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Community Environmental Center Receives $3 Million DOE Grant for Innovative Weatherization Project
Wednesday, September 1st, 2010

Jay Ackley of CEC: A Minnesotan in Gotham
Monday, August 30th, 2010

Lack of Will on Cap & Trade Undermines Recovery and Hurts Climate, But Is There a Future for HomeStar?
Thursday, July 29th, 2010

Donna Parris: Woman of Many Lives
Monday, July 26th, 2010

Community Environmental Center and other agencies receive $12.9 million from DHCR for affordable housing weatherization
Friday, July 23rd, 2010

Community Environmental Center leads a state-of-the-art solar thermal project for the Ridgewood Bushwick Senior Citizens Council
Thursday, July 15th, 2010

Community Environmental Center is installing solar thermal systems in New York City
Thursday, July 8th, 2010

Community Environmental Center Welcomes JetBlue Airways to the Cool Roofs Movement
Monday, June 21st, 2010

21-year-old Spring Creek Towers resident is learning to weatherize homes
Tuesday, June 15th, 2010

Spring Creek Towers: A City Within The City
Monday, June 7th, 2010

The Energizers – Queens Courier

         
Monday, January 25th, 2010


The Queens Courier‘s February edition has a wonderful article about CEC’s work to help low-income residents save money on energy bills and reduce the city’s greenhouse gas emissions by expanding to help other groups.

Download the PDF spread here.  The LIC Courier Magazine is in stores around Long Island City now.

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PHOTOS AND ARTICLE BY CEZARY PODKUL

Amelia Mae Steward shows one of her old energy-wasting lightbulbs.

On a bright, cold December morning, as a big white truck pulled up to Amelia Mae Steward’s red brick townhouse in Canarsie, Brooklyn, her preacher’s promise suddenly became true.

Months earlier, Steward had heard during a Sunday mass at her Baptist church that there was a city-based organization that would send technicians to refit her home with more energy efficient insulation and technology – for free, thanks to a federally-funded weatherization program.

Skeptical at first, she decided to apply for weatherization services from the Community Environmental Center (CEC), a nonprofit organization located at 43-10 11th Street, just south of the Queensboro Bridge in Long Island City. With a monthly $1,180 check from the Social Security Administration as her income and an annual gas bill of $2,500, the 69 year-old retiree easily met the CEC’s low-income approval criteria.

Tahlia Williams installs energy efficient lightbulbs for Ms. Steward.

Soon, holes were being drilled in Steward’s walls and a rackety insulation machine was channeling a blizzard of brittle, gray cellulose fiber into them. Upstairs, crew member Tahlia Williams installed energy-efficient light bulbs. “I’m seeing my money come back to me,” Steward rejoiced as she watched them.

If Richard Cherry were there to witness her say this, he might well have cracked a smile. The Brooklyn native founded the CEC in 1994 precisely to help people like Steward save money on their energy bills. Today, the nonprofit still largely focuses on weatherizing low-income homes. But, along the way, as Cherry’s thinking about environmental issues has evolved, so has the CEC – to the point where, if you ask him today what his organization is all about, he’ll probably say, “our overall mission is to do what we can to reduce greenhouse gases coming out of buildings in New York City.”

That’s no small mission. In 2008 alone, the city released 53.3 million metric tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, according to the latest Inventory of New York City Greenhouse Gas Emissions. The city estimates that 80 percent of that comes from existing buildings. Cherry wasn’t always this ambitious, though.

“Back 15 years ago, we were not smart enough to recognize what was happening with greenhouse gasses and climate change – at least I wasn’t,” he said. Thus, in the mid-90s, the CEC largely carried on the work of a previous community organization, the New York Urban Coalition, which weatherized homes under a nonprofit contract with the state government. “We took that contract over when we started the CEC,” he said. The goal was simple: make low-income homes more energy-efficient.

The bulk of the beneficiaries have been people like Steward, whom the CEC serves across government-assigned territories in Brooklyn and Queens (Long Island City, ironically, falls outside its territory, so the CEC does not do any weatherization work there). The CEC contracts with the state government to perform the weatherization in those areas and then gets paid through funds the state receives from the U.S. government. To date, the CEC has performed weatherization work for 16,134 families.

The CEC expanded beyond weatherization in 2006. That year, former Vice President Al Gore released “An Inconvenient Truth,” a documentary aimed at raising public awareness about the crisis posed by global warming.

“I got up from that movie and looked at a colleague of mine who was about 35 years old at that time who was with me and realized it was his world that was disappearing,” Cherry recalled. “And we were, in fact, in a position to be helpful,” he added.  So CEC broadened its mission “to not just be focused on low-income housing but to be focused on greenhouse gasses,” he said.

Cherry accomplished that by adding a slew of new services. For example, the CEC began doing work for homeowners and businesses that did not qualify for low-income weatherization assistance but were willing to pay to have their buildings re-fitted for energy efficiency. It’s “what in the non-profit world is called ‘fee-for-service,’” or revenue generating services, explained Cherry. Totaling up all its activities – including weatherization – the CEC has performed energy efficiency work for more than 35,000 families since its founding, saving New Yorkers an estimated $315 million in utility costs.

The fee-for-service activities help combat climate change – as do their revenues. The CEC sets aside a portion of its for-profit earnings every year to support environmental education services at Solar One – a solar-powered community center in Manhattan’s Stuyvesant Cove Park. There, a variety of educational programs help teach K-12 schoolchildren how to lead environmentally-responsible lives and job training programs prepare adults for work in environmentally-friendly careers. If all goes well, this year Solar One will break ground on a second, 8,000 square-foot facility in the same location.

In Astoria, another CEC affiliate, Build It Green! NYC, sells salvaged and surplus building materials as a way to keep them out of landfills. Cash and merchandise donations help the organization fulfill its nonprofit mission, and, as with the CEC itself, its revenues also help support Solar One.

Cherry is also expanding the CEC’s activities in LIC. He’s struck up an arrangement with the Long Island City Business Development Corporation to refer local businesses to the CEC for energy efficiency work under its fee-for-service activities.

No one has yet taken him on the offer.  But he’s still got plenty of reasons to celebrate the CEC’s Long Island City location, now in its 12th year. As a transportation hub, it’s easy for employees to get to and from.  During a typical day, while administrative, outreach and financial staff type away at their computers and work their phones, crews of technicians pack up the vans and hit the road for their appointments in other neighborhoods.

CEC also uses its LIC headquarters as a staging ground for job training, which is likely to pick up speed this year. Last year, Congress’s $787 billion stimulus bill provided an additional $5 billion for the federal weatherization program. In June 2009, the CEC received $16 million of that money, plus another $12.5 million in December.

“That has made it possible for us to obviously do a great deal more work [and] hire more people,” Cherry said. In 2009, the CEC hired about 14 additional weatherization technicians. Two additional accountants also joined the staff just so the CEC can keep up with all the additional demand; CEC currently holds contracts to weatherize 4,500 building units over the next 18 months.

As demand surges, so, inevitably, will another number. Prominently displayed on the CEC’s webpage stands a clock totaling every fraction of a pound of carbon emissions saved by its activities: 1,623,589,659.938 as of press time – and counting.