Training and Workforce Development

This session will explore the use of systems thinking to accelerate decarbonization in homes and organizations. Through a case study of a single family property being redeveloped as a Passive House infill project, we will illustrate how the design and construction process can leverage the developer’s needs and available incentives. This session is appropriate for the emerging professional in building science as well as the experienced practitioner who wants to level up their impact.

When used early in the design process, energy modeling is a powerful tool for decision making, not only for sizing equipment but also for shaping buildings and selecting materials. Iterative energy modeling results in reductions in construction costs, embodied carbon, and energy use. With current climate and energy goals, energy modeling must be a tool available to all design and building professionals. Learn to create energy models of your own today!

Building with bio-based materials allow us to address the combined crises of climate change, biodiversity loss, and social inequity. Workforce development, housing access, regional supply chains, and sustainable food and forest systems are all key elements of climate resilience and justice. In this session, learn how building materials fit into this pattern as we explore a UN report on biomaterials and a Northeast initiative to scale their use in the built environment.

To achieve mass adoption of offsite construction, the building process as we know it has to be reevaluated from multiple perspectives. This is especially true when combined with the goals of scaling up low-carbon and high-performance objectives. The session will explore how the three primarily residential companies have built their businesses around offsite manufacturing principles and have developed strategies to “unsilo” the industry.

The impact of building materials on human and environmental health has received increased attention, and hundreds of design firms have pledged to support healthier materials. Ensuring healthier material selections requires complex decisions and collaborations. Acknowledging this challenge, how can the industry adopt meaningful material health goals across all projects? How can we build on the work others are doing?

The global implications of climate change require immediate local action, with a major priority being to have a well-trained green workforce to meet the growing labor needs. Local Initiatives Support Corporation (LISC) Boston, alongside various community partners, piloted the Bridges to Green Jobs program in early 2021 to make clean energy industry jobs accessible to Black and Brown residents.

Think you know effective heat pump sizing and design? Significant market growth of cold-climate air-source heat pumps has resulted in new insights and lessons learned. Come explore new tools and best practices to enable improved design, sizing, and selection of ASHPs in this session with NEEP and Abode, and stay on the leading edge!

On October 22, 2022 we held the inaugural Touch A Trade event in Kent, CT. The goal of this event was to introduce pre-teen and teenage children to various trades via hands-on experiences. This first event attracted nearly 500 participants, exceeding projected attendance and demonstrating the value of similar future events. This session will focus on our planning process, outcomes, and feedback from presenters and visitors alike, and appraise the value of the Touch a Trade event as a viable workforce development strategy to be scaled in other communities.

Join principals of New Frameworks and Builders for Climate Action for a critical look at our practices that have endeavored to embed justice and belonging alongside the highest goals for building health, efficiency, and carbon storage in projects - for the purpose of workshopping how our industry can scale carbon storage and justice, rapidly, to address climate justice.

While recent state legislation across the region has codified ambitious greenhouse gas emission reduction targets in statute, these bills have had a clear lack of funding to address the massive capital investment needed. The tide may now be turning, however, with the recent passage of the Inflation Reduction Act and the implementation of significant state-level incentives, such as those laid out in Massachusetts' new energy efficiency triennial plan. This session will review the emerging funding landscape and identify effective strategies to leverage and stack these various incentives.

Expanding our workforce by meaningful inclusion and retention of people from marginalized groups will be critical to scale our work. We have all heard statements, jokes, and questions in the workplace that make us cringe, but we may not have the skills to respond constructively in the moment. This session will offer tools to engage with these subtle acts of exclusion and focus on learning skills from real examples from job sites and office environments. Core principles such as intent vs. impact, acknowledging our own biases, and recognizing micro-aggressions will be explored.