7/31/24
From Hank Keating, Board President
Many of you will have read Aaron’s message by now and may have questions regarding our future plans. I’m writing to reassure all of our members and followers that PHMass is on the brink of significantly expanding our mission.
Aaron and I have served together for the last seven years and, working with our Board and many partners, we have accomplished a lot. We played a key role in lobbying EOHLC to add Passive House bonus points into the QAP scoring system. We also advocated for expanding the Mass Save Passive House Incentive Program and becoming Mass Save’s primary partner in Passive House trainings. In addition, we helped to educate cities and towns as they considered whether or not to adopt the Specialized Opt-In Stretch Code that requires multifamily buildings over 12,000 SF to be Passive House Certified. Taken together, these accomplishments have resulted in a pipeline of over 13,000, multi-family Passive House units in the State, most of which will be designed and built in the next 4 years. I want to thank Aaron for his contributions to this growth.
PHMass was recently awarded a three-year, $1M MassCEC grant to dramatically increase Passive House trainings aimed at new development teams – including design professionals, GC’s and sub-contractors – that will be working to certify Passive House buildings for the first time.
You may have seen that PHMass has posted a job description for an Education Program Director to take on the rapid deployment of the required Passive House trainings. Next week you will see us post a job description for a new Executive Director. We will be hiring for these two positions as soon as possible. Please look for further announcements of the new job descriptions. If you know of anyone who you think might fit either of the job descriptions, please encourage them to apply.
In the meantime, we will be conducting “business as usual” with evening presentations on September 10th, October 8th, November 12th, and our full-day, in-person Annual Symposium on December 10th. The Board and I look forward to engaging more deeply with You – both our Individual Members and Corporate Sponsors. We will be replacing our previous “Sponsorship” drive with a Corporate Membership Program in order to encourage deeper engagement with employees of our Corporate Members. This new program will kick off in September, while we continue to encourage Individual Membership (via the website) all year long. We are entering exciting times. Thank you for engaging with us in this dramatic market transformation.
Thank you.
Hank Keating, AIA
President, Passive House Massachusetts