Networking Nights are Back!

It's time to connect. Join your fellow Green Building professionals and enthusiasts for an informal evening of networking on June 18th. Don't miss this chance to re-launch our energizing series of monthly gatherings designed to bring you together with others who are as passionate about sustainability as you are.

Chapter Silver Partner Knoll has generously agreed to sponsor our networking sessions and host us at their showroom space in the Innovation District of Boston. This month, Andrea Coan will speak briefly at 6:00 to give us highlights of the LEED Platinum space. Appetizers and drinks will be provided.

The Knoll Offices and Showroom at 281 Summer Street, Boston, MA was awarded LEED Platinum certification in 2012

Doors open at 5:30 and stay open until 7:00. This is an informal gathering so please come and go as you please. No worries if you are late or have to leave early.

Register now through the Chapter web site. We look forward to seeing you there!

Celebrating Earth Day and Innovation in Green Design

Stunning! Fabulous! Classy!

We held a very impressive Earth Day celebration on the night of Wednesday April 10th. Over 120 guests attended from a wide swath of the green building industry. We had six table sponsors: Vidaris, NStar, The Green Engineer, Robinson & Cole, Bergmeyer and National Grid.

The program started with a bit of networking. One of the great things about the USGBC is it connects people from all parts of the real estate industry - from architects & engineers to facility managers and product manufacturers. Energy modelers, sustainability consultants, even lawyers! It's always a great mix and you never know who you might run in to!

Special thanks to Rachel Zsembery and the Special Events Committee for putting it all together. Much applause to Rachel (below, with Carlos Alonso-Neimeyer) and the entire Committee! GE sponsored our table settings: a mix between spring flowers and LED lightbulbs (guests could take home!) More photos are available through our media sponsor, New England Real Estate Journal NEREJ's facebook page.

We were very thankful to our venue sponsor, the Chiofaro Companies, for letting us hold the event on the main floor of Two International Place in downtown Boston. We heard from Don Chiofaro, Jr., as the owner, and from Bob Andrews, of AHA Consulting Engineers, one of our Chapter Sponsoring Partners, who discussed how the building had recently achieved LEED EB O&M Silver - a real achievement for a building that was designed and constructed in the go-go 80's.

A few of the members of the Chapter spoke, including myself, to give an overview of where we are as an organization.  People were in a good mood. I got the crowd to shout out "GREEN BUILDINGS!" whenever they heard something good from the stage. 

I'm happy to report we did indeed attain the goal of our membership drive: to bring in 100 new members by Earth Day. We have 108 new since the beginning of the year. GREEN BUILDINGS!

I also announced that we have hired a new staffer: Stephen Muzzy will start on May 6th as our Green Schools Program Manager, to faciliate green building project creation and completion at campuses across Massachusetts. GREEN BUILDINGS!

Dinner was a really good time - here we have the Green Engineer table (above) and the NStar table (below). Though many people found themselves not at the tables they were assigned to! 

Later, during the dessert, we convened the Awards Committee to present our Massachusetts Green Building of the Year award and our Innovation in Green Design awards. National Grid served as the Award Sponsor with Mark Stafford presiding. The awards were organized by Paul Brown, Carrie Havey, and Chris Liston (not pictured below). The judges were: Holly Wasilowski Samuelson of Harvard GSD, Mark Webster of SGH and Susan Buchanan of VFA. Jess Halvorson of Bank of America served as an alternate.

And the winners included: Homeowners Rehab, Inc. for the Massachusetts Green Building of the Year: their 95-97 Pine Street, Cambridge, LEED Platinum project. The judges saw this as an important model for other affordable housing projects.

Bergmeyer Associates also won for an Innovation in Green Design Award in the Building Category for their work on the Hosteling International Building on Stuart St. in Boston.

Other winners inlcuded:



Special Recognition:

Sherman Fairchild Laboratory Renovation for Stem Cell and Regenerative Biology, Harvard University

Submitted by Payette. Notes: This project is an example of stellar energy performance in a lab.



Special Recognition:

One Boston Place

Submitted by CBRE.  Notes: The judges praised this project for its enthusiastic spirit of the approach to recertification under EB O&M.



Award Winning Entries – Innovation in Green Design

Winner - Product, System or Technology Category

Shady Hill School in Cambridge, MA

Submitted by Richard Burck Associates, Inc. Notes: This project skillfully handled water absorption and discharge to the aquifer.

It was a fun evening full of GREEN BUILDINGS!

-Grey Lee

Let's Rock the Northeast Regional Summit

Is it the greatest show on earth? Or maybe for the earth? Well, you won't know if you don't go. But the Upper Northeast Regional (UNRC) Summit is only once a year--this time on April 18th and 19th. So if you're ready to rock Rhode Island with your fellow USGBC Chapter members from that state and CT, MA, ME, NH, NY (Upstate), and VT, mark your calendars now.

The UNRC summit is kinda like Coachella, but with not quite so much music and a whole lot more green building/organizing help/learning from each other. A large crew from Massachusetts will be there, so don't miss out. Jim Newman, UNRC Regional Rep, is the info man if you want more deets.

What’s the program like? Glad you asked. You can read about it in-depth here, or see below for the set list:

One State, Three Awards, Many Amazing Projects

Time flies when you're building green. The USGBC Massachusetts Chapter launched its Innovation in Green Design Award program back in 2008 with the aim of publicly celebrating the most innovative green buildings and products in the Commonwealth. Hard to believe but the Sixth Annual awards program is already upon us. That means it's once again time to recognize those projects that have been innovative, yet have also blazed a trail others may follow. Another key aspect of the awards is to promote the triple bottom line, so we'll be looking for projects that make a positive impact environmentally, economically, and socially.

Plus, in addition to continuing to give out awards for Innovative Building or System and Innovative Product or Technology, we're very proud to present a NEW category: Massachusetts Green Building of the Year Award! If you have a great green project you want to tell the world about, please enter to win by this Friday, March 29, at 5 p.m. All Innovation in Green Design submissions should be dropped off or mailed to the USGBC MA Offices (Attn: Grey Lee at Space with a Soul - 281 Summer Street, 5th Floor, Boston MA 02210). Whether you enter the contest or not, join us to celebrate all of the state's green builders at our fabulous Earth Day event on Wednesday, April 10, from 5:30 to 8:30 p.m. at 2 International Place, Boston, MA 02110. We'll have the awards ceremony, not to mention live music, delicious food and drink, and the opportunity to connect with your green building colleagues. See below for more photos of last year's ceremony.

 

 

Annual Meeting of Fun

What a great Annual Meeting on Monday night! Thanks again to Rachel Zsembery, Dee Spiro, Katya Carman and Carlos Alonso-Niemeyer for putting together such a fabulous evening! Thanks to everyone who came early and stayed late to help make it all happen. Thank you to Andrea Love and Payette Associates for providing their Practice Room as a great hall to gather in.

[above: Kathy Arthur-Tyler of our Green Schools Committee (also of NStar, one of our sponsors!]

Thanks indeed to this wonderful community we have where even with snow and sleet and rain (all at the same time) (and rush-hour!) we had a full capacity crowd. 

Thank you to Brian Swett [below] for making such an awesome presentation about the ambitious goals of the City of Boston and for reaching out to us to help partner with them as they grow their efforts - certainly we can help bring proven models of success to other communities in Massachusetts. 

Congratulations to the new and renewed Board Members and thank you to all the great candidates.

And now the work continues. I know some of the committee volunteers made connections to new helpers. As you heard, for me, the priorities are Community, Capacity and Advocacy - which means getting more members, bringing in new sponsoring partners and focusing on specific policy projects. The advocacy is really the most important thing we can do as an organization. What are we doing? I believe we can choose one or two of the USGBC campaign issues  and in my conversations some of you have heard I think that those can be Greening the MLS and Energy Reporting going statewide. With our Green Schools strategic investment grant, that will be a focus in the coming months. And, finally, pertinent to current events, we need to respond to the wild community development opportunities and building projects that are the future Casinos of Massachusetts.

[me with active volunteers: Andrea Love, Emily Greenstein, Dee Spiro, Phoebe Beierle, and Jim Newman]

I was really psyched to hear about the awesome work going on in the committees - Green Residential, Green Schools, RASOC, Education, Communications, Membership, Special Events and Emerging Professionals. I look forward to our future advocacy team. I am heartened by the West Branch and the Central Mass group with their successful and upcoming events. We've got a lot of great stuff going on!

Take a look at the website - there are new stories up there and I have been building it out more and more (with our Communications Associate Zak) every week. Please stay tuned to our social media spaces: facebook and our LinkedIn group - plenty of news and discussion there.

[Hi Phoebe!]

So you can see, we are moving right along - new people in the ranks, old-timers coming back into the fold, and a lot of work to tackle. As we mentioned last night: Massachusetts is #4 in the country in terms of LEED certified space created (per capita) in 2012. Not that LEED is everything to us (it's just our biggest horse in the market-transformation team), but 101 projects earned the status last year, taking us to just shy of 400 certified projects, total, up til the end of 2012. This means a lot of us, and our peers who aren't quite yet members, are working on a lot of green building projects and we are really changing the built environment. We really are changing the carbon intensity of our communities. We really are making the world a better place. I'm proud to work for you all and I look forward to cultivating this momentum for even more victories in the coming months and years!

Thanks again for being part of the USGBC MA Chapter! See you at the next event!

Appreciating Members!

We had a great event on Tuesday night. The photos are forthcoming (thanks Carlos!!!)

And the winners of our various Member Awards were:

Most Likely to Send an Email at 3AM - Carrie Havey

Most Likely to Take Recycling Home from the Office - Dee Spiro

Most Likely to Be Completely Off the Grid in a Year - Laura Fitch

Advocate of the Year - Kathleen Arthur

Educator of the Year - Chris Schaffner

Mentor of the Year - Jim Newman

EPMA Rising Star – Laurel Kruke and Javier Burgos

AND, we had a special mention to our awesome previous Chapter Operations Manager, Suzanne Abbott, now at Vidaris. She showed up in style and managed to score the biggest contribution of the night - a $1000 sponsorship from Jack Mackin at Sterrit Lumber - Thanks you Suzanne, and thank you Jack!

It really was a great time had by all. Many of the old familiar faces, but also a whole slew of new folks. Thanks to all of those who signed up to become members due to the event. We are ambitiously kicking off a membership drive in the new year, so it's nice to see that our messaging and outreach is already starting to pay off. Thanks, once again, to all the members for joining the Chapter.

Thanks must also go to Rachel Zsembery and her team on the Special Events committee - Dee, Katya, Keith, Krista, Suzanne and Carlos. You all know how to make it happen, with style. Thanks again for all your hard work.

The night also meant the community had a chance to give back - our philanthropic beneficiaries this year have been the Jowney Elementary School in Brockton - combined, we brought in $667 for the kids for school supplies. We have partnered with the school as they have been working on greening the facility and engaging the students very well, and we want to continue to support their efforts.

Thanks again, everyone, I'm proud of this Green Building Community.

Grey

LEEDv4 - Better and Smaller!

Last night we hosted a great program on the intricacies and details of LEEDv4 - the latest version of LEED which will be operational in June 2013 (we expect). Currently, the process to approve the new version is still open to comments (until 12/10/12) from any relevant party - such as any member of the MA Green Building Council or LEED professional in general. Here's a link to more info, and the slides from the presentation, on our site: http://www.usgbcma.org/LEED

Chris Schaffner, from The Green Engineer (really, he is The Green Engineer), came and presented. Chris is a former board member of the Chapter and a LEED Fellow - one of a few dozen in the country recognized as outstanding leaders in our industry. He is also on the Technical Advisory Group for the new version of LEED and knows a lot of the ins and outs, having worked on streamlining the credits on this new version.

We went through a great slideshow describing how the various credits in each subsection of LEED have morphed into the new line-up. Some have disappeared, others are brand new. He described how the USGBC is trying to balance market adoption (make the system easy) with environmental impact (really make a difference for the planet), and how this version is a little more aggressive on sustainability.

The market has taken up LEED and now we can use it to drive real change in environmental impact. Of course, the entire industries that have grown up around LEED are a little bent out of shape with the change of the status quo - and resistance is significant. There are also the complicated logistics of getting the whole system finished in the next six months! That's going to be tricky, eh!

Chris asked us to please submit comments - especially if you think any of the new changes are good - so that the USGBC has the valuable feedback it needs to continue the evolution of LEED so that it can be the best tool we have to change the real estate industry. Here's a link to USGBC's comment site: https://new.usgbc.org/leed/v4

It was a great evening with about 30 chapter members in the audience. A few mentioned to me that they are interested in getting more involved! That is great!

[Above: Grey Lee, Andrea Love, Chris Schaffner, & Bob Kohn]

Kudos to Bob Kohn, Chair of the Education Committee, for organizing the program, and to Andrea Love (on our board) for providing the space and facility logistics at Payette (290 Congress St - a LEED Platinum Building!) Thanks to Chris Schaffner for providing his expertise and facilitation skill. I am sure we can look forward to more valuable programs in the future. Thanks again, everyone!
-Grey

In San Francisco for Greenbuild 2012

Many of us are here for Chapter Day, and several will be arriving over the course of the next few hours. Everyone is getting pumped up. Be sure to keep in touch over Twitter using hashtag #usgbcma with #greenbuild so we can share with each other and those back home.

Not sure what sessions to go to? Check out our post from last week showcasing MA members giving presentations. Go and support them.

See you at the convention!

Are you going to be around for ABX2012?

Next week is Boston's annual construction industry conference, ArchitectureBoston Expo (formerly BuildBoston) and it seems like there are going to be a whole slew of us USGBCMAers there. Even if you weren't planning on attending the full conference, there will be events of special interest to us. Question is, what are they and how do we find each other?

On Wednesday night in nearby Downtown Crossing is the Fall 2012 collaborative Young Professional Networking Event, which the EPMA are sponsors of. Go to http://ypnefall12.eventbrite.com/ for all the details.

On Thursday night there are two special events. One is Meet Massachusetts from 6pm-10pm, which the Chapter is a sponsor of. Even if you aren't going to the conference, you can still attend by calling 508.743.5864 and requesting to register for the Meet Massachusetts event for only $10. You can also get a free pass to the exhibit hall if you ask nicely! The other event, unfortunately at the same time (but we know you like to hop between parties), is the MA CHPS 10th Anniversary Celebration. Many of your colleagues will be honored for their efforts to make Massachusetts Public Schools the greenest they can be. Congratulate them enthusiastically.

During the conference we have several members presenting. If you still aren't sure what sessions to attend, see our post yesterday highlighting those people and the sessions they are running. Be sure to go up afterwards to introduce yourself as a fellow member.

Lastly, use the power of social media! If you have a Twitter account, use the hash tag #usgbcma to tell us what you are up to and follow your fellow member attendees. Look for (and instigate) impromptu meetups!