In 2025, BE+’s Education program continued to scale its impact, equipping building professionals with the knowledge and skills needed to advance a more sustainable, healthy, and resilient built environment. We delivered 165 trainings in collaboration with 44 instructor companies, engaging 292 trainee companies and deepening industry-wide participation. Strong repeat engagement remained a hallmark of the program, with over 20% of participants returning for multiple courses and companies averaging three trainings each.

Quality and relevance remained central to our approach. Courses earned an average satisfaction rating of 90%, reinforcing the program’s reputation for excellence. Top-performing offerings—including LEED v5: An Early Look, Massachusetts energy code trainings, Phius Certified Passive House Consultant trainings and our new Tech to Transformation: Building Better webinar series —reflect growing demand for technical rigor to meet evolving building standards. Notably, 50% of energy code participants were first-time code users, underscoring BE+’s role in expanding access and building foundational capacity across the workforce.

Program growth was further strengthened through the launch of 12 new courses and 12 new partnerships spanning funders, instructors, and promotional collaborators. Through the Workforce Training Fund Program, we also supported low-cost advanced credentialing, with 21 new LEED accreditation trainees and over 40 Passive House training registrations and 45 professionals earning Passive House accreditation. Together, these outcomes reflect BE+’s continued commitment to workforce development as a critical lever for climate action and industry transformation.

In January, we began hiring and initial planning of a program to support owners and building professionals in reducing emissions and improving energy efficiency in existing buildings. Retrofitting existing buildings is an essential part of achieving Massachusetts’ climate goals. Existing buildings have a lower environmental impact than new construction, though many are out-of-date with today’s standards of energy use, efficiency, and emissions. 

By March, the program confirmed its name as the Building Performance Exchange (the ‘Exchange’), and we met with Mass Save, the Executive Office of Energy and Environmental Affairs, the City of Boston and City of Cambridge, and the Building Performance Partnership to ensure alignment with overlapping local, state, and national programs targeting existing buildings. The Exchange is a program of BE+ and Massachusetts Clean Energy Center, a state economic development agency dedicated to accelerating the growth of the clean energy sector across Massachusetts.

Throughout the summer and fall, we assessed the needs of the building community to inform the Exchange’s offerings. The assessment included an industry wide survey, role specific focus groups, and an in-person summit to delve deeper into gaps in knowledge and challenges with retrofitting existing buildings. Alongside this effort, we worked with a design agency to develop the Exchange branding and made steady progress with them on the initial development steps towards building an independent website. While still in this discovery and development phase, we didn’t hold back from starting to support existing building needs. Our premier events, BTF and GBS, featured large additions specifically created with the Exchange, and we brought the DEBA Roundtable and existing building related training & events into its purview.

Our work revealed a need for greater transparency in utility and cost data, access to available funding and financial modeling, examples of successes and pitfalls in completed projects, regulatory navigation, and opportunities for knowledge sharing between owners and industry professionals. We began translating these findings into planning for programs and resources to be offered via the Exchange. The Exchange begins its efforts in Boston and Cambridge, two jurisdictions with building performance standards that set energy and emissions limits on existing buildings. Within these cities, large residential buildings located in equity communities will be a priority. Over the next few years, the Exchange will expand statewide while continuing to prioritize under-resourced communities.

Clients are looking for high-performance building professionals on Built Environment Connects. It is an interactive and engaging discovery tool that has powerful search-filtering to ensure that users looking for specific building related expertise find the right person to contact. Professionals and Companies elevate their profile rankings by linking to proven project experience via project profiles.

In 2025, we launched updated branding and updated associated marketing materials and support pages. We also made site-wide design and functional updates to improve the user experience for searching and filtering results, and to improve the account holder experience with a new Add Profile page and a much improved account view and navigation while logged-in. An Explore Projects section was added to the site and soon project data summary and display pages will launch publically.

Site profile numbers remained stable while we engaged with partner organizations, a consultant, and site users to explore the long-term viability of the site. We are finalizing a business plan to grow the site and hope to expand into other regions. Though most engagement and recruitment efforts were paused in 2025, early 2026 will see a big push for additional project data in preparation for an update of our Massachusetts is Going Net Zero Report. Connect’s forthcoming project data summary pages are planned to continue this important role into the future and beyond just Massachusetts.

2025 was a year of change and growth for BE+.  Ramping up for the Building Performance Exchange we grew the team from 7.25 FTE to 11 FTE. Our budget increased nearly 70% from $1 million to $1.7 million. We also returned to offices at 50 Milk Street for the first time since going fully remote in March 2020. Employees on average are in the office 2-3 days a week and work remotely the other days.