I wanted to let you know about a partnership opportunity that has recently come our way.

Siemens has just approached us to explore whether we are interested in working with them to present Solar Exchange, a one-day conference intended primarily to educate practitioners about the latest happenings in the solar industry. Participants will include photovoltaic researchers, utility representatives, manufacturers, developers, OEMs, integrators and others. Siemens will take responsibility for identifying and paying for the venue, and underwriting the cost of attendance for all attendees so that it can be offered as a free event. They have asked NESEA to help with the planning and promotion of Solar Exchange – i.e., providing our content for the event. They are planning to host the event in May at Rutgers University.

Siemens has recently hosted other Solar Exchange events in Arizona (approximately 80 attendees), Los Angeles, and most recently in Raleigh, NC, where they partnered with another ASES affiliate, the North Carolina Sustainable Energy Association, which attracted 300 attendees. All were very well received, and I have learned from my counterparts in NC that Siemens was great to work with.

From my perspective, this opportunity is a no-brainer. Last year, the NESEA Board approved a strategic direction that contemplates offering more programming in the southern part of the NESEA territory — NY, NJ, PA and DE. We are hoping, over time, to develop some sort of “BE South” offering. This event could be a great first step. It could allow us to develop a stronger toe-hold in NJ, and to obtain up to 300 qualified leads for new members in the area with whom we might be able to engage, year round. The only cost to NESEA will be the staff time associated with helping to find content for the event and helping to promote it. And we intend to work closely with BuildingEnergy Renewables track chair Bill Stillinger to do so – borrowing heavily from the content and the presenters we are using in the Renewables track at BE12. Siemens has indicated they are open to using different learning formats – more interactive modes of learning than just a traditional panel of 3 with PowerPoints. They are interested in making the event a quality learning and networking event, not just a sales pitch for their own products.

I’ll be glad to keep you all updated on this collaboration as it progresses. Thanks!

Jennifer

I wanted to share with you all an email exchange that took place earlier this week that I believe goes to the heart of NESEA’s role as a membership organization.

Earlier this week we sent the following invitation out to all of our Green Buildings Open House hosts and prior years’ entrants to the NESEA Zero Net Energy Building Award:

“Greetings Green Buildings Open House hosts!

By participating, you will be helping others make the move to renewables. If you are interested, Please contact Energysage at: info@energysage.com or at 617.398.0045. They will follow up with a questionnaire and by phone or email.”

We received feedback from several recipients asking why we were promoting the services of a for-profit company, and whether it was appropriate for us to endorse the services of one provider over another. In the interest of transparency, I’d like to share my response — because I feel like this type of member promotion is exactly what we should be doing:

Dear _____,

As always, I welcome feedback from the NESEA community – what do you think?

Here are the remarks I delivered at the annual meeting on Saturday night, for those of you who weren’t able to join us. It was a great gathering!

“Welcome everybody to the 2011 annual meeting of the Northeast Sustainable Energy Association.

It feels really appropriate to me that this year’s annual meeting is happening here, in New York City. Clearly, New York is a hub for sustainable energy practice in the Northeast, and our New York City Chapter, GreenHome NYC is a shining example of that. GreenHomeNYC is one of our most active chapters, and in addition to hosting us for this annual meeting, they have a huge number of events on the docket this fall – including the blow out NEW New York Block Party Shai just described.

Any of you who read the September 2011 edition of Scientific American know that the future of our country – indeed our world – is urban. Projections say that nearly 70 percent of the global population will be urban by 2050. Cities face huge challenges, but they are also engines of the type of innovation that will be necessary for us to create a sustainable future.

Finally, as I’ll share with you later in my remarks, one of NESEA’s key initiatives for 2012 will involve “expanding the choir” – in other words, dramatically increasing the number of people we reach in order to serve our mission, which is to advance the adoption of sustainable energy solutions in the built environment. As an organization with deep roots in Red Sox territory, one of the most logical ways for us to do that is to expand our geographic reach into the southern part of our 10-state region, starting with New York City. And so tonight I am delighted to call myself a Yankees fan, and even more delighted to be here in NYC.

I want to spend a bit of time tonight telling you where we’ve been over the past year, and where we’re headed. But before I do that, a few “thank yous” are in order:

First, I would like to thank the Institute for Sustainable Cities for hosting us. We are delighted to have such a wonderful and centrally located place for our meeting, and are very grateful for your involvement. I would also like to thank Green Mountain Energy for their sponsorship of this event. Sponsorship for our annual meeting is a relatively new thing, and we greatly appreciate your support, as well as that of our other sponsors throughout the year.

Most of all, thank you to GreenHomeNYC – and in particular to Lifetime NESEA member Andy Padian, NESEA Board Member Steven Lenard, and GreenHome Executive Director Shai Lauros for the phenomenal job you have done putting together this amazing annual meeting on a shoestring budget, and a day’s worth of activities to make it worth any NESEA member’s while to travel here to the meeting. I have a small gift for each of you as a token of our appreciation.

Now, a quick review of the past year. At last year’s annual meeting I shared with you that we had just adopted a strategic plan. Just a year later, we have implemented almost all of what was in that plan. Here’s a brief snapshot of what’s happened within the past year.

We spent much of the past year focused on new partnerships. As many of you probably know, NESEA’s mission is to advance the adoption of sustainable energy solutions in the built environment. But nobody ever said that we needed to accomplish this mission alone. We have adopted a philosophy of “coopetition” – one of my favorite made-up words – under which we have actively sought out like-minded organizations, and in some cases competitors, to help us meet our goals. We identified several organizations that share parts of our mission, and that can help us spread the word to meet it more effectively.

For example, within the past few months we have struck a deal with the Boston Society of Architects to deliver a track of seminars at their Build Boston conference in November. It’s a great opportunity for us to get the good work of the NESEA community in front of a broader audience, and for that audience, which is clamoring for more information on sustainability, to sample some very high quality sessions.

We also collaborated with the German Consulate and the Upper Austria Trade Commission to bring BE conference attendees cutting-edge products and information from Europe. We hope to expand this relationship and to invite other countries to participate in BE, to make it an international hub for networking and learning about best practices in sustainable energy in the Northeast.

Closely related to these types of partnerships, we also spent time last year shoring up relationships with longtime NESEA supporters and sponsors, and cultivating new ones. We attracted support from 14 new sponsors in 2011. Although we continue to operate in an extremely challenging economic environment, we are optimistic that we will be able to work closely with these organizations to provide them with the value they need to justify deepening their support of (and involvement with) NESEA.

We also spent a lot of time last year figuring out how chapters could best help us meet our mission, and what we could offer them in return. We invited NESEA chapters to work with us to develop a new chapter structure, and seven agreed to do so. We will be working with these chapters in the coming year to provide clearer, more consistent branding and programming that advances our mutual missions.

BuildingEnergy11 received rave reviews. We tried a lot of new things, including a full day educators’ summit, which attracted 100 people, and a second plenary session, the Women of Green, which was one of the high points of the conference. We held our own with respect to attendance in an economic climate in which other conferences were hemorrhaging – attracting nearly 4,000 professionals and 150 exhibitors to the conference.

Our Green Buildings Open House program held its own as well, attracting nearly 500 host sites and 12,000 visitors to learn about sustainable energy solutions in a variety of residential and commercial buildings, both new and retrofitted. Just last week, I heard an incredibly inspiring story from one of our hosts, Max Horn, who lives in Hull, MA. Max attended the tour for several years, and was finally inspired to build his own high performance home a few years ago. And now it’s his mission to educate others to do the same, with all that he’s learned from the NESEA community. Talk about a program with real world impact!

So what’s next for NESEA? I alluded to it before.

For more than 30 years the Northeast Sustainable Energy Association (NESEA) has been a membership organization that has appealed to a relatively small audience of professionals and consumers interested in promoting renewable energy and energy efficiency through varying means – advocacy, consumer education, professional development, and networking chief among them.

Over time, as the sustainable energy field has become more saturated, we have narrowed our mission and our focus. Our mission is to advance the adoption of sustainable energy practices in the built environment, and we meet it primarily by connecting professionals to each other, to ideas and to consumers.

With only 1,000 members, and 4,000 BuildingEnergy Conference attendees each year, we have been preaching to a small choir, given the huge need for sustainable energy solutions in the Northeastern United States.

It’s time to expand the choir dramatically. We need to expand geographically, by doing a better job of serving our community outside of New England. We need to expand from a generational perspective, making sure we’re welcoming the next generation of practitioners into the fold, and learning from them. And, perhaps most importantly, we need to expand to reach audiences who may not yet “get” that sustainability is a business imperative.

How will we do that?

First, through an increased focus on our current members and our potential members. We’ve been surveying our community to see what’s important to them in a membership organization. And frankly, there aren’t a lot of surprises in their answers. Turns out that what they value in NESEA is real, vetted solutions, access to multidisciplinary professionals, and chances to interact and share with one another in person. So we’ll be working to create more such opportunities, largely by providing better support to our chapters. Within the next year, we’ll work with our most active chapters to develop and promote at least 6 local programs that help them serve NESEA members at the local level. The first of these is already scheduled for Nov. 10th in Southborough MA, and will be hosted by NESEA business member Mitsubishi. It will be NESEA’s first ever joint chapter networking meeting, and will feature an information session on “getting to zero” and on NESEA’s Zero Net Energy Building Award. We hope to draw members from Springfield and Boston, MA, the Cape, Rhode Island and New Hampshire.

We will also be working to create an infrastructure for collaboration. One of the primary tools for this will be the NESEA website. Yes, we’ve heard your feedback over the years, and we know it sucks. I am happy to report that I’ve just been given the board’s blessing to replace it with a cleaner, easier-to-use website that will better help you, as members of our community, find each other, show your good work, and find the resources you need to do more sustainable energy work better.

Finally, we’ll be working this year to expand BE beyond three days per year in Boston. For starters, we are testing a BE Masters Series of online courses, taught by BuildingEnergy presenters, to take fuller advantage of the wonderful content generated at BE year round and to allow those who might be geographically challenged to participate. We also plan to create a speakers bureau of BE presenters who are willing to deliver their seminars in various locations throughout NESEA territory, in conjunction with chapter meetings or other events. Ultimately – and this may be part of the multi-year plan – we hope to create a year-round on-line BE community, moderated by BE planning committee members to encourage continuous learning and connection – and possibly a BE South Conference, to be held somewhere in the NYC area.

As you can see, we have some very ambitious plans. But at its root, NESEA is a member-driven community. All of this must happen for the members, and be driven largely by the members. So if any of what you have heard resonates with you, I invite you to get involved. If you’re not already a member, join NESEA. If you are a member, attend the Building Energy Conference, exhibit there, sponsor. Even better, help shape our content by joining the planning committee for the BuildingEnergy Conference or the BE Masters Series. Register your most recent project for our Green Buildings Open House tour each year in October. Enter your best work in NESEA’s Zero Net Energy Building Award to compete for our annual $10,000 prize. Submit an article for publication in our Northeast Sun magazine. Make this organization a true reflection of the excellent work you are doing to advance sustainable energy practices in the built environment.

I hope you’ve gotten a good feel for where we’ve been over the past year, and for where we’re headed. In a few minutes I’m going to call NESEA board chair, James Petersen to the stage. James has been a huge champion of our work to “expand the choir,” and has supported these efforts personally by being a NESEA evangelist within his own professional network. James will share his thoughts with you on how to get involved with NESEA, and why it’s imperative that you do so.

But before I call James to the stage, I’d like to close with a short video, in which some of our members themselves make a compelling case for why membership matters. This video was shot and produced for us, pro bono, at BE11 by Roger Sorkin, of Sorkin Productions, to whom we are incredibly grateful.

Thank you again for your time!”

We’ve been doing some belated spring cleaning at NESEA, to prepare for bringing new staff on board, and to reconfigure the office so that those of us who need quiet can have it, and those of us who work together most often can be in close proximity to each other. One of the things we have done is to donate the NESEA library to the Energy Efficiency/Renewable Energy program at Greenfield Community College.

As a book lover, it was hard to part with these treasures. But it was a good lesson in letting go to make space for something new. We’ve created beautiful new work space. And the truth is, by housing the books at GCC, we’ve made them more publicly accessible than they were here at NESEA. They can serve our community, and the community at large, better at a public institution than here in our building, which doesn’t really host regular meetings or gatherings. We’re grateful to our friends at GCC, and to Christine Copeland, in particular, for arranging to house our collection.

On another note – you’ve probably gathered by now that one of our priorities for the coming year is to find new and better ways to engage NESEA members and to provide them with valuable tools to grow their business using social media. As one step in that process, I’d like to introduce you to Roger Sorkin, of Sorkin Productions. Roger is a really talented video producer and, as a sponsor of BuildingEnergy11, he captured wonderful footage of longtime and new NESEA members talking about what NESEA means to them, and the value of the BuildingEnergy Conference. We’ll be working with Roger within the next few months to turn that footage into one or more promotional videos that NESEA can use on its site, on YouTube, and elsewhere to tell our story.

So, as you might imagine, Roger is very savvy at using video online to help organizations tell their stories. He also has a passion for the work that NESEA and its members do. Filming at BE was a real opportunity for him to “drink the Kool Aid,” and he’s hooked. We’re now referring to him as our first ever “sponsoring member” (which may soon appear as a new membership category for NESEA, who knows?). In fact, he’s in the process of completing a deep energy retrofit on his own home, and is just starting a project to document the US Military’s response to climate change.

Roger has offered to serve as a resource to NESEA members – to share his insights on how they might use video to effectively tell their stories and grow their businesses, and to share with the community, using video, his experience with the deep energy retrofit process so that NESEA’s practitioners might learn how to make the process easier from the perspective of one of their customers. Check back for his posts and enjoy!

Things have been quiet on the NESEA blog lately. That’s not an indication that we haven’t been busy (yes, mom, I know that’s a double negative!) To the contrary, I have felt so swamped that it’s been hard to catch my breath and update the community. I’m going to try my best to do so with a series of short blog posts over the next few weeks about what the staff and I have been up to.

At the top of my list is to introduce you to two new members of our staff, Rayna Heldt, our membership services coordinator, and Travis Niles, our communications and development coordinator. We have brought them both on board as part of our 2011 strategic plan to help us increase NESEA’s reach into new communities and to help us serve our current membership better.

Rayna has (officially) joined NESEA staff after working for us on an informal basis for about a year. After volunteering at BE10, she arrived at NESEA central to assist planning the 2010 Junior Solar Sprint. Since then, she helped edit last years’ Sustainable Green Pages, and was also BE11′s Registration Coordinator. She has an MSc in Anthropology and Development, a Certificate in Baking Arts, and a BA in Liberal Arts with a concentration in anthropology, poetry and philosophy. She currently lives in Charlemont, MA where she keeps a tremendously over-ambitious vegetable garden and spends most of her free time cooking and listening to public lecture podcasts. She is interested in the connection between people, culture and the environment, and at NESEA, sees the relationship between people and their built environment as a key to securing environmental and economic sustainability. She is thrilled to be the point of contact for membership and will be reaching out to the membership soon for any and all feedback you are willing to share! You can reach Rayna at rheldt@nesea.org or at 413.774.6051, ext. 20.

Travis comes to us from the ACT Volunteer Center. A native of upstate New York, he received his BA in History from Wells College in 2009 and came to Massachusetts to serve as an AmeriCorps VISTA member. He discovered a passion for outreach and networking while directing the volunteer center’s operations and promotional campaigns. Always desiring to be on the cutting edge, he worked to bring ACT and its non-profit partners up to speed by using web tools, social networking platforms and the booming mobile market to supplement under-performing traditional marketing efforts. He firmly believes in applying these same principles for us to “build energy” for all of NESEA’s programs. When he’s not singing with the Pioneer Valley Symphony Choir or searching for the next great local wine, you can find him on our Facebook page or on Twitter @NESEA_org. You can also reach him using more conventional media, at tniles@nesea.org or at 413.774.6051, ext. 21!

You can expect to hear a lot from Travis and Rayna within the next few week, as they start to survey NESEA members and potential members about how we can help you advance the adoption of sustainable energy practices in the built environment. Please join the conversation and provide them with your candid feedback so that we can build an organization that serves your networking and professional development needs.

Earlier this month, in consultation with NESEA’s Board of Directors, I decided to eliminate NESEA’s K-12 education programs. Although this was a difficult decision, I am confident that it will ultimately make NESEA stronger.

So what does this mean? This will be the last year that NESEA will host the Northeast Regional Championship of the Junior Solar Sprint, which will take place on June 12th in Springfield. We hope you’ll join us for our last hurrah, and make this year’s event our best ever. In addition, Arianna Grindrod and Susan Reyes will be working to deliver the last of our Wind Wisdom and Solar Sense educator workshops, and to report back to our key funders and supporters by June 30, 2011, the end of our fiscal year.

Background and Rationale for the Decision

As many of you know, NESEA’s mission is to advance the adoption of sustainable energy practices in the built environment. We do this by connecting professionals to each other, to ideas, and to consumers.

For many years there has been confusion about exactly how NESEA’s K-12 programs fit within this mission. Certainly, through these energy efficiency and renewable energy programs we educate professionals – teachers – and connect them to each other and to new ideas. Yet, despite our best efforts, we have never effectively integrated these programs, or their attendees, into the rest of what NESEA does. We have never been very successful in getting educators to join NESEA or in persuading educators and the rest of our community of practitioners – architects, builders, engineers, contractors, policymakers, investors, and others – to network with each other, to share ideas and information, in order to advance sustainability in the built environment.

In addition, over the past year, although we have diligently sought continued funding for our K-12 education programs, we have been unsuccessful in securing it. We have been able to secure funding for only one of our three programs – the Junior Solar Sprint – and that funding has been reduced dramatically over the past year due to a restructuring of the grant. So the bottom line is that with our current funding streams, we would be forced to operate these programs at a significant loss.

Finally, much of the type of work our K-12 department does is also being done elsewhere (although perhaps not as capably as our wonderful staff does it). Most of the states within NESEA’s territory have followed our early lead in the teacher training arena, and have launched statewide energy efficiency education programs. So we believe that, increasingly, this landscape will be adequately covered.

None of this is to say that our K-12 programs are anything but excellent. Classroom teachers and non-formal educators have long given our curricular units and our educator workshops rave reviews, and have shared with us how they have incorporated what they have learned into their own lesson plans. We can be proud of the curricula we have developed, and of the excellent manner in which our staff and partners have delivered it over the years.

We would like to extend our heartfelt thanks to Education Director, Arianna Grindrod and Science Educator, Susan Reyes, for their dedication and hard work. You have done a wonderful job over the past several years raising NESEA’s profile within the K-12 community. We will miss you, and hope to have the opportunity to collaborate with you again.

p.s. – For those of you who are interested in joining us, we will be planning a special send-off for Arianna and Susan in mid-to-late June. We’ll keep you posted so that you can help us celebrate their accomplishments at NESEA, and wish them well on the next leg of their journey.

Dear BE11 attendees and NESEA community,

Re-entry after BuildingEnergy is always hard, and this year was no exception. The energy level at this gathering is so high! It was especially bittersweet to leave the Seaport last week knowing that I may have to wait an entire year to get my “hit” of the passion, the energy, the community that is BE. BE left me wanting more.

That leads to big questions, and I’d like to ask for your input. How do we bottle this stuff? How do we transform BuildingEnergy from a 3-day event each year into an experience that infuses us with ideas, connection and passion throughout the year? And what are the things we would bottle if we could?

Here just two of the many things on my list:

I’d like to find a way to bottle the feeling I had after the “Women of Green” second plenary session, which ended with a spontaneous standing ovation. In my mind, this pecha kucha session was one of the best at BE, and probably one of the best learning sessions I have ever been a part of — largely because of our 8 panelists’ willingness to share very personal stories in the interest of our collective of our learning. Some of the highest praise for the event came from some of our most technically focused members — mostly men. I think that all who attended appreciated the huge contrast between this session and the other, much more cerebral offerings at the conference. And the buzz continued, after the conference, with commitments via email from the panelists to stay in touch, to serve as resources to one another, and to find another opportunity to rekindle the connections that were born at BE. So how do we do this? What is the best way to maintain this energy throughout the year? How do we continue to involve this incredibly accomplished group of sustainable energy professionals, and widen the circle to include more?

I’d like to bottle the sentiments some of our most active NESEA members used to describe NESEA as they were being filmed by our sponsor, Roger Sorkin, for our soon-to-be released promotional video. Their comments about what NESEA is and why it matters left me with chills. We couldn’t have chosen more appropriate words had we hand-picked them — words like “community,” “family,” “mind-expanding,” “caring,” “interconnectedness.” So these words describe human needs — human needs that can’t possibly be fulfilled through just 3 days each year. What should we be doing to foster this community, this mind expansion, this connectedness?

I wonder if any of the rest of you are feeling similarly? What moments of BE magic did you experience last week? Do you have a desire to replicate them at other times throughout the year? Most importantly, do you have ideas on how to do so?

How can NESEA use the energy of BE to connect us to each other and to ideas throughout the whole year? Comment here, or if you’re more comfortable email me directly at jmarrapese@nesea.org.

Jennifer

Things have that crazy, breathless feeling as we close in on BuildingEnergy, with only 4 weeks to go until showtime. But I wanted to share with you a spontaneous outpouring of generosity that occurred within the NESEA community within the past week.

A group of NESEA emerging professionals, led by Ryan Lacey, LEED AP, of Petersen Engineering, and Bernice Radle, of Buffalo Energy, were working hard to make the NESEA student design competition, which culminates at BE11, a success. Part of their work entailed securing sponsorships and/or donations for prizes for the winners – something they had hoped to be able to offer, but that wasn’t in the budget. The put out a call for help on Basecamp, NESEA’s project planning forum.

What followed was a stunning online fund drive that would make even National Public Radio affiliates green with envy. During the course of the next 3-4 hours, individual NESEA members pledged anywhere from $50 to $250.01, and in no time, they had raised the $2000 they sought. But more importantly, they established their credibility within the NESEA community such that these donors really felt it a privilege to help them.

Kudos to these young leaders. They’re already doing great things, and with their engagement, our future looks bright indeed!

Last week we announced a new chapter structure for NESEA, and invited current NESEA chapters to work with us to iron out the particulars. This chapter restructuring is truly taking on a life of its own. I can hardly believe how much has happened since then – all good stuff, all worth sharing!

• Yesterday, we received our first, formal written response from a current NESEA chapter. The Board of GreenHome NYC indicated that they are interested in working with us to further design the ideal NESEA chapter. Per Andy Padian, who serves on their board, “Of course, New Yorkers always want to scream out “we’re #1” and this week, we can claim being the first (we think) existing Chapter to stay in the fold. Do we win anything?” We’ll have to see if we can come up with a suitable prize for those Yankees fans, but in the meantime, my undying gratitude to them for stepping up to the plate will have to suffice. We also have inklings from a few other current NESEA chapters that they’d like to work with us to design the ideal chapter and opt into the new structure – although no more formal commitments yet.
• We have received almost universally favorable comments about the proposal – even from those who are not sure they want to opt in. Some chapters have indicated that they are interested in having NESEA provide some sort of chapter programming each year – say a workshop or seminar – and that they would gladly trade some of their chapter dues share for such programming. We have learned that some of our chapters are reinvesting some of the dues share money they receive from NESEA in “the mother ship” – purchasing NESEA memberships in lieu of an honorarium for their guest speakers. And we have learned that we may need to do a better job of articulating the “WIIFM” (“What’s in it for me?”) to the chapters. If we are asking them to make changes that take more time and cost more money, they’ll need to know what these additional costs buy them in return.
• The proposal also has sparked comments from NESEA members who are not currently involved with a chapter have also shared ideas with respect to how to increase the value of NESEA membership, how to more readily connect NESEA members to each other directly – through pot lucks, house parties, and an online, member-to-member directory.
• Late last week, we received an inquiry from a professional in the Poughkeepsie, NY area who is interested in starting a new NESEA chapter. We filled him in on the chapter redesign process, and he’s very excited about participating in this process from the ground floor.
• I have been asked to share We have been asked to share this open and collaborative process, and our results so far, at the annual conference of our parent organization, the American Solar Energy Society (ASES), in May. Evidently, others in sustainable energy are interested in learning about how we are engaging the NESEA community with respect to these issues, and we are delighted to share what we’re learning!

So what’s next? In January and February we plan to start meeting with those chapters who have expressed interest in fleshing out the new chapter structure to get their perspective on exactly what the new structure should look like, and how and when to roll it out to best serve them. We will also likely create some sort of forum at BuildingEnergy11 so that chapters, NESEA members, and the sustainable energy community at large can weigh in with their ideas. Once we’ve gathered feedback from all the stakeholders, we will present a clearer proposal and roadmap to the NESEA Membership and Chapters Advisory Committee, and ultimately to the NESEA Board for their consideration at the May Board meeting.

As excited as I am to move ahead with all this, I recognize these are big changes we’re making, and big changes take time. And, of course, these changes are occurring in the context of a whole system, a system in which we face competing priorities every day. We’ve opened the spigot, and the ideas with respect to chapters and membership are flowing much faster than we can process them all, especially as we are trying to deal with a server that crashed earlier this week, and with making BuildingEnergy11 our best conference ever. Nonetheless, I’m looking forward to sharing our progress, and hearing your thoughts

I just finished a call with the NESEA Chapter Caucus to update them on some changes to our chapter structure that the NESEA Board recently approved, unanimously, and inviting them to participate in a collaborative process to build a new chapter structure over the next six months. I was delighted with the level of engagement and cooperation on the call. Those who participated seemed, universally, to understand this new strategic direction and the rationale underlying it.

In the spirit of openness and collaboration, I wanted to share the same information with you, the NESEA membership.

Here’s the text of the letter I circulated for the call:

November 29, 2010

Jennifer Marrapese
Executive Director

I would love your involvement in the process as well. Please let me know how chapters can best serve you. How do you think NESEA chapters can best advance the adoption of sustainable energy practices in the built environment? What programming should they be offering? What types of networking opportunities? Email or call me with your ideas: jmarrapese@nesea.org or 413.774.6051, ext. 23.