Condensing a Sea of Speech Bubbles into a Report on Energy Efficiency in CT

I can hardly believe that December is only a few days away! I’ve been thoroughly enjoying my work here at the Housing Development Fund. Half of the reason is because I get to speak with and engage with a variety of stakeholders on a daily basis and the other half is because my work is inherently meaningful to me. My focus is on energy efficiency in the residential sector in Connecticut. Through the months of August and October, I engaged with a community of over sixty stakeholders together with a small group of committee chairpersons from other organizations to produce a set of recommendations on residential energy efficiency. We then submitted these recommendations in the form of report to the state’s Energy Efficiency Board and Department of Energy and Environmental Protection (DEEP) as part of public comments for policy planning.

Ethnographic training from anthropology certainly came in handy during the first two months on the job, as I learned about the different stakeholders and organizations in the energy efficiency field. In some ways, I was also learning and adapting to working with others in a more general sense - being cognizant of their roles, interests and the multiple hats people have to wear. I am ever grateful for the examples of others including my organization's CEO Joan Carty for demonstrating sensitivity and tact in this respect. 

While the months leading up to the report involved a fair amount of administrative and detailed work (conference calls, transcriptions, summaries, reminder e-mails etc.), this foundational work provided a corpus of data from which the other chairs  and I could cull recurring stakeholder concerns and ideas for action. Ensuring that the minutes were clearly written, correctly labeled and accessible via the cloud helped make the report writing process much easier and more reflective of stakeholders’ views overall. What did I learn from this? Never look down on the small tasks that make the big tasks better.

In the Finance committee, we heard presentations from energy efficiency programs from seven other states on their financing programs. From this series of webinars, we collected a set of data about their program processes, loan terms and performance in terms of number of loans and delinquency rates. From this information, we did a comparative analyses of programs and uncovered some best practices that we could implement in Connecticut. One of these recommendations was to launch a pilot loan program with credit unions and community development financial institutions, I am excited to say that this is in the works! My organization, HDF, is currently in the midst of launching a loan program for low-income households in small multifamily units while the Clean Energy and Finance Investment Authority (CEFIA) is planning on launching another pilot with credit unions in January 2013. 

Since the publication of the Megacommunities Stakeholder Report, I’ve gotten the chance to represent this group of stakeholders at several meetings. On November 16, I presented the recommendations on a panel at Connecticut’s Green Economy Summit, an event organized by the Connecticut Working Families Party. Other members of the panel were representatives from the Governor’s Office and DEEP, who spoke about the state’s Comprehensive Energy Strategy (CES). More recently, I provided a brief summary of the recommendations at the Building Efficiency Technical Meeting to DEEP staff members as part of public comments for the CES and presented several questions together with Kerry, one of our Megacommunities chairpersons. I am grateful for these opportunities to represent my organization, as well as the stakeholders who participated in these discussions. 

Attending these events, as well as the monthly meetings of the Energy Efficiency Board, has enabled me to interact in person with many of the stakeholders who I had spoken with during the conference calls and webinars in the previous months. It was enjoyable to finally be able to put a face to the names and voices I had gotten to know. We’re in the process of launching two more committees (or working groups, as we call them) in the next few months. I’m looking forward to fostering more conversations!

Building Bridges

Yesterday, all Achievement Prep employees got an email from our principal that mentioned the fact that Monday, May 7th marks the start of the last 30 days of school.  This spring has FLOWN by.  I've kept a calendar on my desk all year and have been crossing off the days as they pass and now I only have two pages left.  Now that it's May, I'm in the second-to-last month of my PP55 Fellowship.  The time is drawing extremely near that I will no longer be a member of the most recent class of graduates of Princeton University.

 Despite my concerns about the passage of time, I'm really looking forward to this Saturday.  And no, not because it's Cinco de Mayo (or Trucko de Mayo, for that matter), but because it's Achievement Prep Academy Community Day, of course!

 Achievement Prep has been working really closely with the CityBridge Foundation (home of current PP55 Fellow Jon Extein as well as at least two former fellows) over the last couple of months to pull this event together.  The event is intended to help build new relationships with the Ward 8 / East of the River community and to express our gratitude for being welcomed into the neighborhood for the last four years.  Community Day is being held at a park near the school and will have a wide range of social service and health vendors, as well as free food, music, and fun activities for children.

Community Day is a large part of our drive to cultivate community partners, as well as to collect as many student applications for the 2012-2013 school year as possible.  Far too often, people will say to us, APA is such a great school, I can't believe I haven't heard of you earlier.  Unfortunately, we don't have a prominent location on a main thoroughfare like some of our competitors.  We are tucked into a residential neighborhood very close to the border with Prince George's County, so we are working as hard as we can to promote the school and the great work we do for the children of this community.  I personally have spent a good amount of time in the last two weeks driving around to different organizations that serve families in the area and dropping off marketing materials with them and trying to cultivate contacts who might be interested in developing a partnership with Achievement Prep.  It was pretty scary the first time I had to "cold-call" an organization and walk in unannounced, but sometimes actually walking into a building is the best way to get your foot in the door.

On a personal note, a friend from work and I joined a kickball team that plays on the National Mall on Sunday afternoons.  It's super fun.  I highly recommend our next round of DC fellows look into it.

Also, Carol and I made delicious black bean burgers last week.  You can find the recipe here:  http://dinnerisvegan.blogspot.com/2012/04/southwest-style-black-bean-burgers.html