You are here: Home / Archives for strategic plan

Profound Gratitude: Remarks by Jennifer Marrapese, Executive Director at Annual Meeting, 9/15/12

September 17, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Welcome everybody to the 2012 annual meeting of the Northeast Sustainable Energy Association.

I am really excited that we’re here in Portland. There’s a vibrant green building and sustainable energy community here – a community that has built what they need in the form of the monthly Building Science Discussion Group, Maine Association of Building Energy Professionals, Passive House Maine, USGBC’s Maine Chapter, the Pretty Good House movement and many other formal and less formal organizations and collaborations.

The Portland area has traditionally not been as well served by NESEA as many other areas in our territory. And for as long as I’ve been at NESEA, we’ve been hoping to change that. So I was delighted when NESEA board member Phil Kaplan invited me to Portland and asked us to consider hosting our annual meeting here.

Since our first meeting with Phil and the Building Science Discussion Group in June, many of you Mainers have drunk the NESEA Kool Aid. Architect Rick Renner, a longtime NESEA member, is running for the NESEA board of directors. Sam Strickland is serving on a committee to help us create and launch online communities of practice so that geography ceases to be such a challenging barrier for NESEA members who want to learn and share year round. Steve Konstantino of Maine Green Building Supply has become a business member and opened his facility up last night for an annual meeting pre-game – a Building Science Discussion Group to welcome the whole NESEA community to town.

Profound gratitude. As I prepared my remarks for tonight, that was the mindset I started from. I feel profoundly grateful to this community and appreciative of all that we are accomplishing together.

Let me explain to whom I am grateful and why.

I am grateful to the more than 200 members who are really actively engaged with NESEA far above and beyond simply writing a check and receiving their monthly newsletter and their BuildingEnergy Magazine twice a year. It is surely unprecedented within NESEA that almost a third of our members are actively engaged in planning the conference, hosting sites in our Green Buildings Open House tour, submitting content for BuildingEnergy magazine, and serving on NESEA program and board committees.

I am grateful to Jamie Wolf for recently helping us to articulate something that we’ve known intuitively for a very long time:  that the BuildingEnergy Conference is NESEA’s crown jewel, or the center of NESEA’s universe, but that it occurs only for 3 days/year in Boston. Jamie shared with me his vision for BE365, which makes the BuildingEnergy experience available to NESEA members every day of the year through various events, gatherings, online learning and other forums throughout the year.

I am grateful to lifetime NESEA member Bernice Radle, who at the ripe old age of 26 is rallying a group of NESEA member preservationists to plan a kick-ass Green Buildings Open House tour in Buffalo on October 13th, and who is trying to bring the rest of the NESEA community into the digital age with her incredible promotional savvy using twitter, facebook, blogging and Pinterest.

I am grateful to Marc Rosenbaum, one of our NESEA rock stars, who has partnered with us, and who has spent more than 100 hours to develop and help us launch a 10-week online course for the BuildingEnergy Masters Series, and who recently shared with me, “I could develop and market a course like this on my own. Yet what appeals to me about this arrangement is that I get to advance my personal mission of expanding our collective capabilities, while creating an income stream, and also give back to this organization that has been such a key factor in my success. However, it’s a business partnership, not a charity -  NESEA has skin in the game just as I do.”

I am grateful to NESEA board member Kate Goldstein, who, although she is still a starving student, is digging deep for NESEA this year. Not only did she become a lifetime member – a great investment for somebody who’s still in her 20s – but she has also pledged a leadership gift in our annual fundraising appeal, because, in her words, “The diversity of NESEA’s membership is a gift for us who have not yet found our own path. NESEA is the shelter of our community.”

I am grateful to my staff – at least three of whom, despite being handed a salary freeze this year, have decided to invest some of their discretionary income into NESEA membership because they believe deeply in what we’re about here, and they consider themselves a part of this community.

I am grateful to Paul Eldrenkamp, who confided in me that one of the happiest days of his life was the day that he left his last NESEA board meeting in the mid-1990s. He went and sat in his car for a few minutes and let out a freedom cry that others may have heard even from inside the building. Paul shared that the board as a group (not its individual members) was so dysfunctional, and mired in the day to day operation of the organization, that he couldn’t wait to get out. Well, Paul is a testament to how things have changed for the better. This year, not only is he chairing the BuildingEnergy Conference, and bringing a ton of new talent into the organization through his vast network, but he’s also teaching a BuildingEnergy Masters Series class on Passive House online, and running for the NESEA board!

I am grateful to the 20 or so NESEA members – some long timers, some newbies – who are helping us experiment with and launch active online communities so that they can learn together how best to apply systems thinking in their practices and what are the elements of a generative economy. These communities will serve as a forum in which NESEA members can share with each other what’s working (and what’s not) in service of a more sustainable built environment. Based on what we learn from these communities of practice, we’ll launch others in the new year – including one on Deep Energy Retrofits, one on Zero Net Energy Buildings, and possibly even one on our topic tonight, the Pretty Good House.

These examples barely scratch the surface of all we’ve accomplished together over the past year. And all of this is happening in the worst building environment in 20 years.

In many ways, last year represented the “perfect storm.” Almost everything that could have gone wrong financially, did. NESEA’s membership numbers and Sustainable Green Pages listings continued their steady decline since the housing market crash in 2009. BuildingEnergy registration and exhibitor numbers declined, despite a whopping 97% of our attendees saying that they would recommend the conference to a colleague. We lost substantial donations from two longtime donors whose funding focus shifted and whose portfolios suffered at the hands of a lackluster economy.

We knew before the year even started that we were going to run a deficit in Fiscal Year 2012. We even budgeted for it. We invested heavily in staff, hiring a membership coordinator and a communications coordinator. We also invested in our infrastructure, launching a new website, supported by a new, more nimble database. We knew it would take time for these investments to pay off. Unfortunately, the deficit we ran was larger than anticipated.

NESEA’s reason for being is to advance the adoption of sustainable energy practices in the built environment. The rest of the industry is finally catching on as well.

Last year’s bottom line fails to tell the whole story. It doesn’t tell the story of the momentum we’re building, one practitioner at a time. It doesn’t tell the story of the quality of engagement within our membership, within the BuildingEnergy planning process, and at BE itself.

I truly believe that we’re planting the right seeds, and that if we continue to provide quality engagement experiences, the numbers will follow. I also know that we’ll continue to learn and adjust the plan as we go!

So I’m grateful. I’m invested in this organization and in this community, not just professionally, but also personally, as I complete my own deep energy retrofit and prepare to showcase my home on NESEA’s Green Building Open House tour, which will be held on October 13th throughout NESEA’s 10 states, from Maine all the way down to Delaware.

Now’s the time for you to invest as well. Invest in NESEA and in our future in a way that makes sense for you. If you’re not a member, join. If you are a member, consider donating or sponsoring above and beyond your membership contribution. Or give the gift of NESEA membership to a colleague to help grow our community.

If you’re a newcomer to our community, invest in your own professional development as you get to know us better. Enroll in one of our BuildingEnergy Masters Series courses and partake in  high quality interactive educational content from the comfort of your home or office. Learn about zero net energy homes from Marc Rosenbaum, the man who’s probably engineered more of them than anybody else in the Northeast. Learn about Passive House from Mike Duclos and Paul Eldrenkamp, a member of the inaugural group of Passive House certified consultants in the U.S. Then connect with others in your class to share what you’re learning and create a community of practice that can meet in person at next year’s BuildingEnergy Conference.

Attend the Building Energy Conference, exhibit there, sponsor. Even better, help shape our content by joining the planning committee for the BuildingEnergy Conference. Register your most recent project for our Green Buildings Open House tour 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 BuildingEnergy Magazine, our peer-reviewed journal by and for sustainable energy professionals in the Northeast.

Invest in the community that is building your knowledge base, your practice, your career, and a more sustainable built environment.

Before I close, I’d like to thank a few people without whom this meeting would not have happened. First, thank you to our committee of locals who advised us on all of the nuts and bolts decisions we needed to make – from the beautiful location we are in to the buildings we should include on the tours earlier today to the Pretty Good House speaking program tonight. Those committee members include Matt Holden, Steve Konstantino, Dan Kolbert, and Rick Renner, among many others.

Next, I’d like to thank our sponsors for tonight – Sparhawk Group, Maine Association of Building Energy Professionals, and Thorton Tomasetti Fore Solutions. And a special thanks to sponsors Kaplan Thompson Architects and Pinnacle Windows, who are hosting a party after tonight’s meeting at Grace, a beautifully restored church and restaurant with an awesome looking menu!

Huge thanks also to Phil Kaplan of Kaplan Thompson Architects for advocating in favor of holding the meeting here in Portland and for connecting us with all the folks here who could help make it happen.

And finally, thank you to Kelsey Hobson, our summer intern from the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center. Kelsey came in at the beginning of the summer and flat out handled all the logistics for this meeting, with almost no guidance. She herded a group of benevolent but busy cats to score us this great location, and planned all of the building tours. She did such a great job that we decided to hire her permanently – or at least as permanently as she’ll have us. This is one NESEA emerging professional with a very bright future.

And now, I’d like to welcome to the stage NESEA board chair, James Petersen. 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 with you an update on where the board would like to see NESEA head, and on what your role might be in helping to create our future success.

Filed Under: BuildingEnergy Conference & Trade Show, Communications, deep energy retrofit, Events, Green Building, Industry, NESEA, NESEA Members, Renewable Energy, Sustainable Building, Whole Systems Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Executive Director's Report — NESEA Annual Meeting, Sept. 24, 2011

September 26, 2011 By Leave a Comment

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!”

Filed Under: Emerging Professionals, Green Building, Industry, NESEA, NESEA Members Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

Housekeeping and Introductions

July 25, 2011 By Leave a Comment

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!

Filed Under: Communications, NESEA Tagged With: , , , , ,

Welcome to Travis and Rayna

July 15, 2011 By 2 Comments

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.

Filed Under: Communications, NESEA, Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , , ,

An invitation to NESEA Chapters and Members

November 30, 2010 By Leave a Comment

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

An invitation to NESEA Chapters

We are inviting you to work with us to build a new Chapter structure – a structure that puts NESEA’s mission, to advance the adoption of sustainable energy practices in the built environment – at the very center of our local activities, and that provides Chapters with the resources to help advance that mission.

We have outlined below what we think this new, ideal chapter structure will entail, and the NESEA board has given unanimous approval to move in this direction. We hope you’ll want to be a part of this process. If so, we’ll need to hear from you by no later than February 1, 2011.

After consideration, if, for whatever reason, you decide that you will not be participating in further defining and implementing this new chapter structure, we hope that you will still choose to be an Affiliate of NESEA. We have further defined the affiliate relationship below.

Background

For the past several months, a Chapter Advisory Committee, comprised of NESEA board members, representatives of NESEA’s staff, and Mitch Anthony, an outside strategy consultant, has been reviewing and considering the organization’s membership and Chapter system. This work is being done in the context of a new, integrated strategic plan that is focused on learning how the organization can better fulfill its mission, an how it can better serve its members.

One of our primary findings was that NESEA Chapter and Chapter membership policies are inconsistent. Over time, our Chapters have developed their own policies with respect to their membership, their branding, and their programming. Our Chapters are doing some really great work – but much of it is not done in the name of NESEA, in concert with NESEA, or in concert with other Chapters. We aim to address this inconsistency.

Help us build the ideal chapter

We would like to invite you to collaborate with us to build “the ideal chapter.” The NESEA Board has agreed to what the basics of the ideal chapter might look like, but we need your help fleshing out the details – how will it work in practice, what’s the best way to implement it, etc.

Based on the work we’ve done with the Chapter Advisory Committee so far, here’s what we think that ideal chapter might look like:

Look and Feel
• Consistent Branding – use of logo (NESEA Chapter Graphic) in literature, signage, tabling materials
• Consistent web presence
• Consistent naming protocol (ex. NESEA RI, NESEA Boston, NESEA NJ)
• Clarity that you are a chapter of NESEA (display prominently in literature and on website and/or in tag line)
• NESEA to provide: branding toolkit (including logos, PowerPoint template, suggested color palate); training in how to use it

Minimum Activity Level
• Minimum quarterly opportunity for in-person meeting. Regularly scheduled meetings to advance mission, recruit members. Meetings might include:
o Tours of high performance buildings or manufacturers’ plants
o Meet ups for networking
o Business “How To” (ex. how to green your portfolio, sustainable leadership
o Workshops (professional development, technical issues, “BE on the Road,” financing, incentives, rebates)
o Incentives/rebates/financing
o Info sessions on NESEA events. Ex. ZNEB, GBOH, JSS, BE
• Reciprocal communication: Chapter publicizes NESEA events and vice versa
• Host NESEA Award Night Annually – Celebrate member achievements!
o NESEA Members submit their best projects. One is selected per state or several per category per state – and they are honored at an awards night.
o This will help track our impact throughout the territory and it will provide good PR and networking opportunities.
• Participation in the GBOH tour
• Participation in BE
• Tabling on behalf of NESEA at local/regional conferences, fairs, expos, etc.
• Active in Chapter Caucus (participate in calls or in-person meetings at least 3X per year, share information)
• Mentor/Teach/Coach other chapters
• NESEA to provide: suggested topics and speakers for meetings, information on how chapters can get AIA or other professional development credits for their programming, content for NESEA program info sessions, support for local NESEA night

Reporting
• To help NESEA track our reach geographically (how many people are we reaching each month/year throughout the territory).
o Meeting report – (topic, speaker(s), attendees, attendee info, evals)
o Workshop Report – (topic, speaker(s), attendees, attendee info, evals)
o Annual Report
• NESEA to provide: Simple-to-use online template that chapter can populate to report speaker, topic, number of members attending

Mission and Strategic Focus
• Chapter mission must be the same as NESEA central’s, although there may be room for chapters to use different strategies to achieve that mission, so long as they are also willing to support NESEA’s strategies

Membership
• All chapter members must be NESEA members.

If you are interested in helping us to flesh out this new chapter structure, we invite you to be part of that process.

What’s the alternative?

If, for whatever reason, your Chapter does not notify NESEA by February 1, 2011 that you want to participate in building this new chapter structure, we would still like to maintain an affiliate relationship with your organization, and continue to work with each other to advance our respective missions. An affiliate relationship would entail the following:

• Logo exchange for use on website/social media/PR
• Live link exchange
• Share email lists (when appropriate)
• Help promote each other’s activities
• Calendar exchanges
• Membership in each other’s organizations (your organization would be a Business Level 1 member of NESEA, and NESEA would have an equivalent membership level within your organization.)

There will be no dues sharing with affiliates. Affiliates will maintain their own members, and NESEA will maintain its own members. (We have, however, created a tool kit for affiliate organizations to help them administer their own membership and notify their members of the change.)

Catch-up call

We want to provide more detail and hear your ideas and questions. We’ve scheduled a group conference call on Tuesday, November 30th at noon Eastern. The call-in details are:

Dial in: 866-675-4248
Passcode: 774-6051

Come prepared with your suggestions, questions and ideas.

NESEA is committed to serving its members. We are committed to serving their efforts, and your efforts, to advance the adoption of sustainable energy practices in the built environment. How can we help you to do this on a local level? We hope you’ll accept this invitation to help grow the organization to meet these goals.

Warm Regards,

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.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , ,

NESEA Retrofit Revisited?

August 23, 2010 By 1 Comment

We’re having lots of great conversations internally about the strategic role of 50 Miles Street to NESEA.

For the uninitiated, “50 Miles Street” is the address of the NESEA building. Unlike many nonprofit organizations of our size, NESEA actually owns its building. We have owned it since the mid-1990s, as a result of an agreement with the City of Greenfield, MA, which also led to NESEA creating the Greenfield Energy Park.

From what I gather, people have been talking about making the building a showcase for energy efficiency and renewables for as long as we’ve owned it! Several members have initiated studies and made proposals as to what we should do, and in the mid-1990’s, the board even entertained completing a capital campaign to raise funds for a retrofit of the “Northeast Sustainability Center” at NESEA.

Lately, a number of NESEA members have again taken up the torch! Last fall, Nancy Hazard arranged for a comprehensive energy efficiency audit of the building, and since then NESEA board member John (JJ) Jacobson has completed a more comprehensive review, including:
• Reviewing all the previous studies of the building
• Talking with the city planner’s office and local businesses about anticipated economic development in Greenfield
• Reviewing the financials, including our utility and building maintenance expenses, our rental income vs. market rates, and other related information.

JJ is planning to present his findings to the NESEA board later this fall. The next step will likely be to establish a NESEA work group, comprised of board members, NESEA members and staff, to develop (and hopefully ultimately implement!) a strategic plan for the building.

So what’s your feedback. What would a Northeast Sustainability Center mean to you?

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , ,

Quick Update from the Executive Director

July 28, 2010 By Leave a Comment

This will be my last communication for a week or two, as I’m headed off to vacation in Madison, Wisconsin with my family on Friday. But I wanted to fill you in on what the staff and I have been working on over the past few weeks.

The short story is that we’ve been operating at a fever pitch this summer, and finding opportunities to collaborate, both internally and with external partners, almost everywhere we look.

Here’s a snapshot of what’s underway:
• We have developed a media tool kit so that we can better equip our Green Buildings Open House organizers and hosts to promote the tour, being held on October 2nd;
• Our Education Department is working closely with the BuildingEnergy planning committee on our first Educators’ Summit, to be held at BE11;
• We are partnering with other organizations (Affordable Comfort, Green Roundtable/NEXUS, the BSA, and others) to spread the word about our programs and better serve our members;
• We are more clearly defining NESEA’s brand so you’ll begin to recognize us more readily. We’ve been working with Mitch Anthony and Susan Lapointe on our ads, website, and other promotional materials to create a cleaner, more consistent look and feel for the NESEA tribe.
• We’re looking closely at the relationship of NESEA members and chapters to NESEA central – trying to envision what it might look like if we were building it from scratch, and identifying ways to move toward that ideal state.
• And there’s more . . . much more!

I’m happy to share any of these developments with you if you’d like to contact me directly after August 8th. Until then, I’ll be “off the grid!” — Jennifer

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , ,

On winning . . . NESEA style

June 30, 2010 By Leave a Comment

My favorite blogger, Seth Godin, wrote yesterday about winning. He started with the toddler’s approach to winning – getting what you want, now. But he went on to describe more nuanced ways of defining a “win.,” asking instead, “What happens when you define a win as getting closer to someone who wants the same thing? Or when you define it as improvement over time? Or in creating trust?”

These three questions set the framework for what could have been a very difficult meeting yesterday.

NESEA staff had a visit from representatives of our New Hampshire Chapter, NHSEA, yesterday. Madeline McElaney, Program and Outreach Coordinator, and Christa Koehler, Vice President of the Board of Directors met with me and the rest of the NESEA staff for almost two hours. We all knew at the outset that this might be a challenging meeting. The New Hampshire Sustainable Energy Association (NHSEA) has for years been doing wonderful, compelling work (both education and advocacy) on behalf of residential consumers and business owners in New Hampshire who wish to learn more about sustainable energy. Their mission and their focus have been different than NESEA’s, as we have devoted most of our energy toward supporting professionals in sustainable energy in their networking and professional development. This difference in mission and in strategic direction has been a source of concern for NHSEA for several years – to the point that they are actively considering whether affiliation with NESEA still makes sense.

Madeline and Christa also shared with us several concerns about the current NESEA membership and chapter structure – some of them relating to the revenue chapters receive from NESEA for each new member, and others relating to the “contract” between NESEA and its chapters, and the lack of clarity about what is expected of the chapters and what they can expect in return.

These are pressing issues to NHSEA, and they want to see progress on them . . . now!

Clearly this wasn’t a meeting where either party could expect a “toddler win.” Everyone around the table understood that. Too many complex issues requiring the consent of too many stakeholders who weren’t even in the room. Yet I would absolutely classify this meeting as a “win” on the basis of the other three, more nuanced questions.

Getting closer to someone who wants the same thing: We shared information and experiences with respect to the Green Buildings Open House program and identified ways we could work together more effectively immediately on that program so that it reaches more consumers in New Hampshire. We also raised the possibility of working together on a pilot for the program to increase its visibility and its financial viability over time – a pilot that might serve as a model for other NESEA chapters.

Improvement over time: We committed to work together to address the concerns they raised with respect to membership, in the context of the NESEA Membership/Chapters Advisory Committee. This committee will be addressing each of the issues raised by NHSEA within the next six months or so – but will do so in the context of the “whole system” that is NESEA. Madeline will serve as a member of that committee, which will make final recommendations to the NESEA board with respect to membership structure and benefits, revenue share with chapters, what will be expected of chapters and what NESEA will provide in return.

Creating trust: This one’s probably pretty obvious. It spoke volumes to us that Madeline and a member of her board cared enough to visit us, to sit with us face-to-face, to tell us the hard truth, and to give us the opportunity to work together to resolve the issues.

So are we all ready to sing Kumbaya? Not quite yet. As I shared with Madeline and Christa, I can’t guarantee the outcome on some of the items most important to them – those relating to membership and revenue. These are decisions that the NESEA board will ultimately make. Nor can I guarantee that our missions will continue to align sufficiently that NHSEA will find value in affiliating with NESEA. What I can guarantee is this:

• NESEA will try to be as transparent as possible throughout this process;
• The door will remain open for better communication between the chapters;
• They will have a seat at the table as we reformulate the membership/chapter structure; and
• We will continue to try to find ways to support them, whether they decide to remain a chapter or not.

I hope it’s enough for now, and I look forward to working together to sort out the rest.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , ,

On silo busting, bridge building, and social media . . .

June 25, 2010 By 2 Comments

Wanted to bring you all up to speed on what’s happening with the NESEA strategic plan, and catch those of you up who might not even be aware that we have a strategic plan!

The board adopted a new strategic plan in May. The plan sets forth a number of priorities for the coming year. But rather than bore you with you a dry list of bullet points relating to communications and branding, strategic partnerships, membership and chapters, metrics, etc., I thought I’d bring you up to speed on a few of the things I’ve been working on in conjunction with the plan that excite me most.

First, we’re breaking down silos and building bridges. Such cliché language, such over-used expressions. What they mean in our case is that we’re looking at NESEA as a solar system, and BuildingEnergy is the sun. For many people, BE is NESEA and vice versa. So part of what we are doing is reevaluating all of our programs with respect to what works well with BE: great opportunities to network with and learn from a multidisciplinary group of professionals, a “whole systems” approach to energy efficiency and renewable energy, the opportunity to share the results of proven case studies . . . the list goes on. We’re trying to add a bit more of the BE vibe to our other programs, and bringing our other programs to BE, both figuratively and literally. For example, this year we’ll hold our first educators summit at BuildingEnergy. For years we’ve been offering excellent teacher training programs on energy efficiency and renewable energy, but we’ve not created opportunities for educators to network and learn from and with other NESEA professionals. This year, we’ll have educators attend sessions geared toward K-12 science curriculum, but will also invite them to take in a few of the traditional BuildingEnergy sessions. We’ve known for years that teachers involved in our K-12 training programs are often the strongest advocates for introducing energy efficiency and renewables into our schools. Let’s equip them with the tools and the passion to be evangelists for a larger audience of students and their families as well.

Second, on the sponsorship front: we looked at NESEA’s sponsorship packages and found ourselves really uninspired. We also did a lot of research into the sponsorship packages that other, like-minded organizations were offering and were similarly unimpressed. Then it struck us that we’d never really gone out asked our sponsors what they wanted from their partnership with NESEA. Duh! So one of the first things we’ve done is to schedule meetings with a few of our key sponsors to hear from them. We held our first meeting this week with BuildingEnergy sponsor Conservation Services Group. They gave us lots of ideas of really do-able things that would add value for them. And more than anything else, I think they were delighted just to be asked. Just this meeting set us apart from the other 100+ organizations and/or trade shows that seek money from them each year! A great opportunity to build the relationship and learn more about the needs of some of our key members in the process. We’ve got a few more of these meetings set with other sponsors over the next few months, which I’m hoping will be equally valuable.

Third, (and last for now), on the communications and branding front: We know we need to be doing a lot more with social media to keep our members in the loop and to attract potential newbies as well. This blog post is one of my first personal efforts in that regard . . . and I have to say it’s a bit terrifying to try to speak in my own voice, and to figure out what’s relevant to share. I’d love for this forum to be a dialogue . . . but then again, I don’t want anyone to disagree with me . . . ever. (Just kidding, of course – working with this highly engaged and opinionated group sometimes requires me to have a thick skin!) I’m going to do my best to keep you all updated, both here and through our enewsletter, but if a few weeks go by without you hearing from me, feel free to jiggle the handle. You can always reach me at jmarrapese@nesea.org. Thanks!

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , , ,