Day of Service at Suffolk Law
By Celis Brisbin, Programs Manager
Together parents, students and staff helped plant more than 200 plants in the outdoor classroom that purchased in part thanks to funding made possible by MassSave. Mary Smoyer, a retired teacher and steward of the school’s Outdoor Classroom was onsite to work with families and educate them on how to plant bulbs. Mary and her husband also led tours through the Outdoor Classroom and anyone who wanted too was encouraged to help weed, break up sticks and beautify the space. The Outdoor Classroom is a beautiful oasis of nature in the back of the school that helps manage stormwater runoff, is a habitat for animals and birds, and is an important educational space for all Trotter students.
The school was proud of how successful the Fall Harvest Garden Festival was this year and looks forward to working with USGBC MA Chapter and local partners next year to make this event even bigger and more impactful.
The attendees were mostly Graduate students across various disciplines interested in energy issues and sustainability. The objective of the workshop was to emphasis the importance of energy models and how they help inform decisions. The presenter discussed the following key points during his presentation.
The presenter also presented case studies from his projects and explained how energy model helps to make data driven decisions. He listed the various energy conservation techniques that can be implemented through modeling and walked through the various phases of a building project.
This seminar helped the attendees to understand the drivers of energy consumption in various building types and how energy model can help to understand the benefits of various energy conservation measures. NU-ESS welcomes involvement from everyone in the Northeastern community interested in taking a more active role relating to energy, sustainability and environmental issues. The group's leadership will work to organize events, discussions, educational forums and other activities to give the student body an opportunity to extend their learning and experience outside of the class-room. The group also serves as a valuable networking tool to industry throughout Boston, New England, and beyond.
Contributed by Carolyn Silva Sanchez, Teacher
On October 7, 2015, my kindergarten class was fortunate to have participated in an energy efficiency project thanks to the generous mini-grant from Eversource that we received through the Massachusetts Chapter’s Green Apple Day of Service. My project focused on teaching students what electricity was, why we need to strive each day to use less, and what we could do to help in the classroom. Being new to school, many of my students did not have an understanding of what electricity was and how much we use it each day. When I helped them to make connections that things like lights, computers, and televisions all use electricity they realized how much they use electricity at school and at home. One student even said, “wow, it is in everything.
My lesson contained three parts. Pulling from the Magic School Bus Jumping into Electricity Curriculum, I read them a book that talked about what electricity was and then we put together our very own mini circuit board where students could watch a small light bulb light up. Reading the story allowed children to understand the concept of electricity as simply as possible. They took away understandings of what types of things use electricity, and also why it is not safe to touch things that have an electrical current. They also started to understand that electricity is generated in one central location and then runs out to different places like our school.
After reading, I wanted to make this concept come alive. My students all benefit from content that is hands-on, so we used the materials in the kit to make a small circuit board. Students had the chance to connect wires to a battery and to a very small light bulb. They saw what happened when the activated wires touched the light bulb. They were amazed! We were in a circle, taking turns connecting the wires and students had trouble staying seated because of their pure excitement. When we finished the project I told them to look at all the wires we needed just to turn on one little light bulb. Then I asked them to imagine how many wires are needed to turn on the light bulbs in our classroom. Students began to look up at the ceiling and say, “oh there must be a lot of wires to get electricity to the lights.” I told them that the plants we read about in the book, where the electricity is made, isn’t so good for the environment – they don’t help our trees grow big and strong. I said that it was our job to help the environment by using less electricity.
Over the next few days we generated a list of things we could do at school and at home to save electricity. Even today we continue to talk about saving electricity. When we leave the classroom one student is in charge of turning the lights off. Students take pride in their ability to “help the trees grown big and strong.”
This article by Ryan Snow, Community Development at USGBC
There are plenty of actions, technologies and processes we can do that increase health, energy and resource performance without any added cost. For example—turning off lights when not in use is free. A 2013 study estimated $17 billion in savings across the entire U.S. commercial building stock if simple behavioral tweaks and small automation changes were employed. We need to broaden the tent of the green building community, engage more people, including regular citizens, and redefine the value of green in terms attractive to a wider audience.
USGBC’s Community Advancement team has worked with a diversity of community and faith-based partners to identify ways to engage new, underserved and underrepresented audiences over the last few years. Events like the 2013 Community-based Sustainability Forum, 2013 Faith-based Professional Peer Group and 2014 Affordable Homes & Sustainable Communities Summit expanded this dialogue through the Greenbuild platform. We’ve learned that the values and aspirations of non-traditional audiences are resoundingly similar to those of the green building community: stewardship of land and resources, increased health and prosperity, and the need for justice and equality. Of course, no conversation about buildings could be complete without the ubiquitous desire to reduce operating costs!
While our values are aligned in many ways, the approach and resources offered through the existing green building community have not always met these important stakeholders on their own terms. Perceptions of increased cost, overwhelming amounts of technical information, and value propositions that don’t match their realities abound. Simply put, the largest barrier to entry for many new audiences is finding the right starting point where they can access easily digestible, high-quality, and credible resources and expertise. In response, we’ve developed ADVANCE.
ADVANCE is a framework to increase access to resources and expertise for new, underserved and underrepresented audiences. ADVANCE is built to meet organizations and communities wherever they are on the path to sustainability and assist them along that path. Through a series of launch events and follow-through activities, community partner organizations work collaboratively with the USGBC community to advance energy, resource and health performance in the places they occupy.
The four phases of ADVANCE
ADVANCE progresses through four phases: START, PLAN, FOCUS, and LEAD.
The USGBC MA Chapter looks forward to working on ADVANCE projects in 2016. Come to our Outreach Team meeting on Tuesday, 10/13, 5:45pm at 50 Milk St. in Boston to explore this important program.
On the evening of Oct. 6, 2015, Kevin Smith, Planning and Construction’s clerk of the works, and Andrew Breiter-Wu, assistant sustainability coordinator co-led a tour
These green buildings are compliant with the City of Boston’s Green Building Guidelines (BRA Article 37) and are LEED certifiable. The tour demonstrated the importance of addressing many dimensions of sustainability, including energy efficiency and climate change, resource conservation, storm water management, adaptive re-use of existing infrastructure, and creating flexible spaces to meet the needs of a dynamic college campus. For additional photos of the Green Building Tour and other Wentworth Environmental Collaborative Events, visit their Facebook page.
You can read our most recent Newsletter here. This links to articles about past and upcoming events.
Here's the introduction:
October 2015
Greetings,
What a wonderful evening last Thursday, thank you to all who were able to make it out. We celebrated, as a community, our strength in numbers – in the buildings we've made, the performance they demonstrate, and the innovation in design that they manifest.
The gathering was a fabulous mix of people from different professional disciplines and levels of experience. We launched our new Mentoring program where we will match seasoned pros with emerging pros to help both sides – mentoring will work in both directions, esp. in regards to engaging with new technologies. Explore the program here.
There are times, when I'm up on Beacon Hill, when I wonder how I could find some good green building mentors for some of the politicians up there. Sometimes I can't believe the level of misunderstanding around sustainability and life-cycle costs going on. I also am often impressed at how well versed others of these public servants are – esp. our allies among the Global Warming Solutions Caucus. It almost looks like they are having fun as policy wonks. Please stay tuned as we turn up the heat on green building policy – esp. what we have brewing for the impending Stretch Code update.
Thank you to our many participants in the Green Apple Day of Service. Some of the programs are still yet to occur – we look forward to sharing more of the stories in the coming weeks.
This month, among other things, we will have our Green Associate Training Course, a breakfast program on green building tax incentives, there is a building tour in Amherst, and we are co-sponsoring an energy conference at Northeastern.
We convene people because we are fundamentally about community: helping people connect and enable our mission to come to fruition.
As I said at our Showcase, we can be proud of our work because we are implementing real change, positive change, for our communities, by ensuring the longest-lasting human artifacts, our buildings, are done the right way for the generations to come.
Thank you for participating in this essential work.
Grey
Architerra is an architecture, community design, and development advisory firm dedicated to sustainable design and smart growth. It was founded in 2004 by Ellen Watts and Dan Arons, and they are committed to comprehensive design solutions for any project in the built environment.
“The newly opened Headquarters was designed to be the first public sector zero net energy office building in the Commonwealth. The 45,000 square foot, 3 story building provides office accomodations for 120 staff, fisheries and wildlife laboratories, environmental review hearing rooms, and flexible multi-purpose classrooms and public spaces. A live trout pond, natural rock rainwater cascade, and native plant garden help support the organization's educational and conservation mission. This LEED Platinum design optimizes energy performance with passive solar strategies, mechanically assisted natural ventilation, structural insulated panels, triple glazed curtainwall, a closed loop ground source heat pump system, and a 300 kW rooftop photovoltaic array.”
Keep up the great work, Architerra! We look forward to seeing more of your projects in the future.
The middle school has been piloting composting in the lunch room for the last month, and this day of service was created to: 1) educate the students on why we compost, 2) educate the rest of the school about the awesome middle school composting pilot, and 3) reward the 6th grade for their efforts.
The day started off with students broken into their learning cohorts. They discussed the meaning of Community Service and then reflected on what the Green Apple Day of Service meant. The students then rotated through 3 different activities:
1. Compost Education & Worm Bins: Students participated in several hands-on, interactive activities that taught them the importance ofcompost (including saving energy!) and then helped reinforce what we can and can’t compost at Boston Green Academy. These activities included a game where students looked at a pie chart detailing total waste from 2014 and discussed ways to reduce it. Students honed in on the fact that 15% was food waste, and were thrilled to learn that we were helping to change that statistic at Boston Green Academy by composting! The activity ended with students observing Red Wigglers and making 2 worm bins, 1 for their class and 1 for a 7th grade class.
2. Art Activity: This activity created signs that will educate the rest of the student body about our Compost Pilot in the middle school. The final product spelled out BGA COMPOSTS in large letters. The top of each letter was a collage of things we CAN compost at BGA (like beans, bread and napkins) and the bottom was a collage of things we CAN’T compost yet at BGA (like meat and cheese). We made three of these signs to spread around the school. It was a great way to reinforce composting and get the students excited about sharing what they are learning and doing everyday in lunch with the rest of the student body.
The Green Apple Day of Service ended with a celebration by eating the food the different groups made. It was a great way to have personal discussions about what they enjoyed and what they learned. All in all it was a wonderful way to introduce our 6th graders to meaningful, green community service!
For many of these positions you can have little to no LEED experience or knowledge, while other require LEED knowledge and a certification. Any of these positions are helpful to fulfill CE hours to maintain LEED Green Associate or Accredited Professional accreditation. The different positions also allow for a lot of flexibility in scheduling, as they only require a few hours of time per month on average.
Learn more about these positions here!
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