0:00 Music plays
0:02 Ed Connelly (EC): If we can move the needle so that in order to get financing for construction you have to demonstrate some level of decarbonization, high performance, healthy homes, then we’ll have really changed the entire system so that all the buildings, especially in parts of the country that aren’t doing this so much, all the buildings are built to a really high standard, and are climate resilient, and better for the occupants.
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1:36
Michelle Moran (MM): Welcome to BuildingWell: Sustainable Homes, Equitable Communities, your new podcast from New Ecology.
1:43
Join us as we explore real life stories from key players in green building and community development.
1:48
We’ll examine exciting new innovations, highlighting practical solutions for creating more affordable, healthier, and more resilient equitable communities.
1:57
We’re building well, together.
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2:01
MM: Welcome to the Building Well podcast by New Ecology, celebrating 25 years of sustainable community development.
2:07
We’re so excited to have you here with us for our very first episode of this podcast.
2:12
It’s our pleasure to be talking to you here today for this foundational episode of what we hope will become your number one source for sustainability and green building-related news, discussions and updates.
2:23
My name is Michelle Moran.
2:25
I’m the Senior Associate of Marketing here at New Ecology.
2:28
I’m joined by my co-host, Alita Michaelewicz, Principal Director of Finance.
2:33
Today, we have a very special guest here to help us inaugurate this podcast.
2:37
He’s been a superstar in sustainable community development and affordable housing for over 20 years.
2:43
His vision and expertise have helped not only to shape the industry, but he has also helped improve many, many lives, including ours.
2:50
It is with great pleasure that we welcome Ed Connolly, President of New Ecology.
2:56
Hi, Ed.
2:57
Thanks for joining us.
2:58
EC: Oh, it’s my pleasure.
3:00
MM: All right.
3:01
Ed, could you please introduce yourself and give us a little bit about your background as well as new ecology?
3:07
EC: Sure. Yep.
3:08
I’ve been the president of New Ecology for almost 20 years, came here in 2004, so.
3:16
And when we were just a small company, we were just less than five years old.
3:21
And I came on, there was one other employee.
3:25
So what I’ve tried to do in my career is take the principles of sustainability that a lot of folks talk about and try to actually implement them.
3:36
And that’s what I’d set out to do with New Ecology, to see how we could use the nonprofit to enhance the sustainable efforts in community development.
3:48
So before that, I had started one of the nation’s first green jobs companies back in in 1997 in Providence, RI, working with a Community Development Corporation, the South Providence Development Corp. We set up a subsidiary company called Cleanscape that did recycling and urban landscaping.
4:09
And I ran that for about 7 1/2 years from start up utill when I came over to New Ecology, and lots of other stuff too.
4:17
I was the recycling manager and acting director and deputy director for the state Solid Waste Authority in Rhode Island, expanding efforts to recycle materials.
4:29
At the time, Rhode Island had the best recycling program statewide in in the nation.
4:36
I’ve also been a municipal official and assistant town administrator, and before that I was an attorney practicing labor law, and I was a criminal prosecutor to start off my career.
4:49
So it’s been a lot of varied work, but always with the same kind of focus on implementation.
4:59
MM: Excellent, thank you so much for telling us all about that. Such a varied and exciting career!
5:05
Could you please tell us a little bit about New Ecology and the approach that new ecology takes?
5:11
EC: Yeah, some of the stuff, the, the principles that I was talking about have kind of guided what we’ve done at New Ecology.
5:17
When I first came on board, there was a very brief report on the Costs and Benefits of Green Affordable Housing.
5:25
It was just a few pages long, and the first task that I had to do coming on was to expand that report into a full-blown effort.
5:35
And what’s funny now looking back is, that I think we had about 12 or 15 case studies from across the country of green affordable housing.
5:44
And those were the properties that were adopting principles of sustainability that we could find and get any information on.
5:53
And now New Ecology works on 250 or 300 projects at a time!
5:59
So that’s sort of an indication of how the world has changed in the past in the past 20 years.
6:04
But that effort on identifying what was working, what people were trying in in affordable housing and greening affordable housing, really started New Ecology on the path that it’s still on.
6:16
I believe that report is still available on our website.
6:19
So it’s interesting I’ve occasionally looked back on it to see what we got right and how much stuff has changed.
6:26
Certainly none of the things we’re doing now with Passive House with real deep concern for health and resiliency were being practiced back then.
6:35
It was all very aspirational.
6:38
The concepts that we kind of planted back then in the early days, because of that report and because of relationship with community development corporations in Massachusetts through something we call the Green CDC initiative, that was actually trying to work with community development corporations to figure out how to how to green their practices and their housing development.
7:01
That set the path for us.
7:03
And that’s the that’s where we’ve been going ever since.
7:06
Trying to figure out how to do it better, how to do it more expansively, how to do it with an eye towards bringing benefits to the housing stock in multiple ways and making it more inexpensive and more durable and resilient for both the owners and the tenants that live there.
7:28
In the past 15 or 20 years, we’ve worked on well over 200,000 units of housing and if you think that two to three people are living in each of those units, at least, it’s way more than a half million people that we’ve helped to have better housing, that’s amazing.
7:50
AM: I have a follow up question actually.
7:52
You were talking about the green CDC initiative that kind of led into all this.
8:00
How did you approach potential partners to grow the work? ‘Cause that’s an incredible growth from 15 projects across the country to just New Ecology working on 250 a year.
8:15
Can you talk about how we got there, how you led us to that level of increase?
8:22
It’s really incredible.
8:25
EC: You know, what I always have told people, especially a lot of the students that we worked with interns early on when we didn’t have a very big staff, was that if we were going to be successful, we had to demonstrate why what we were advocating was better than common practice or existing practice.
8:46
So that’s the approach that we’ve taken when we, when we started to say if you air seal buildings and you better insulate them, you’re going to be cutting down on the operating costs and improving the health and and comfort of the occupants.
9:04
People said, OK, show us is that really true. And we, we were able to demonstrate working with architects and contractors that they could actually build this way without substantial cost or substantial disruption to the typical construction cycle.
9:21
But then we could also demonstrate through the acquisition of data that these buildings actually performed way better than the the code buildings or the existing buildings that were built and that was benefiting both the owners, the property managers and the the tenants.
9:40
So it’s been basically building on each project.
9:47
One of the big advantages that New Ecology has had with working on so many projects over so many years is that we’re learning all the time about what’s working and what’s working better.
9:59
And then we’re literally passing along those learnings in real time.
10:04
An architect may be working on a couple projects at the at a time and maybe a few dozen projects over a career if you’re the primary architect on a project, whereas we’re working on hundreds.
10:18
So we can take what we’ve learned today and put it to in practice tomorrow.
10:22
And whether that’s a technique on how you build a better building, whether it’s equipment, whether it’s funding sources, whether it’s just how practical this work can be.
10:35
That’s what I tried to build in terms of what I said before about building a process for actually implementing and then showing that this is better than what would otherwise happen.
10:47
So you needed to not only have the skill set to understand what the outcome could be, but you had to have the ability to relate in multiple ways that it was better.
10:59
And we did that through data acquisition, which we’ve done a lot of over the year.
11:03
And we also did that through storytelling of of why this was better.
11:09
I think a big impact that we’ve had is that we’ve changed how folks went about the work in terms of designing buildings and planning projects.
11:19
One thing that we’ve always been especially proud of is that is, is that we’ve worked with the same owners and developers multiple times over the years.
11:27
And what’s really cool to see is that you get a project, you know to move slightly to more advanced building techniques or better building techniques.
11:37
But a lot of times that would be the starting point for the next project when you when you worked with the same team and so on and so on.
11:44
Until now.
11:46
I just found out yesterday that the New Ecology is working on more than half the Passive Houses in Massachusetts.
11:53
We have over 40 active projects right now that are that are building to this highest standard of building envelope and equipment procurement for heating and hot water.
12:04
You can call it a lot of things, a little bit bootstrapping a little bit, just sequential continuous quality improvement, right.
12:10
But that’s the that’s been the approach.
12:15
AM: very cool, that’s great. I have another follow up, Michelle, if you don’t mind.
12:19
I’m curious Ed, if you could talk a little bit about some of the work in the Mid-Atlantic as well and and maybe the data acquisition piece that you just mentioned also some of those additional pieces.
12:31
Yeah, I’ll talk about the data first.
12:33
It was clear to me early on that in order to prove the case that what we were talking about actually works and was actually better, we needed to collect at least energy data on buildings.
12:47
So early on in 2010, 2011, you know I had been here five or six years and we just started ramping up this approach.
12:57
We had the notion to, yeah, I think actually was earlier then, I think it was 2007 or 8, that we needed to collect building data on how the buildings were performing.
13:08
I remember, I remember asking some of the interns from MIT when I first started to say what defines a green building? How do you define whether something is actually built to a better standard and is environmentally superior?
13:23
And and nobody can answer that question at the time.
13:28
So that led us to say, all right, let’s measure, let’s measure what we’re doing.
13:33
Let’s get utility data and figure out if these buildings are actually better.
13:38
So we started to do that in spreadsheets and realized like, Oh my God, this is impossible to do in a spreadsheet.
13:46
AM: Oh, you know, I love spreadsheets, but I didn’t imagine.
13:51
EC: So we teamed up with another young MIT graduate, Barun Singh, who had had an idea of creating a database of building energy.
14:02
And we we formed what eventually became WegoWise and started to collect data and develop the software tools in the graphic interface to make that usable and attractive to people.
14:14
And we get we were able to eventually gather the data on much of the affordable housing in both Massachusetts and Connecticut and populate that database.
14:25
And then we could start to show absolutely what percentage these buildings were performing better, how much lower the cost they were to operate.
14:35
You know, some of the other stuff was harder to measure like the the health benefits.
14:39
You know, you can’t just get a utility bill and measure health benefits.
14:43
But we actually did, working with Harvard School of Public Health on some projects, come up with ways to start to measure health benefits too.
14:50
And those are seminal studies that were done on the Old Colony project in South Boston showing before and after what the impact of the sustainability high performance practices were advocating for what the impact was it.
15:05
It actually showed that children missed less school when they lived in the buildings that we had helped build because their asthma was better, because there was there was less toxic material, there was less, it was better ventilation, less use of pesticides, things that could trigger asthma.
15:23
So that if you think about that, that the kids miss less school, the parents miss less work because the kids miss less school, and that brings stability to families and to neighborhoods.
15:35
So especially proud that that’s the that’s the impact of what we did, but always measuring having ways to talk about what this performance actually was in these new buildings.
15:48
Now we see the Passive House buildings and they’re they’re kind of off the charts, like they’re performing at levels that we never dreamed of when we started off just begging people to do basic Energy Star buildings.
16:01
AM: Wow, cool.
16:01
EC: And what was the second question?
16:04
AM: Some of the work we’re doing in the Mid-Atlantic.
16:05
EC: Oh, the Mid-Atlantic, yeah.
16:08
So you know some, some of what we were do, we were doing here, was being recognized around the country when we did publish that Costs and Benefits of Affordable Green, Affordable Housing report.
16:22
I think I must have done 100 lectures on it all across the country.
16:27
I kept getting invited to conferences and to universities to talk about what we had learned.
16:32
Because of that, people started to take notice and said, huh, can we copy this? Can we expand it?
16:38
And we raised, we raised funds, grant funds to be able to take what we’ve learned in in Boston and Massachusetts and bring it other places.
16:48
We started off with Connecticut and we helped help to advance their green building movement.
16:53
We eventually we had had an office in Hartford, which we eventually closed because we could handle the work from from Boston.
17:01
Ultimately, we decided to open offices in in the Mid-Atlantic because of the opportunities both in Delaware and Maryland.
17:11
So we have an office in Baltimore and in Wilmington now and we’ve taken the same approach.
17:16
You know, this work is very hyper local.
17:19
You know you can have the the theory behind it that could apply anywhere.
17:23
But in order to really convince people in a place that they should use the practices we’ve developed and talked about, you need to get to know them.
17:31
You need to get to show that this works.
17:34
So having people located in cities like Wilmington and Baltimore able to explain why we do this, able to show results is is how we started to expand.
17:46
The work ends up being slightly different in every place you’re at, because it’s affected by zoning, by by building codes, by politics, by utility programs, by housing finance agency priorities.
18:05
So from a big picture, it looks the same. We’re building green affordable housing, but how we’re doing it is slightly different in each region.
18:13
The work in Delaware has focused on developing programs to to renovate existing housing and to bring green practices to to newly constructed housing.
18:26
So some of it is very similar to what we do in Boston, MA, but some of it is different.
18:33
One big one big thing that’s different is that a city like Wilmington is, is underdeveloped, is is under resourced, has a lot of vacant land and vacant housing unlike some of the more prosperous cities.
18:46
So taking an approach of working with local actors, with community development corporations, with city government, with property owners to improve non-regulated affordable housing, naturally occurring affordable housing or NOAH is is a big part of what we do in Delaware and much less a part of what we do in Massachusetts.
19:08
You know Baltimore has focused on working with architecture firms to to have their skill set brought up, working with the state Department of Housing and Community Development to bring techniques, processes, experience to the housing development field there.
19:24
So I don’t have the numbers for exactly how many of the 200 plus thousand are in the Mid-Atlantic, but it’s a big growing number of units that we’re working on there.
19:35
MM: Thanks Ed.
19:36
I’m just going to do a little plug here because it will be happening by the time this podcast is out.
19:51
We’ll link this in the documentation on on this podcast, but we’re looking forward to those.
19:56
And I would like to go back just a little bit to when you were talking about the data measuring and acquisition work that New Ecology does.
20:03
I was struck by the phrase you said we’re always measuring, which is exactly… We’re always measuring everything that we do.
20:09
And I was thinking about how this ties into the storytelling aspect you were talking about, you know, in the beginning stages of New Ecology’s development.
20:16
Has this data acquisition and the greater availability of data had an impact on both our storytelling and how that ties into our partnerships and client base and everything?
20:27
EC: Yeah, absolutely.
20:28
It’s not one thing. It’s sort of like layers of multiple things.
20:32
So when you can demonstrate to an owner of a building that using the techniques we’ve developed is going to save them a bunch of money on heating for example.
20:46
Then the way we’ve often done it is tell a story about how this worked for another owner.
20:52
And saying like what we we did this in in this location and we showed a 25 or 30 or 40% reduction in costs, and we can share that data with you in form of a case study or you know, we can get permission from the other owner to share to show you what’s happened.
21:10
So it it’s conversation and storytelling and advocacy and persuasion all rolled up in into one.
21:19
You know one of our hallmarks as an organization is to be able to talk from results to to be able to say we’re not just theorizing or making this up, we can demonstrate that this works.
21:35
So we, you know, we would do like little mini studies of comparing similar type structures built to code or built to Energy Star, or built to LEED, or built to Enterprise Green Communities standards, and be able to show what that meant in terms of of operations.
21:53
We’ve often tried to gather more operating information too, and that’s hard because a lot of the data isn’t kept the same way by organizations.
22:04
But we do believe that there there’s been reduction in maintenance costs from a lot of what we’ve done.
22:13
You often talk about the energy use in green buildings, but it’s certainly not the only benefit.
22:18
You know, moisture control better, moisture control better. Managing water makes buildings last longer. They don’t rot. They don’t…
22:25
You don’t have water infiltration into walls or through windows that cause trouble in the end, right?
22:34
So those are much harder to measure. So those tend to be more anecdotal, more stories about what worked and what didn’t work.
22:44
I also think there’s another side to this and and it’s demonstrating credibility.
22:50
I think a lot of times why people don’t embrace more sustainable practices is that they don’t view the source of the information that they’re getting as being really credible and having data, having experience with a lot of owners would say you, you know, you can call this this building owner in a different city if you want to talk to them.
23:12
That just brings so much credibility to the work we’re doing that it is very real, that it is very practical, that it’s not pie in the sky stuff.
23:23
So important, why the storytelling and the and the data is really integral and necessary.
23:32
MM: Excellent. Yeah, absolutely.
23:33
I’m going to pivot just a little bit because you’ve talked a lot about, you know, the evolution New Ecology, both how it’s changed and how the industry has changed and also things that have stayed the same because they work.
23:45
How do you think that this evolution and this work ties into both New Ecology’s mission but also into your personal mission and your personal passions?
23:55
EC: Well, you know, when you’re when you take over a young nonprofit like I did, the challenge is really deciding which paths are going to go down and which you’re not going to go down, right?
24:05
Because you only have so many hours, you only have so many resources, you you have to sort of prioritize what you’re doing.
24:14
So for me, that the personal path and the and the organization’s path have been pretty closely tied for a long time.
24:21
But I just keep coming back to: it’s making this stuff work, it’s making it practical.
24:28
It’s saying that if we’re going to really say this is going to create a better world by providing better buildings, better health, different opportunities for workers and contractors, you have to live it.
24:43
You can’t just theorize on it. You have to live it and it has to be real practical.
24:51
MM: I agree. And I think you are the best example for everybody at New Ecology because that is how you are.
24:57
You live your mission and New Ecology’s mission every day and you inspire everybody to do the same.
25:02
EC: You know, I, I feel like I just wake up and figure out like what do I have to get done today to to keep us going, right.
25:11
It’s certainly not been conscious that that’s what’s been happening.
25:15
It’s more just been let’s move the ball down the field a little bit today and a little bit the next day and a little bit the next day.
25:22
And you know what? What I’ve often said is like, as a leader of an organization like ours, my primary job is to keep us focused on that end goal and realizing that we’re never going to get there, like in a direct straight line, that we’re going to wiggle around and go left and go right.
25:39
And keeping us close to the path, as close to the path as possible, is what the leadership aspect of this job has been about.
25:47
At the same time, you want to, you want to give staff and colleagues and partners opportunity to to experiment and explore.
25:54
So you don’t want to limit what we’re trying to do too much, but you want to keep us going down the direction that we’re aiming for, which is to make all housing for all people top quality, healthy, resilient, climate adaptable now.
26:15
So yeah, so it’s not like sort of a grand plan in one respect, but in in the day-to-day, it’s not like that.
26:24
It’s just keeping us moving.
26:27
AM: I love the idea of pushing the ball down the field just a little bit more every day.
26:32
I think the climate crisis can feel so massively overwhelming and so hard to address.
26:41
Like it just feels like sometimes it’s so large, so much bigger than us.
26:46
But there is the opportunity to wake up every day and just get a little further and a little further and a little further and contribute and and every piece that we can.
26:57
And I think that is really inspiring to hear from you that like even early on like the field had not come very far.
27:06
There was a long way to go, and there’s still a long way to go, but even in a longer way to go and just keep at it, I think is what I’m hearing you say is like, you just got to keep going and continue to feel passionate and keep doing the work.
27:19
EC: Yeah, you know, we see like in the world we live in now, these giant rapid changes with things like smartphones and Facebook and all kinds of social media.
27:33
And there’s a tendency to think everything should be that way and everything should just change really quickly, and you, you know, the break stuff mentality, but that’s not how most things work, right?
27:46
That’s how these high-profile things have happened.
27:49
But in an industry that’s as old and established and conservative as buildings as construction, you’re not going to affect change that way.
28:00
You’re going to have to do what we’ve just been talking about, like do it a little bit at a time and show why it’s better, and then do it a little bit time and show why it’s better.
28:10
And as individuals, to go back to Michelle’s question, like that’s all we can do.
28:16
We can’t wave a magic wand and change all the things that we would like to see change.
28:22
We can certainly rant about it, but that’s not gonna really make it happen, right?
28:28
What’s gonna make it happen is concerted effort, really high levels of competence, real sincere passion that this is good for everybody, and and then developing and hiring a team and motivating a team that feels the same way and wants to work together to do this.
28:50
So that’s been a critical part of what we’ve done in New Ecology is develop a team that’s feeding off each other all the time.
28:57
You know, when we had the Costs and Benefits of Green Affordable Housing report, you know, one or two people could know pretty much all the issues at at a pretty high level.
29:08
It’s been a long time since that’s been true. The only way this works is, is if there’s a team that’s working really closely together, bringing different skill sets, bringing different eyes on the job, different approaches and working together.
29:23
And I think that’s one of the things I’m proudest of about New Ecology is, I’m always so proud of the, of the people as much as just what we’ve accomplished, that there’s been a lot of people that have put their heart and soul into into trying to move the ball down the field a little bit.
29:42
And I think that’s why we we’ve become a well-respected organization and why we’re continuing to innovate and continuing to have a big influence way beyond you know our 60 some staff size.
30:00
MM: Agreed. I’ve said before that the reason that I like marketing, particularly for New Ecology is because I love bragging about everything that we do, whether it’s benefits to the people that we work with or the tenants and the buildings we work with or our own staff. It’s it’s great!
30:17
On that line, Ed, I was wondering about any advice you might have for either somebody just starting out in this field now, you know, somebody that’s seeing this massive heap ahead of them that they might have to overcome, or maybe somebody that’s established in the field and is feeling either a little disgruntled or like they don’t know where to go or how to keep going.
30:36
EC: I have these conversations all the time with folks.
30:39
People reach out to me to talk about how I’ve been able to do what I’ve done, but also how they can act on their dreams and see where they want to go.
30:50
I think a lot of the stuff we’ve been talking about is key, to think incrementally, to think what you can do to, to just have today be better than yesterday.
31:02
But often times what I’ve told folks is that this field is still really new and developing and there’s a lot of different kinds of expertise that are needed to make it work.
31:17
Looking at your own skill set and your own desires and your own experience and picking the pieces of that that are going to be useful to problem solving in this sustainable world is the way to really think about it.
31:36
I mean, I have no training in architecture or engineering, you know, everything I’ve learned is is through on the job training or through my own personal projects.
31:47
You know, building stuff, ripping stuff down, that kind of stuff. So you don’t need to be credentials in a way to do this work.
31:57
You just need to be able to solve problems and have a skill set and figure out where in this whole big chain of things that need to happen your skills would be useful.
32:07
I think another way to say that is a lot of a lot of this work is as much about attitude, desire to keep learning and passion than it is about particular skill sets.
32:20
If you have no knowledge of any of the work we’re doing, it’s that’s hard.
32:24
But most people especially that are mid-career people have a lot of different experiences that could be really put to use in this kind of work.
32:34
MM: Definitely! When we look around at the staff of New Ecology, everybody has different skills, which is part of why we work so well together as a team.
32:43
It’s not one expert in everything, it’s many experts and lots of things.
32:47
EC: And you know, when, in hiring folks, what I’ve always looked for is, obviously being intelligent and having a great desire to do this work, but also having the personality that you you wanted to be part of a team and not be just out there on your own.
33:06
It’s purposeful that our staff is that way, because I think it was the kind of team that we really needed in order to do what we’ve done.
33:17
MM: I was thinking about what you said about the continuous learning. And we’ve had members of our staff before who have been in the field for years and they talk about a building as almost like a human body and they’re almost like the doctors that the diagnosticians.
33:32
So if you think about a doctor, they will have to implore continuous learning throughout their career if they want to stay up to date.
33:39
And it’s somewhat similar in our field. Things are changing, Science is changing. We’re always getting new data as you’ve talked about before.
33:46
So it’s imperative to keep up and it’s nice that that New Ecology that’s not only encouraged, but you have to.
33:54
EC: Yeah, I I, you know, I think it’s important on a bunch of different levels.
33:58
Part of what I thought my role was is to create careers for folks, to not just get the job done.
34:06
And if you want to do this for a career, you’re not going to be doing the same thing for 20 or 30 years.
34:14
You’re going to be evolving, so the way to evolve is to keep learning and to keep learning new skills and see how you apply them.
34:23
I’ve never been afraid that people are going to learn things from at New Ecology and then just leave and take them someplace else.
34:32
And on the other hand, I’ve always thought it’s great if somebody learns how to be a green building project manager, for example, and then goes in house into a developer and then we’ve had even more influence about what we’re doing.
34:45
So it’s not necessarily a bad thing that we’ve trained and taught people how to do this work and then and then have them go do it elsewhere.
34:53
Curiosity and desire to keep solving problems and learning to solve problems is what is what makes this work, the work I described.
35:03
When we’re just starting out, we’re doing things that are just so different now than we did then.
35:08
And we’ve had to just learn it.
35:11
Early story from when we were just three employees, myself and Lauren Bauman and Alison Corwin.
35:18
We got an opportunity to do our first LEED job and it came from an established firm that had been doing lead projects and they couldn’t.
35:28
It was a supermarket and they couldn’t get it to be LEED certified.
35:32
So we said, how hard can this be? Let’s let’s give it a try! And that’s how we learned how to do LEED projects.
35:40
We just jumped into one and started trying to figure out what it took to do it and how the interactions with the owners and the contractors, the architects, what would work in order to get these projects to get certification.
35:56
So we didn’t know how to do it when we first started to do it, but we were just fearless that we could figure it out.
36:03
And that sort of spirit has just stayed at New Ecology for the longest time. That we’re not daunted by things that we don’t know the answer to, that we can figure out.
36:15
I remember like distinctly when I got to a point in this work where at first it was petrifying, like you’re going to give architects advice on how to build their building.
36:27
And I’m a lawyer!
36:28
Like, I always would do that. But I remember, you know, getting to the point where I was like, oh, my God, I know as much about this as anybody else now.
36:37
So it’s OK to start saying I don’t know the answer to that, but we’ll go figure it out.
36:43
And that was an important kind of advancement for the organization where we got to the point overall that we were knowledgeable but also, you know, humble, that we didn’t have all the answers.
36:56
And that part of the work is to figure out what you don’t know.
37:01
So that ties in.
37:01
You need a staff that wants to think that way.
37:04
You need a whole team that wants to really figure things out that they don’t know.
37:12
MM: Is that why you personally interview everybody?
37:16
EC: It’s part of the reason, right?
37:19
I think I’ve interviewed so many people over the years that I’ve gotten, I think you guys probably remember some crazy offbeat question I asked you in your interviews.
37:27
Like I don’t follow a script. I just wanted to see what makes you tick, right?
37:33
And whether you can demonstrate the kind of characteristics that we just talked about for really wanting to learn new things, really wanting to push the envelope, really wanting to figure out how things worked and and what you could do to move the work along.
37:49
So I don’t have like one way that I’ve done that at all, but it’s very tied to close listening to what people are saying when you give them a generic question and following these trails to see where they lead.
38:02
I remember one person, the New Ecology employee that was talking about their experience teaching overseas and desire to be in green building, but not a lot of experience.
38:16
And somehow I got him to talk about how he had taken the transmission out of his car and bought some manuals and figured out how to rebuild the transmission and put it back in.
38:30
And I was like, OK, you’ve never done green building work, but if you’re not afraid to do that and you’ve got the approach, the mental approach that you’ll do that, then you’ll be a successful at New Ecology.
38:43
So that’s why I would interview people.
38:46
Plus, I also think it’s important for an organization that all the staff knows the leadership and they’re not intimidated to talk to me or any of the senior staff at the organization.
38:56
So establishing that from the get go was I always thought was a good idea.
39:02
MM: All right, let’s have some fun.
39:04
What are some things throughout your career at New Ecology are in this industry that have surprised you the most, either in a good way or a bad way?
39:13
EC: Oh, that’s a hard question.
39:17
There’s a couple things that start to come to mind.
39:20
I’ll, I’ll see, I’ll start talking and see where it where it goes.
39:23
But one thing we’ve learned a lot that still surprises me is that the way we build our buildings and operate them is often divorced from each other.
39:34
So that, you see, companies have a development arm that is responsible for getting the building built, and they turn it over to the operations arm that’s responsible for running it.
39:47
And the lack of communication in the early stages of when the building’s getting designed and built has always astounded me, that the people that actually are going to live with this building and run it for 10 or 15 or 50 years aren’t making the decisions on how the thing is built.
40:05
So that’s something that we’ve tried to bridge in, when we do Charrettes and we start asking questions about how the building is going to be operated.
40:14
So that those questions get surfaced maybe on behalf of people we’ll never even meet, but that one is a is always a surprise.
40:22
You know, how conservative the construction industry is, is another challenge, right?
40:27
You know, it’s hard to build things and people have, have approaches that have worked and they don’t want to veer from them because they know they can get it done for a budget and a timeline in the old way.
40:40
This isn’t anything new, but it’s part of the landscape that you have to be ready to, to address that.
40:46
So it’s sort of surprising that innovation in this industry comes slowly.
40:52
Another thing that surprised me is how many places in the country haven’t embraced what we’ve done, especially in Massachusetts.
41:00
It’s really apparent now with all the federal money coming to regions through the IRA, through the Inflation Reduction Act, that a lot of what we take for granted in the places we work is just not true in a lot of other parts of the country.
41:16
That there are incentives, resources, mandates to build better buildings, a lot of laissez faire kind of stuff in other places and not a lot of attention to, to using incentives and regulatory processes, building codes, zoning codes to move buildings to a higher threshold.
41:36
You know, there’s always a real debate that happens about whether should you just build as many units as you can, or should you worry about whether they’re super high-performance buildings?
41:48
And obviously we come out on the side that we should do both, that we should build as many units as we can and but make sure they’re all high-performance.
41:57
Because they are, the prospect of not doing that is going to mean that they’re not climate resilient, that they’re costing tenants more or stuff we talked about earlier.
42:07
Especially in the past half dozen years when climate has become more front and center, and the fact that a lot of places in the country are just not embracing what we’ve been talking about is still surprising.
42:24
So it goes to sort of the threads of what we’ve been talking about, that you have to take the approach that you’re given in each place you’re working.
42:34
And even though you we would have a goal at New Ecology of where we wanted to get in terms of climate resilience, in terms of energy efficiency, in terms of reducing carbon, we’re still at a place where we can’t talk about that universally. We have to do it a little bit surreptitiously.
42:53
AM: That’s a bit surprising, definitely. Definitely a little surprising.
43:01
MM: This might be a little bit of a tangent, but we’ve mentioned this phrase, climate resilience or resiliency, a bunch of times. Could you just define that for some people who might not be as well, familiar with it as we are?
43:12
EC: Sure. We’re really trying to do 2 things with the work we’re doing.
43:18
1. Recognizing that our weather patterns are changing and that that’s affecting the life cycle of buildings. So and making sure that we’re not building buildings that are likely to flood because of historical flood patterns or more likely anticipated flood patterns is one way that we’re addressing resiliency.
43:45
We did a really big study for the State of Delaware, where we mapped their whole affordable housing portfolio and tried to assess the resiliency of it, how resilient the buildings were in a climate change, and what was real interesting, we, we expected there to be, because you know, coastal state, we expected sea level rise to be the biggest concern, but it actually wasn’t.
44:09
The biggest concern turns out to be that elderly, especially elderly households would have severe consequences during power outages when they lost air conditioning and the risk of heat. Excessive heat was really the risk.
44:25
You know, when we talk about resiliency, we’re talking about designing buildings so that they can endure the kinds of disruption that we’re expecting to happen as the weather changes.
44:37
And sometimes it’s flooding, sometimes it’s power loss, isolation from from, you know, if you’re you might not be flooded yourself as a building, but you might not be able to get anywhere out of it because all the area around you is flooded.
44:50
So what do you do?
44:52
Some of the techniques that we’re talking about, like Passive House building envelopes, they’re sold in one respect in terms of energy use, low energy use.
45:03
But on the other hand, even in a cold climate, those buildings can maintain comfort for days without heat because they’re so well insulated, so preparing for disruption, it’s a big part of what we talk about with resiliency.
45:23
Another whole aspect is decarbonization. We’re trying to move to a world where we’re not emitting carbon, to have power, to drive our cars, to fly our planes, to heat our homes.
45:39
So, thinking about how we, how we make make it possible for people to decarbonize their buildings by electrifying them over a period of time, especially in occupied buildings, is a really critical thing.
45:55
So, we’re thinking about resiliency in a bunch of different ways, in in terms of that survivability of in a sense of, of the building, but then also long-term operations of the building and there are other nuances to it as well. So those are two big ones.
46:13
MM: Thank you.
46:15
MM: So, Ed, what are some of your proudest moments or achievements over the past 20 or so years that you’ve been involved with New Ecology in this industry?
46:25
EC: I think a lot in terms of the people, the people that I’ve helped to move and change this field.
46:32
You know, that echoing some of the stuff we talked about before, this is not a solo act. You can’t do this with one person. We need to develop armies of people that want to do this work and and are capable of doing it and understand it.
46:48
So I think what I’m proudest of is how many people New Ecology has worked with, has trained, has influenced, have from policy makers to building owners, just to our staff to the staffs of other organizations.
47:03
If there’s any kind of long-term sort of success, it’s that it’s, you know, the buildings will be here 50 or 100 years and then they’ll be gone.
47:14
But hopefully the, the people that have been influenced by this approach will each go out and influence other people and other people and other people and that will just keep growing.
47:30
On a more like kind of mundane note, you know, very proud that our organization has this combination of we’re not a grant funded organization completely, that’s reliant, that’s just doing whatever you need to do to get those grant funds, that we’ve developed a business.
47:46
And so that we’re running a nonprofit business that provides really valuable services to folks, to clients, but also then has the ability to raise grant funds for things that are not market ready yet, that people don’t want to pay for yet, that so that we can experiment and continue to innovate in the field.
48:13
And I think that’s been a really key part of what’s made New Ecology successful.
48:17
You know, going back to some of the stuff we talked about earlier, being a business and saying, like, yes, you’re going to pay us for our advice on this and it’s going to be money well spent.
48:27
You’re going to value what how we’re influencing your projects makes the whole system work in a way, right? Because if we were just advocates and saying you should do this, you should do that, it wouldn’t have the impact among all these projects that it has.
48:44
I think we touched on a lot of the other stuff as we talked, that I have a lot of pride in what I’ve done and what the organization has done, that we’ve been able to be both practical and mission based and actually get a lot of buildings improved.
49:03
You know, as people have reached out to me since I announced my retirement, it’s really touching how many people have been influenced by this approach that are saying, you know, you guys are, you’ve really helped to change the fields here because of that approach, because of that practical side and that willingness to share what you’ve learned and humility about how you’re doing it.
49:27
So, so that’s what I’m proud of.
49:33
AM: What are the next things that you’re excited about for New Ecology? I know you’re retiring, but you see us on this trajectory. What are you really looking forward to seeing New Ecology achieve or going into new areas? Those kinds of things.
49:49
EC: Yeah. Well, I I think there’s a bunch to be really excited about.
49:55
You know, the fact that we’re what we mentioned before that we’ve got all these Passive Houses, more than half the Passive Houses.
50:01
So continuing that expansion, like that’s basically the ultimate building envelope. You’re not going to build better than that.
50:09
So making that standard, and training, training all the people that need to be trained to make that just the way of, of doing business. The architects, the contractors, the subcontractors, the building owners, the tenants, and how you live in these buildings, that’s something that I think is going to continue to just grow and expand and be really important.
50:29
And as we’ll figure out even better ways to do it, to do it less expensively to incorporate new equipment. So that I think is huge.
50:40
I think another one is the focus on decarbonizing existing buildings. How do you get old buildings, especially in old cities like in the Northeast or the upper Midwest, how do you get those cities to gradually change over all their buildings to be zero carbon?
51:02
We’ve reorganized ourselves over the past year and a half to be able to attack this problem at New Ecology and we’re starting to have some really good early success in the approaches. But I think this is where the action is going to be.
51:17
I actually remember part of why we started WegoWise way back was, that I remember in our old office in Cambridge one day just staring out the window, looking at all the buildings that I could see from the office in in Central Square and saying, thinking to myself, oh my God, like the real challenge is not how you build a new building to a really high standard.
51:38
It’s how you get all these old buildings to this standard!
51:43
It’s taken us like 20 years to get to a point where we’re actually now starting to do that at scale. So I think that’s super exciting and it’s going to the same techniques we’ve been talking about are going to be what gets it done.
51:57
We’re going to have to experiment. We’re going to have to raise money to do experimental things. We’re going to have to be trusted advisors to folks.
52:05
We’re going to have to measure that what we’re doing is actually working and use that data and anecdotes to, to convince other people to do it.
52:13
But I think we’re really well poised to do it and to figure out the new techniques and new equipment.
52:20
I think one of our, one of our hallmarks as an organization has been we’re not afraid to tell building owners not to do something that they might have read about or heard about or be advised about.
52:34
So, figuring out which equipment, especially in this case, is the way to go and not advising people to just do things because that’s what the current buzz is. It’s going to be critical for that.
52:49
The third one I think of is, is the increased attention on naturally occurring affordable housing.
52:55
You know, a lot of our work has been in the subsidized affordable housing worlds where there’s significant money being put to either the building or the renovation of projects.
53:05
If we look around, most people that that are low income don’t live in those housing, that housing. They live in privately owned housing that’s not directly subsidized.
53:17
How do we take all of the, the techniques and the, and apply the goals that we’ve been talking about for climate resilience, for health, for improved durability, to this segment of the market?
53:29
And it’s especially challenging because it’s an unorganized, it’s unorganized, it’s just desperately owned, it’s not heavily regulated.
53:38
So figuring out that the challenge I think is going to be a big part of where of what New Ecology does in the next few years.
53:47
And then, you know, what’s the next level of innovation that we want to really push.
53:55
There’s a whole bunch of different options. One is that we may need to be training construction managers for these small jobs on, especially the naturally occurring affordable housing.
54:06
Because the key to getting those done is having a good construction manager that’s on site and making sure the work is done well. So, training those kinds of, of actors in the field, but also training MBE firms to get a bigger part of this work.
54:23
Individuals who want to come into the field as apprentices or in in new ways, making the work feel exciting and vibrant and that you can make a career at it is going to be I think a key part of what we do going forward.
54:39
And then finally, the innovation in the financing that hopefully comes through the federal IRA funding, the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, and the other funds that are coming out.
54:50
Because if we can move the needle so that in order to get financing for construction, you have to demonstrate some level of decarbonization, high-performance, healthy homes, then we’ll have really changed the entire system, so that all the buildings, especially in parts of the country that aren’t doing this so much, all the buildings are built to the to a really high standard and are climate resilient and better for the occupants.
55:20
So. So I think that’s where, where we’re going now. With new leadership, there’ll be new ideas and new approaches as well. So that’s exciting because we need to keep innovating, because we’re not done here with changing the whole housing stock.
55:37
MM: Keep pushing the ball down the field a little at a time.
55:41
EC: Yeah. Yeah. And then, you know, after 20 years, you can say, wow, look back how far that ball was.
55:52
AM: What advice would you give to someone who’s interested in the field? Maybe working in something adjacent like as an architect or construction manager or even an operations person or someone who’s just searching? Like what types of advice would you give someone who’s interested in getting into this field?
56:14
EC: I keep coming back to the fact that a lot of the work is problem solving. So, figuring out how you know how your experience, whether it’s academic or experience or work experience from related fields, helps you solve problems.
56:30
It just goes back to touching on a lot of the stuff we’ve already talked about, demonstrating some passion for this, demonstrating a commitment to, to learning and figuring stuff out, but then using different skill sets to be to be moving in.
56:44
We have a bunch of ex-architects at New Ecology, and it’s real interesting when you get to. It’s, maybe that should have been one of the things I was most surprised about, is how, how much architecture school generally didn’t emphasize building performance.
57:03
It tended to emphasize more the aesthetic aspects of the building, the community relationship of the building to the community, the artistic aspects of it, the design. But so many architects have told me over the years that they never learned anything about building performance.
57:19
Yet a lot of the folks that are at New Ecology now realize that just doing the traditional way of designing buildings wasn’t going to do it for them. They wanted to do more, and that’s how they ended up transitioning to this work.
57:33
There are some folks that may need to go back to school for some training, but it doesn’t need to be a complete master’s program.
57:41
It’s not one thing. It’s different for every person, but it all just comes down to, what this field needs is persuasion and problem solving, demonstrating that you can do things different, that it’ll work and that you can explain to people what you’re doing.
57:56
So that’s, that’s not a degree, right? You don’t get a degree in that right?
58:02
Or, you know, you don’t have a job that that’s your job title, right. So, everybody that’s good at what they do does that all the time.
58:09
And so, drawing that out from past experience, I think is the key.
58:15
AM: Mm hmm. That’s great.
58:17
MM: Ed, would you like to close out this first podcast with any final thoughts?
58:23
EC: Oh boy. You know, one thing I want to just say is how grateful I am for being given the opportunity to lead this organization, and to grow it over the years, and to what an awesome experience it’s been to work with so many cool people all across the country, all across the field, in our organization, outside of our organization.
58:44
I really feel blessed that I’ve been able to get myself into this situation and take advantage of it and, and make something of it. So I’m very, very grateful for that.
58:56
It’s odd for me to be leaving at a time where all the work for the last 20 years is finally getting to the place where it’s where it’s ready to take off really quickly. So I thought a lot about that.
59:10
There’s an oddness to it, but there’s also like a satisfaction that there’s been enough people that have been indoctrinated that that they can take it to the next level, you know?
59:23
And, you know, what you worry about too is, getting stale, or not, you know, having said what you have to say. It’s good to have other voices, you know? So, I think I’m excited that there’ll be new voices at New Ecology, and I’m really excited to see what happens in the next several years as we move on to new things.
59:43
But I think we’re as an organization in a really good place. And as I said before, it’s taken so many people to do this work. I’m not walking out the door with all the skills in my backpack. They’re, they’re spread deeply throughout the whole organization.
59:57
So, so that’s exciting, to see that. It’s exciting also to be able to watch it and not have to do it! So yeah.
1:00:03
AM: Thank you for joining the podcast, but also just for all your work over the years, and leading the organization, we’ve clearly come such a long way. So it’s, it’s great that we get to connect with you as we launch this podcast.
1:00:23
EC: Yeah and I’ll be listening!
1:00:26
AM: Great, we have at least one listener!
1:00:31
EC: Yeah! I think this is really exciting that, you know, one thing that I always wanted to do and never really had the resources or the time is to spread our message broader and wider. So, I’m, I’m glad you guys are taking this on, and maybe I’ll be on the editorial board, who knows sometime.
Music starts playing
1:00:48
AM: Sounds great.
1:00:49
EC: Thanks, thanks for the chance to, to talk about what I’ve learned.
1:00:53
MM: There’s always a spot for you on this podcast, Ed!
1:00:55
MM: OK, that has been the BuildingWell podcast by New Ecology, 25 years of sustainable community development.
1:01:05
Thank you to my co-host Alina Michelewicz, and our guest today, Ed Connelly, the President of New Ecology.
1:01:13
To learn more about some of what we’ve spoken about today, please check out our website, newecology.org
1:01:19
Or you can find us on social media: Instagram, LinkedIn or Twitter at New Ecology Inc, and we look forward to seeing you in the next podcast.
1:01:26
Thank you!
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