SEDI board members attend “green boot camp”

June 18, 2009 • Flagstaff, AZ • Coconino County News

Living Cities offered SEDI Board Members Ron Hubert and Rebecca Sayers along with Coconino County Verna Fischer, Director of Coconino County Community Services, an unprecedented opportunity to learn new strategies and share best practices on creating green jobs and reducing greenhouse gas emissions through city-wide retrofitting

The event, "Green Boot Camp: Recovery Through Retrofitting," was held May 31-June 2 at Harvard Kennedy School. National experts and multi-disciplinary teams of senior officials from 17 U.S. cities, met for intensive training and peer learning on ways to improve, accelerate and scale up their building energy retrofit programs.

A primary goal of the Green Boot Camp was to enhance the capacity of the participating city-led cross-sector teams to significantly improve, expand and accelerate the retrofitting of buildings in their communities. Further, participants explored in detail the design and implementation of building energy retrofit initiatives that ensure new jobs, career pathways and energy cost savings.

Large-scale efforts in U.S. cities to increase building energy efficiency through retrofitting hold great promise for not only saving energy, but also reducing climate pollution. According to Living Cities’ recently released Green Cities Report, buildings consume more than 70% of the electricity and account for 40% of greenhouse gas emissions in the United States.

“Public sector innovation is a necessity in these increasingly difficult times,” said Stephen Goldsmith, director of the Innovations in American Government Program at Harvard Kennedy School’s Ash Institute. “Sharing ideas and best practices is a must for cities to serve their constituents efficiently and effectively. We are pleased to be working with Living Cities and the Institute for Sustainable Communities to host the Green Boot Camp – such events are at the core of the Ash Institute’s mission to foster the dissemination of innovation across the country.”

Participation of local representatives was funded by the Living Cities Foundation. Rebecca Sayers, Sustainability and Environmental Manager for the City of Flagstaff; Verna Fischer, Director of Coconino County Community Services; and Ron Hubert, Adjunct Professor with NAU and President of Hozho International, represented a broad based collaborative working in our region to create a viable plan to retrofit residential buildings with energy efficiency measures. The large scale vision will put people to work and reduce utility usage in area homes. Both the City and the County will be receiving Energy Efficiency and Conservation Block Grant funding to kick start this effort. Flagstaff and the surrounding region are well positioned to move into this new opportunity to create a local green economy.

The event featured key figures from the Obama Administration, including Ron Sims, Deputy Secretary of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.

The Green Boot Camp was sponsored by Living Cities, a philanthropic collaborative of 21 of the world’s largest foundations and financial institutions, and was hosted by the Ash Institute for Democratic Governance and Innovation at Harvard Kennedy School. The Institute for Sustainable Communities was program coordinator. “ISC is excited to collaborate with Living Cities and the Ash Institute on the program,” says Steve Nicholas, Director of Climate and Environment Programs for the Institute for Sustainable Communities. “We think we’ve put together a program

and resource guide that will give cities the solid information and inspiration they need to seriously ramp up their building energy retrofit programs.”

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