Plat forms people can use to solve events at higher level, more impact - partnerships around platforms

Leverage work to be done on energy efficiency with job seekers and interns. Creative partnerships.

Green Justice Coalition in Boston, Community Labor United - brought together labor unions, low income neighborhoods, to advance energy efficiency retrofits in low income neighborhoods hiring local people with living wage jobs. Article: http://www.thenation.com/article/154165/doing-green-jobs-right

How are the environmental groups organizing ourselves

Social network maps - example of climate action groups

Green and Healthy Building Network example - how to get non-profits to collaborate in their work pursuing green/healthy buildings - learn who is doing what, find overlaps, coordinate their work. Challenge of non-profits fighting for same funding. Foundations have key role as convener.
Link: http://www.ndcollaborative.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=category&layout=blog&id=37&Itemid=69

Business week - has maps of different boards, see the links.

Climate Corps - work with Net Impact to recruit students. Work with RMI on training materials.

Health Care without Harm is an example of a partnership/coalition that is helping hospitals all over the country to be more energy efficient. Conferences, sharing solutions among people within hospitals going green. Promoting friendly competition between hospitals, e.g., many Boston hospitals are building new LEED buildings. www.noharm.org

Project Get Ready - RMI - establishing and building networks of 'champions' around the country to encourage electric vehicles. Get buy in from utility, someone in government, and a champion in each community - to join the Initiative. RMI supports champions in getting more support (e.g., from utility). RMI helps exchange lessons learned. Host monthly calls with utilitity, technology providers, champions on one big call. Provide ways for someone in Raleigh to talk about charging infrastructure with someone in another place to exchange lessons learned. It works because you're empowering someone in their community. Helps the champion's career, they get to lead.
5 cities now. Hard to provide with good service. Hard to manage 25 cities and have value. RMI also tracks and provides resources. No interaction discussion forum on line. www.Project Get Ready.com

EASE Initiative - vendor that provides on-line tools to enable people to collaborate/network across organizations on a common goal. Includes social networking software where people put in their profile and find all the people in the network who could be helpful. Also has collaborative action plan tools for benchmarking, coordinating across organizations on common action plans, templates to share best practices across a network. Link: http://www.easeinitiative.com/

We need new mindsets to work in networks, we're used to hierarchies. How do we create platforms that let the network participants self-organize to connect, work together, share ideas, and solve problems together?

How do you change the industry to do deep energy retrofits? How do we do the process so we get to scale fast? Get partnerships with leaders. RMI - sees need for technology/software companies that do facility management, large real estate associations, trade associations for buildings - whole range of stakeholders. Get a few big ones to innovate first.

Partnering with community organizations to help do energy efficiency in large residential buildings, government agencies, etc. Lots of work needed to build relationships.

A Better City - has voluntary environmental initiatives to help local businesses implement energy efficiency. Work closely with utilities, and the city in partnership.

Partnerships is a way to punch beyond your weight to spread sustainability.

Working with municipalities on energy efficiency in residential - need to forge public/private partnerships with local NGO's. No one has $$. Need grants - they're restricted, hard to fund even consulting/convening time.

How do you get small business to implement energy efficiency investments? Getting buy in originally is tough, then getting $$ to pay for it is hard. utlility programs focus on light bulbs. Utilities process is bureaucratic, moves slowly - slower than pace of small business.

Challenge - to convince them to go green.

Boston Green Tourism - regular convening of hotels in Boston, every 6 weeks. Friendly competition among peers, connections to latest/greatest green topics and ideas, members share their stories of greening. It's more effective hearing it from their peers, seeing it on a tour, than getting sold on it from a consultant. The network creates added benefit of professional networking, e.g., to help people have good contacts if they want to find a new job.

How could this model be used elsewhere? Are their ongoing gatherings of residential facility managers?

Expand opportunities for people to interact, stay engaged and share information. How do you use web sites to help facilitate those discussions?