (EVSE)-dedicated operations and maintenance provider,” according to its website. The company fills a big hole in the market to encourage mass EV adoption.

The co-founder said, per CNBC, “You need to be able to understand how the station is behaving in the field. You need to understand what issues may be happening in the car and the charging station.”

The University of California, Berkeley, and Cool the Earth surveyed the reliability of open public EV chargers. They discovered that over a quarter of the charging stations did not work. Some common causes were electrical issues, blank screens, connection issues, and system payment failures. ChargerHelp! can solve any EV charging station problem. “It honestly really doesn’t matter what’s wrong with your charging station. Whether it’s a communication issue, a hardware issue, or even a communication issue, our technicians are going to fix it,” Terry said in a video on the company’s website.

Unreasonable Group Ventures, an investor, noted that ChargerHelp! services 18 states and plans to support all 50 states by the end of the year.