Member Spotlight: City Green Solutions

In the next installment of our Member Spotlight series, meet Teresa Lawson, Executive Director of City Green Solutions. City Green is an enterprising non-profit based out of Victoria, BC that specializes in energy efficiency services for homes and buildings.

Tell us about your organization and your role within it.

We’re an enterprising non-profit based out of Victoria that specializes in program design and delivery, research, education, and community engagement. Much of our work is focused on residential renovations from the GHG reduction, energy efficiency, and climate resiliency perspective.

As Executive Director of City Green Solutions, my primary focus is on designing and actioning programs for a variety of topics from EnerGuide Rating System (ERS) services to incentive programs to educational and engagement initiatives. I oversee our portfolio of work and lead key stakeholder engagement to connect great ideas to opportunities that can bring those ideas to life.

Why did you become a B2E member?

City Green’s membership was initiated by my predecessor in early 2022, though we proudly remain a member because the B2E Coalition provides an excellent environment for collaboration, and supports multi-disciplinary and multi-industry learning opportunities. B2E has a number of support mechanisms to fund, sustain, and amplify the work of organizations like City Green, and we’ve found the support to be valuable throughout our membership.

What impact has the B2E community had on you/your organization?

A few big pieces include networking and sharing / amplifying ideas. Much of the work City Green does includes getting good ideas out to people, and B2E is an excellent channel for supporting that. B2E has also funded a handful of City Green initiatives through the B2E Project Fund (now the B2E Innovation Fund). These projects have since gone on to be integrated into other community channels, spread through target audiences, and refined through community discourse.

Tell us about an exciting building electrification project that you’re working on.

We have a few exciting things going on. We recently completed the Retrofit! Community Festival, which was an education-forward homeowner-focused pilot event that tested a few different outreach concepts. We explored a "Living Library” for homeowners to learn from real people who have completed efficiency upgrades on their own homes, which received very positive feedback from participants. We also tested taking a guest speaker approach to programming, and found that participants were eager to schedule their day around specific topics and many even spent multiple sessions in a row learning. We’re now in the process of analyzing the full event and drafting a final report, but attendee feedback so far is confirming that an event like this is certainly in demand for the community. With these findings, we’re building a framework that we hope to provide to other communities to support electrification and energy upgrades more broadly.

Another great project we’re working on is the LEEP Trial Homes for Renovations Project, which is a pilot focused on deep energy retrofits and reducing cost barriers to having professional integrated design, mechanical design, and electrical design as part of foundational planning for residential retrofits. Often renovations are single upgrades completed without a holistic whole-home design approach. We’re asking “what if holistic design was part of the retrofit design process?” to learn whether that extra bit of effort will result in achieving better upgrades. We’re really excited about the results of this work.

What do you see as a key driver in advancing electrification in your industry?

Do you have any advice for others (individuals or organizations) who want to follow your path?

Embrace community and networking! These are so crucial. Many challenges are overcome when working with others, and keeping an open mind when working towards common goals has served me well in this work. The values of networking simply weren’t a part of my academic education, but I’ve learned that in this work you cannot pull one thread without pulling many more, so it makes sense to bring in folks who have a different perspective or expertise than your own. It's important to ask "how might we do this differently?” when facing a challenge, and B2E is asking those questions.

I’m in this work for the long haul – when we’re talking about market transformation, decarbonizing buildings, mitigating climate change, the lasting benefits may not be seen within our lifetimes. I don’t expect to reap the rewards of this work but I know it will be worth it, and diversity of perspectives only serves to strengthen the quality of the work we're doing. Change comes with hard work, and we don’t have to go it alone.

For more information on City Green Solutions see their follow their LinkedIn and see their website.