Greenbelt, LEED gold at 361 Manhattan Ave., Brookly

New York, NY (February 17, 2010)–Williamsburg, Brooklyn, home to cutting-edge artists and hip restaurants, is now the site of Brooklyn’s first building to receive LEED®-NC Gold certification, announced developer Derek Denckla and Community Environmental Center, the company overseeing the building’s energy design and LEED certification.

Called “Greenbelt,” this energy-efficient, five-story complex contains eight condos and a 4,000-square-foot arts facility on the ground floor. Attesting to the building’s unique green status, Greenbelt is Brooklyn’s first mixed-use facility and arts center to receive this high LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design-New Construction) rating and also New York State’s first multifamily low-rise building to achieve LEED Gold.

Located at 361 Manhattan Avenue, Greenbelt is a joint venture of Brooklyn developer Derek Denckla of Propeller Group and New York architect Gregory Merryweather.

Community Environmental Center (CEC), the Queens-based non-profit company dedicated to energy efficiency and green building, was responsible for the energy modeling, and the LEED consulting and commissioning.

Denckla was seeking an alternative to business-as-usual when he developed the property.

“Unlike the majority of LEED projects sponsored by large corporations building high rise structures, Greenbelt shows that a neighborhood-scaled development can achieve excellence in environmental design for the rest of us,” says Denckla.

“Propeller Group, CEC and the Center for Performance Research hope to inspire other developers to see that Greenbelt has achieved LEED®-NC Gold certification, delivering both environmental sustainability and lasting cultural value,” Denckla adds.

Richard M. Cherry, founder and president of Community Environmental Center, says: “The Greenbelt apartment complex is a model for the urban environment of the future. It provides aesthetically pleasing apartments, offers a cultural component that benefits the community and challenges the climate crisis that affects us all.”

“Green” is the key concept throughout the airy building, which was completed in December 2008.

Each of the eight condos, which range from 750-square-foot 1-bedrooms to 1,100-square-foot 2-bedrooms, includes energy-efficient technologies and green features:  Energy Star appliances and lighting, Forbo Marmoleum floors in the kitchen, Benjamin Moore Eco-Spec low-volatile organic compound (V-OC) interior paint, Richlite compressed paper-and-resin kitchen counters, and high-efficiency dual-flush Caroma toilets.

Rooftop solar panels produce over 6,000 kilowatt-hours of electricity annually—close to the amount a typical New York City household uses in a year—and that energy runs the elevator and the lighting in the building’s common areas.

On Greenbelt’s first floor, dancer Jonah Bokaer and choreographer John Jasperse, co-founders of the Center for Performance Research (CPR), extol the real estate-arts partnership that provides below-market arts space to CPR and other Williamsburg arts groups.

“New York City is facing a real estate crisis that threatens to displace the arts from maintaining permanent, affordable space,” says Bokaer,  “CPR responds to this crisis by offering subsidized workspace for rehearsal and performance, made possible by the sale of the market-rate condominiums above us.”

While the LEED®-NC Gold rating confers supreme recognition of this Brooklyn building’s energy efficiency, the complex has also won the Brooklyn Building Award in the Mixed Use Category and the Cinderella Award for Excellence in Energy Efficient Design. In addition Greenbelt was featured in a 2008 exhibition at the AIA Center for Architecture.

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CONTACTS:  Alexis Greene, Community Environmental Center, 718-784-1444, ext 156 agreene@cecenter.org

Derek Denckla, Propeller Group,  917-674-9040   derek@denckla.com

Stephanie Tack, Center for Performance Research, 718-349-1210, Stephanie@cprnyc.org

To learn more about Greenbelt: www.greenbeltbrooklyn.com

Photograph: Greenbelt, 361 Manhattan Ave., Brooklyn

Alvin Pettway, who always makes a fashion statement. “The only simple explanation I have to offer for my sense of fashion is that appearance is important to me. And I like style – always have.

But perhaps even more rewarding was the day he took his mother, Melerway Pettway, to the retrospective as a surprise. “I stood back,” recalls Alvin, “to watch her reaction, and that was one of the greatest gifts I gave her. My mother was a strong woman – she ordinarily did not cry. But I could actually see a tear drop.”

Co-workers often do not know the background of the man or woman sitting at the desk across from them or working side-by-side on a crew.

Alvin Pettway, CEC’s administrator of technical services, has a particularly unique heritage.

His mother and grandmother were born in Gee’s Bend, Alabama, a knob of land about 30 miles from Selma, where the Alabama River loops among swamps and underneath hanging tendrils of greenery. The area takes its name from a planter named Joseph Gee, who staked his claim to more than 6,000 acres early in the 19^th century.

The Gee family eventually sold their plantation and slaves to a relative named Mark H. Pettway, and after the Civil War a number of freed Pettway slaves – who had either adopted the name or, Alvin surmises, had been born to the Pettway family — became tenant farmers.

The Pettway slaves and their descendents became the renowned quilt-makers of Gee’s Bend, expressing themselves and their community through the painstaking piecing-together of bits of cloth, to create vibrant art. When Alvin married, in fact, his aunt Nazarath Major made him and his wife, Melinda, two quilts in the black-and-white color scheme of their wedding.

Alvin Kirk Pettway inherited the quiet determination of his forbears. Born and raised in New York, where his mother had moved from Gee’s Bend during the 1950s and met Alvin’s father, he went to Fordham Preparatory School in the Bronx and then graduated from Fordham University at Lincoln Center with a degree in economics.

He has been at CEC since before the beginning: his first job was at the Urban Coalition, as the assistant to the purchasing director. “Not that economics and purchasing go hand-in-hand,” says Alvin, with a good-humored smile, “but there’s a correlation there. And being fresh out of school, I just wanted a job.”

The purchasing director left, and Alvin took over her responsibilities. When the Coalition dissolved, Richard Cherry, then President of the Urban Coalition Housing Group, invited certain staff to move with him to the newly formed CEC (initially at Queens Plaza North). “I had no idea I would be among those people,” Alvin says, “but thankfully I was. And I’m still here.”

At CEC he started in the purchasing department, rose to purchasing manager, and in 2004 transferred to technical services. “I track all the work that we do,” says Alvin, speaking with the quiet precision he brings to his job. “I make sure that the reporting is being processed the proper way and is getting to the persons it needs to get to.

“For weatherization, we’re responsible for submitting our reports to DHCR [Division of Housing and Community Renewal]. I’m responsible for making sure the reports get to our field rep and get done, so that Thelma Arceo, who is Manager of Technical Services, can review them and give them back to me, so that I can release them to DHCR and, if DHCR isn’t responding, send them an email.

“One thing hinges on the next. My job is to make sure that all those steps fit together in a nice, neat puzzle.”

Alvin’s peak experience at CEC? “I’d have to say I had fun working in purchasing,” he grins. “From pencils to company cars, I had the best job. Because I love to shop.”

But he adds, “The satisfaction that carries over to the position I have now is in knowing that CEC does good work for many people. Knowing that a senior citizen or a child now has heat, or can close their window and not have air come through the cracks.  I know that we make a difference.”

As someone at CEC since its birth, Alvin has witnessed changes small and large. “Mr. Cherry called an impromptu staff meeting at Christmastime, and I’m looking at the people gathered around Larina’s desk and I did not recognize many of them, because we’ve hired so many new people.” He pauses. “We have definitely branched out.”

There has been change, too, in Alvin’s personal life since starting at CEC. Not only did he marry, but he also became a father. His daughter, Christyn, now 10, keeps both parents busy shepherding her to karate lessons and piano lessons, and choir rehearsals at Macedonia Baptist Church, on 147^th Street between Amsterdam and Convent avenues.  Alvin has been a member there for 31 years: he sings tenor in the choir and is on the Board of Trustees.

Alvin’s mother died in 2008 and was buried in Gee’s Bend.

“It feels as though she’s still here,” says Alvin. “I’m still dealing with her loss. She was my role model. She was the kind of person who just liked helping any and every body, and I’ve adapted that and made it my own mantra. I’m not one for the big spotlight. I’m one for being behind the scenes, quietly getting in, rolling up my sleeves and getting the job done.

“When she passed, I had several people come to me and say, ‘I’m sure you miss her, but know that while she was here, you did for her.’ And I cherish that.”

–A. Greene

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.

Dear Ms. Wiggins,

“I had weatherization and insulation done in June 2009. I could not write to you before, since I had to wait for the cold weather, to judge how well the job was done. Well, this is winter now, and I am very happy with the warmth I am enjoying in the house….I know my gas bill will be much less this year. Thank you very much for placing me on your program.

Yours truly,
Hyacintha C.
Brooklyn

Hyacintha is a retired Registered Nurse who lives with her husband in a four-bedroom house in Brooklyn.

Born in Barbados, she first moved to Canada, then came to the United States and worked and raised a family (the children’s many net-ball and bowling trophies are proudly on display in the dining room).

Hyacintha and her husband bought the house in Brooklyn about 20 years ago. But the house itself is around 100 years old. Even though Hyacintha clearly takes excellent care of her home, it was no surprise that too much cold air was coming in during the winter. “It was very drafty,” Hyacintha said during my recent visit to her beautiful house.

She learned about the weatherization program at Community Environmental Center (CEC) through a flyer she received with her gas bill. She called CEC, and CEC’s Henderson Callender (who also happens to be from Barbados) went to Hyacintha’s house and told her that, if her income was below a certain level, she could be eligible for weatherization at no cost to her or her family.

Processing the application took a little time, but last June a CEC crew began its work. “It took about a week to do the house,” Hyacintha reports.

Of course she had to move some furniture. “But they were excellent,” Hyacintha says about the workmen and women. “Very professional. They always told me when they were going to be here, and what they were going to do. They had to break into the wall to put in some insulation. But they came and worked, and they cleaned up every time before they left.”

CEC’s crew insulated walls throughout the house and even in the attic, where they also changed the door. They checked the boiler, checked the exhaust from the clothes dryer and fixed a problem. They installed a carbon monoxide detector and gave Hyacintha new, energy-efficient light bulbs. “They gave me a new fridge, too,” says Hyacintha. “A nice big one.”

And the best part: “It did not cost me anything,” says Hyacintha.

Now, even during the coldest days in January, her home is comfortable and warm. “It is fantastic,” says Hyacintha.

–A. Greene

646-382-7047, agreene@cecenter.org

Long Island City, NY (January 20, 2010) – Community Environmental Center (CEC), the New York-based non-profit dedicated to green building and energy efficiency, has received the State & Local Energy Report’s 2009 Weatherization Award.

The award recognizes CEC’s installation of solar thermal systems in two multifamily buildings belonging to Cypress Hills Local Development Corporation in Brooklyn, in March 2009.

These were the first solar thermal systems of their kind to be installed in New York State under the state’s Weatherization Assistance Program (WAP).

“Community Environmental Center is proud to receive this Weatherization Award,” said Richard Cherry, CEC’s founder and CEO. “With solar heating systems like those in the Cypress Hills buildings, renewable energy from the sun can be used to help pre-heat your hot water, which reduces the amount of energy used, lowers a home-owner’s heating costs and reduces greenhouse gas emissions. CEC thanks the State & Local Energy Report for recognizing this achievement.”

EarthKind Energy, New York State’s leading authority on solar thermal technologies and CEC’s collaborator on the project, explains the process:

Solar panels containing a mixture of water and a food-grade glycol (the same substance that is in ice cream and  toothpaste) absorbs 94 percent of the sun’s energy. The heated solution then transfers the heat to water in a storage tank, which provides pre-heated water for a building’s existing hot-water tanks and reduces the energy used by 50 percent or more. And provides plenty of hot water for your morning shower.

Following their successful Brooklyn partnership, CEC and EarthKind are now installing New York City’s largest solar hot water system, for the apartment complex at Wadsworth Terrace on West 189^th Street. At that site, 42 hot water collectors will save more than 3,500 gallons of heating oil each year and will eliminate the emission of more than 86,000 pounds of carbon dioxide each year.

CEC continues to lead New York State in terms of weatherizing low-income homes and multi-family buildings, primarily in Brooklyn and Queens.

Patrick in his office at CEC.

“Some people think that having a black belt in Karate is the ultimate prize,” says Patrick Goodluck, on-site manager for CEC’s weatherization crews and Karate artist extraordinaire. “It is not. In our philosophy, you reach the mountaintop, where do you go from there? Start over. A belt is a symbolic gesture of your progression in the art, not the main objective. The main objective is you.”

We are sitting one morning in the crew managers’ office, overlooking CEC’s garage. For the moment the garage is quiet: trucks and crews are out, and the metal door is down, shutting out the December chill. Patrick, looking trim and serious but occasionally flashing a dazzling smile, is talking about Karate’s impact on his life and career, including his work at CEC.

In short, he is telling his story.

He was born in St. Vincent’s — “A small, beautiful island,” says Patrick — one of 32 islands called the Grenadines, in the Caribbean. His father’s family came from Portugal, his mother’s from Africa and the East Indies. The name “Goodluck” belonged to his mother’s father – in the Caribbean at that time you could give or be called any name you wished — but how his grandfather acquired the intriguing name, Patrick never learned.

His family farmed the land, growing spices, pineapples and mangoes and bananas, coconut and sugarcane. But at his mother’s urging, when Patrick left school he mastered a craft instead, for his mother believed that would give him personal independence. Joining his father’s cousin, who made metal furniture, Patrick learned welding and how to construct furniture out of iron and steel. Then at 18, again on his mother’s advice, he left St. Vincent’s for Trinidad, “to get a better opportunity.”

Trinidad is the birthplace of the Steelpan drum and the Limbo, congenial host to festive parties and an annual carnival, and a bustling center for industry and commerce. There, Patrick met his wife, Veronica, and proudly became the father of two daughters, Patrice and Crystal, and a stepson, Richard. His third daughter, Precious, would be born in the U.S.

In Trinidad, Patrick discovered that welding hurt his eyes, so he moved into masonry and the construction trades. “That’s the ability of Caribbean guy,” he says. “We don’t just hold on to one craft, we do a number of things.”

And in Trinidad, at around the age of 19, he discovered Karate.

“My style of martial art is Kyokushin,” Patrick explains. “Its founder was Sosai Masutatsu Oyama, who was from Korea and grew up in Japan.”

“Kyokushin is budō karate,” says Patrick. “The Samurai way: full contact. Bare knuckle. The only protective gear you have is a mouthpiece and something at the groin. It’s similar to street fighting. The cage fighting you have? All that stem from what we do.”

Patrick stresses the toughness of the form, which demands that you train “mind and body and soul.”

“If you want to compete at a high level you have to be committed,” he emphasizes, “because the training is really intense and rigorous. I formally trained with a teacher, but you got to train on your own.” In Trinidad, after his Karate classes were over, he would go home and practice for hours.

The common perception is that Karate prepares you to fight. But as Patrick experiences the world of Kyokushin, much more than physical aggression is involved. “The actual exercises make your body respond as a weapon,” he says, “but within the exercises there is training for the mind to overcome some of your weaknesses. You have physical training, psychological training, spiritual training. They all interlock.”

The highpoint of Patrick’s Karate studies came in 1987, when he traveled to Shinjuku, Japan, to compete in an international tournament. A competitor has three minutes in which to knock down or knock out an opponent, and Patrick, who by then carried a black belt, made it to the quarterfinals, fighting men from France, Guyana, Norway, and Japan.

After the tournament he took a much-needed vacation and visited one of his half-brothers, in New York City. Patrick’s relatives encouraged him to remain in the U.S. and helped him get a green card, and in 1988 Patrick moved to New York with his family and soon found construction jobs. In 1994 he was working on a crew for the Urban Coalition, and when the Coalition dissolved and Richard Cherry founded CEC, Patrick went with him.

Patrick looks over the CEC warehouse.

Today Patrick is responsible for ensuring the high quality of the CEC weatherization crews’ work. He helps homeowners prepare their houses, and once CEC’s workmen and women are at a site, he oversees the job, often teaching a new crew member weatherization skills.

What does he like best about his role? “Helping the environment and helping people,” says Patrick. “I also like to do the job. The hands-on part. Reduce air infiltration, install light bulbs. I like to know that what I do physically and mentally really makes a difference.”

As with Karate, he dedicates himself rigorously to the task at hand. Certified by the Building Performance Institute (BPI), he goes to conferences, reads books about the environment and weatherization. “You got to read,” he states, “because there’s a constant flow of information.”

Reading happens at home in Canarsie, Brooklyn. “Where you live,” says Patrick, “should always be controlled in such a way that, when you get home from work, it’s quiet, you relax. Not to say I don’t play music, but I want to be able to reflect.”

He assists around the house, although he acknowledges that many men of his background and generation might question whether that’s a man’s function. But Patrick has no problem sharing household duties. “I cook, I wash, I press my clothes. I do everything. I think that, as a husband, as a father, I should be there.”

He relishes politics and he likes to travel. He competed in another world-class Karate event in Japan in 1999. Often he goes back to Trinidad and to St. Vincent’s, where his mother, who is now 82, still lives. “I’m a Caribbean person,” he says, smiling affectionately. “But I’m American now. So I have allegiance to America first, no doubt about that. I love America. But there are some things that we could do better. We fighting and killing each other because of some men color, sometime your class, sometime your status in society, sometime where you live. It makes no sense. All of us are human beings.”

And of course he always, studiously, practices Karate. Because training your body and your mind and your soul never stops.

Long Island City, NY (December 28, 2009) – An eTown broadcast featuring Richard M. Cherry, president of Community Environmental Center (CEC) can be heard on a podcast from December 23-29.  Click on the headline and then click on the green arrow to play the 10-minute interview.

Taped on December 7, 2009 before a live audience in New York City, the interview was part of a 2-hour broadcast that also featured popular singer and songwriter Tori Amos at the piano and singer and satirist Loudon Wainwright III.

Richard Cherry, who was interviewed by eTown host Nick Forster, received the E-Chievement Award for CEC’s dedication to energy efficiency and green building solutions.

eTown, a variety radio program that offers music and conversation, aims to educate, entertain and inspire a diverse audience, in order to create a socially responsible and environmentally sustainable world.

by Arthur Zaczkiewicz; photograph by Deborah Degraffenreid

CEC’s 1347 Bristow project was featured in an article lauding the changes that the greenly renovated building has inspired in its tenants.

Some excerpts:

“Living here has changed my life,” Rivera says matter-of-factly as she gives a tour of the building, noting the Fiberglas-framed windows, Energy Star appliances, energy saving fixtures, and ventilation system that allows for a hermetically sealed home. The latter made her think hard about indoor air quality and her health. “So after 30 years, I quit smoking,” she says. “I feel great, and I lost 60 pounds. I truly feel blessed.”

…

Larsen Plano, LEED Accredited Professional (AP) at the Long Island City-based Community Environmental Center, which consulted on the retrofit, says 1347 Bristow represents a unique green trend in urban areas. Plano says greening an existing building rather than constructing a new one “is more environmentally friendly because you’re cutting down on the impacts associated with siting a new building—whether that’s demolishing an old building or developing a greenfield site—and you’re vastly decreasing the amount of new materials that you need.”

Plano says that even so, “real world” situations can complicate considerations of green retrofitting, but adds that from a climate perspective, “it is imperative that we improve existing buildings.”

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE, PLEASE

Nick Forster talks with Richard M. Cherry (right) at eTown Taping on Dec 7

Long Island City, NY (December 9, 2009) — Richard M. Cherry, president of Community Environmental Center (CEC), the New York City-based nonprofit dedicated to energy efficiency and green building solutions, received eTown’s E-Chievement Award on Monday, December 7, at a radio taping at the New Yorker Hotel in New York City.

Interviewed on stage by eTown co-host Nick Forster, Cherry spoke movingly about the need for weatherization assistance to low-income homeowners and city residents, the core of CEC’s work.

“The environment begins at your threshold,” said Cherry. ” Energy conservation on the part of people who live and work in cities can have a hugely positive impact on our planet.”

Cherry also stressed that making homes and other buildings energy efficient benefits the environment, and that New York City is one of the most energy-efficient urban centers in the U.S.

The interview will air and podcast December 23-28.

ETown is a weekly one-hour radio show that is carried by more than 270 commercial and non-commercial stations in the US and around the world. A non-profit organization, eTown’s mission is to educate, entertain and inspire a wide-ranging audience through music and conversation, and to create a socially responsible and environmentally sustainable world.

Community Environmental Center (CEC) was founded in 1994 as a not-for-profit organization, to bring building energy performance technologies and services to a wide-ranging market. It was the first New York City non-profit to focus on environmental issues in housing and development. CEC is the umbrella organization for Build It Green www.BIGNYC.org and for Solar One www.solar1.org