It’s time for our Annual Fund! To MAKE A DONATION to passivhausMAINE, click here. Or read on to learn about what we’ve been up to this year.
To our partners, members + supporters
It’s time to close the books on another fiscal year at passivhausMAINE. This has been a noteworthy year for our organization and for our state, beginning with the re-launch of our training program.
Our training sessions–covering passive house basics, retrofitting, and passive components–have now happened at more than a dozen spots around Maine from Presque Isle to York. This year, with the hiring of our training director, Randy Rand, and the launch of our online training calendar, the expansion continues–this summer, we’ll be holding near weekly training sessions at even more venues around Maine.
It feels good to be hosting in-person events again. In the last year, we’ve been out and about again at sites like the University of Southern Maine’s Portland Commons dormitory, soon to be the second largest passive building at a U.S. university, which we checked out along with the building’s designers. And In February, we held our 10th Annual Forum at the Harraseeket Inn in Freeport, Maine. This was the first in-person forum since Covid and it was GREAT. We had an amazing three days which included a local site walk, plenty of schmoozing, and a packed schedule of workshops and seminars led by some familiar passive community figures as well as brand new movers and shakers doing cool things in Maine’s passive ecosystem. (Check out the photos below, taken by Alexandra Roberts from Decor Maine.)
This energy hasn’t been contained to trainings and events. It seems that Mainers are pressing ever more forcefully for solutions to our housing and climate challenges. We’ve been proud to be a leader in that effort over the last year. Continuing 2022’s successful legislative session, we recently helped to craft, publicize and are currently advocating for Maine’s LD 1101, an act to establish a voluntary system for rating and labeling the efficiency of our building stock in the state.
Our public advocacy work is supported not only by our growing community of members and sponsors (up to 216 currently–nearly double our membership since 2021) but by grants and other support. Notably, Freeport’s Elmina B. Sewall Foundation has again picked us as a recipient of their Healthy People, Healthy Places grant. This year we received twice as much capital support as in 2022.
These are some of the highlights of our last year. Please, join us in these efforts. Remember, Maine won’t wait! But we need your help to address the challenges at the nexus of housing, climate change and equity.
Naomi Beal, passivhausMAINE Executive Director
