A few weeks ago we were lucky to receive a visit from a very special and unexpected guest, Reverend Jesse Jackson.  The Reverend had been in town for an unrelated event and had the good fortune to meet our Social Justice Advocate, Larry Bratton, who enthusiastically informed him of all of the work we do here at the Sustainability Institute.  Rev. Jackson was particularly interested in the job creation and low income housing assistance work that we do and Larry easily convinced him to come out to one of our job sites. 

The house that we were working on that day just so happened to be an Impact Project house, the home of Mrs. Eugenia Johnson.  Mrs. Johnson is in her early 80s and has been living in her home for over 20 years.  She is an active of her community, volunteering at the local church, helping to watch her neighbor’s children and keeping an eye on the daily activities on her street.  Mrs. Johnson had been busy running around and doing all of these things while living without any working HVAC system for the last two years.  Now, in some parts of the country that may not mean much, but in Charleston where our average July temperature is close to 90 degrees with over 88% humidity, that is quite a feat.  On top of improving Mrs. Johnsons health and safety by giving her a retrofit, we are also projecting a 63% efficiency improvement in her house, saving her over 30% in utility costs on an annual basis. 

Reverend Jackson was impressed by the amount of work we were doing to the house as well as the projected cost and efficiency savings.  He was also excited to see young, local professionals-in-training doing the work.  Our Energy Conservation Corps (ECC) program was on site performing the retrofit while receiving on the job training of construction skills, weatherization techniques and building science.  All members of the ECC are local residents between the ages of 18-25 who are looking to acquire professional skills through other means than college.  Many of the participants go on to find other forms of education and employment that will lead them to rewarding careers. 

This combination of local workers helping a local resident in need while bolstering the job market and improving Mrs. Johnson’s quality of life was exactly the type of partnership that Rev. Jackson was looking to see.  His positive words of encouragement went a long way with Mrs. Johnson and the ECC members and let them know they were on the right path.  We appreciate him taking his time to learn about our program and hope to work with him further in the future. 

Since the Impact Project wrapped up our public efforts to raise awareness about our goals and findings, we’ve been working on a variety of ways to reach out to our peers to share our results.  Next week we have our first chance share our story with our fellow building science professionals, at the Department of Energy’s Better Buildings Conference, Residential Energy Efficiency Solutions: From Innovation to Market Transformation.  The conference is an opportunity for Better Buildings programs from across the country to come together and share their stories and learn from each other’s successes.  While the Impact Project is not at Better Buildings program, one of our key goals is to support the work of our sister program, CharlestonWISE, which is a Better Buildings Program. 

We will be speaking on a panel entitled Using Data to Monitor Market Transformation where representatives from several programs across the country will share their experiences in making real time changes to their program based on data and feedback coming in.  In the Impact Project we specifically set out to do this through our Intentional Learning component.  Through Intentional Learning we diligently tracked every aspect of customer solicitation and selection, from gender of the applicants to effective messaging and outreach.  In doing this we were able to learn a great deal about the energy efficiency market in Charleston and better inform CharlestonWISE in how to best use their resources. 

The conference will be a great chance to share key lessons learned for targeting customers, like most applicants were women, 30% of applicants learned about us through grassroots sources like their neighborhood associations and many customers are older and not tuned into current marketing trends like Facebook and Twitter. 

It will also be a great chance to share lessons learned on doing comprehensive, community-wide energy retrofits, such as discovering that the majority of low income participants need a high level of work to be done to make their houses safe and efficient.  Because of this we’ve had to reorganize our retrofit funds so that we can truly improve the quality of their living environments, including replacing HVAC systems, installing drywall and making minor structural repairs that will help seal the building envelope. 

We are excited to share our many lessons learned and we are equally excited to learn from other programs across the country so that we can continue to improve our own work and leave a better blueprint for CharlestonWISE and all other efficiency programs that may follow us.  

When we started to test our selected Impact Project Houses, we wanted to re-create the natural order of the local labor market by putting all 200 jobs out to bid on a case-by-case basis.  Not all 200 at the same time mind you, but a few every week or every other week as the work load allowed.  Starting with 3 Energy Advocates in our network, we assumed that if everyone one could do 4-6 jobs per month; we would end up testing all the houses by May 31, 2012. 

It was a good assumption, but to paraphrase, “the best laid plans of mice and men often go awry”.  There were many complications with the process.  It was time consuming on our end to prepare and manage each bid, keep advocates on schedule and communicate with participants.  Advocates were scrambling to be in the office preparing bids and completing reports while servicing the jobs they already had and spending time in the field.  Several obviously stopped considering the size and needs of the houses and started bidding flat rates on each job, thinking it would speed up the process, but not considering that it could complicate things on the back end when they found the costs of the job to be outside their set price.    

By late November of last year, it was obvious that things had to change.  Besides the difficulty of managing the process on both ends, we had some feedback that the lack of constant jobs made it difficult for advocates to anticipate their needs down the road- they never knew how much work they would have each week. 

We took the time to evaluate the situation and determined that bulk contracts would be a more efficient method of distributing the work.   Our advocates agreed and in January we signed agreements with two companies to each get a set number of jobs for an agreed upon price and to have the payments distributed in thirds- one third up front, the other half way through the process and the final upon completion.  While this process is helping jobs get done faster and is moving much more smoothly, we are still disappointed in one aspect; none of the advocates are currently willing to hire additional employees or expand their practice as we had hoped.  We are keeping our fingers crossed that as they get more comfortable with the new process they will be more comfortable taking risks in their personnel levels and be willing to make more hires and expand the job market.   

During the course of the Impact Project we have primarily focused our outreach efforts on the local community here in Charleston – getting people involved as volunteer participants of a home energy assessment, and engaged in the exciting world of home energy efficiency.

 Now that we are well under way with the 200 energy assessments to be performed through the Impact Project (65 completed to date), we have information and experience to share and, thus, have decided to change our outreach efforts to focus on telling industry peers, green building professionals and other communities about our work. We are seeking opportunities to give presentations, participate in conferences, and nominate the Impact Project for awards to highlight and get the word out about our work and experience.

 A goal of the Sustainable Cities Institute with the Pilot Cities program was to grant projects that could catalyze a greater sustainability initiative on the community level, as well as produce lessons learned and resources to inform other communities’ sustainability efforts. By sharing our work and findings through the ‘conference circuit’ (as we say), we hope to jump start that sharing process, get regional players interested in what we are doing here in Charleston, as well as get some input as to what is going on in other places and learn from them concurrently. 

We’ve previously mentioned how important communication is in the Impact Project, and as we continue to work with our participants, we’ve come to realize just how big of a factor effective communication really is.  Our project has a lot of moving parts, communicating with residents, setting up workshops, scheduling assessments and retrofits and monitoring QA on all work being done.  Because of all of these aspects, it is more time consuming than we anticipated getting participants from beginning to end.  Without effective communication it is easy for these people to feel that they have been lost in the shuffle. 

But it goes both ways, as much as we are responsible for reaching out to our participants, they must also be responsible for moving themselves forward in the process by submitting household information, utility data and attending a workshop.  We have found that while some participants are eagerly awaiting their assessment and are ready to beat down our door to get it; most participants need multiple touches to prompt them to act.  Many people did not realize that they would need to take multiple steps and supply various pieces of information before any work can be done.  It has been a constant game of reminding people what they have and haven’t turned in and where they are in the process. 

It is unclear how much of a factor this commitment is in people’s decisions to continue on in the project.  We have had feedback from some that due to work and personal commitments, they just don’t have the time, and we have worked with them to make it as accessible as possible.  We also have over 15 people who have simply not responded to our calls for participation and will have to be dropped from the project. 

The lesson that this has taught us is to be sure that the participants understand that they will be asked to actively participate in this process, not simply sign up and sit back and wait.  Also be sure that ample time is built in for customer service.  This ranges from helping people set up an online account with their utility company, to explaining the process of the energy assessment and scheduling workshops.  While some hand holding will be necessary, in some ways it only enhances the project, we know our participants life stories at this point, can tell you who works which days and how many kids they have.  In the end it enriches the project and helps generate a better experience for all.   

Training our workforce to properly test and retrofit historic buildings for energy efficiency is one of the primary goals of the Impact Project, and last week we were able to take a major step in making it happen by holding our Energy Efficiency Improvements for Historic Structures in Warm and Humid Climates class. 

The class was attended by seven energy advocates and contractors who came from all across the region and was taught over a period of four days at our local technical college, Trident Tech.  Our students all came from a building science background and all have their BPI BA.  We had hoped to have more members of the Historic Preservation community attend, and had advertized to them, but had no luck this time. 

In order to effectively teach both preservation and building science, we used two instructors, each with experience teaching in their respective fields, with additional contributions from our own building science staff as needed.  This ended up being a great way to go, the students gained a lot from hearing first hand experiences that each had had dealing with the unique characteristics of historic buildings and how they had approached maintaining and updating them. 

While the classroom experience was valuable, all agreed that the best part of the class was the field study that was done on the last day.  We were able to access an empty, about-to-be-renovated, 10,000 square foot house, built in 1789.  It was full of great examples of what can be found in our local historic houses, a variety of rafter types, a crawl space with evidence of multiple types of early electrical and plumbing configurations, and a kitchen building that was joined to the main house with a mysterious foundation set up. 

We were also able to use our 1880’s office building to test out using multiple point blower doors.  Most advocates had never used multiple point blower doors, but many historic houses are so leaky that they will not be able to be pressurized using one fan, so this was an essential point to learn.  They did a great job with it and were able to quickly understand how to run the tests.    

Overall the class went well and we got feedback from the students that it was helpful and informative.  Of course, those of us who were involved in writing the curriculum could see minor flaws, typos and room for edits and improvements and we are looking forward to getting together next week to tweak things and make sure the class will be ready for another run some day.