And voila — instant one-day NESEA conference in the Big Apple.
Those of you who are NESEA members have probably already seen the announcement for BuildingEnergy NYC, a multifamily conference we’re hosting at CUNY – Hunter College on December 1, 2012. The conference will focus on the regulatory arena – the things that building owners and operators need to know to comply with increasingly stringent energy efficiency requirements, on technical know-how, with examples and case studies from hundreds of multifamily buildings that illustrate best practices and lessons learned, and on financing multifamily projects.
The line-up of speakers and topics for this event is really impressive — you can check it out at http://www.nesea.org/buildingenergy/benyc/.
The conference came together at warp speed. Less than five months from concept to implementation, and less than a week to plan the content. Here’s the back story . . . .
In May 2012, the board directed me to focus on launching an event in NYC to help expand NESEA’s reach into underserved parts of our territory, and to help fulfill the promise of our purported service territory – the 10 Northeastern states. NESEA board treasurer and well-known curmudgeon Andy Padian took up the charge and found us a location that we could use, free of charge, thanks to our friends at CUNY-Hunter’s Institute for Sustainable Cities.
On October 19th, Andy confirmed that CUNY-Hunter had space available on Saturday, December 1st, just six weeks away. Warp speed conference planning began!
On October 26th, Andy invited a group of multifamily building superstars from organizations like The Community Preservation Corporation, Steven Winter Associates, GreenHomeNYC, Jonathan Rose, NYSERDA, NYSAFAH, Enterprise Community Partners, Related Companies and elsewhere to a three-hour meeting to plan the conference. They left the meeting with a grid of nine almost fully-fleshed-out sessions. Within the next two weeks, speakers were confirmed, we set up a registration page, and . . . voila . . . instant conference.
Of course we all know that this isn’t really the way it happened. This seemingly “instant conference” didn’t happen instantly. What made it happen “instantly” was Andy Padian’s passion for NESEA, his expansive network of devoted GreenHomeNYC volunteers, and high-powered energy geeks in New York, and his strong powers of persuasion. Now only if we could find a way to clone Andy. . . .
Seriously, BE NYC is going to rock. If it’s as great as we think it will be, we’ll sell out all 300 seats, and NESEA members from other parts of our territory will be lining up to host the next one-day conference. I hope you’ll join us.
About Jennifer M.
