Green Economy Task Force

Cory Suter, BioNeighbors Sustainable Homes

By Susan Boni

When Cory Suter, 27, migrated to Philadelphia from Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley in 2006, the new college graduate brought a business plan, a wealth of construction experience, and a name for his future company.   BioNeighbors would be a green for-profit company that also created social benefits. 

At James Madison University, Cory, who has strong roots in the Mennonite community, had learned about triple bottom line businesses.  “Some things should always come ahead of mere monetary profit,” he says.

“What I was most excited about in that original business plan was all these green building technologies that I was learning about,” Cory adds.  “I wanted to find simple, affordable technologies that could help existing city buildings use less energy and last longer.”  

As he settled into his home on West Oak Lane, Cory discovered he needed a new roof.  He found a local roofer willing to experiment with him and installed a white, or cool, roof that fall.  A cool roof reflects and emits the sun’s heat back to the sky instead of transferring it into the building.

“I knew that cool roofing helps the roof last much longer and also saves the homeowner on cooling costs,” says Cory, who installed his first traditional roof with his Dad when he was in elementary school.  As the interest in cool roofs grew, Cory was able to launch BioNeighbors Sustainable Homes in early 2007.

Next, Cory decided to learn everything he could about green, or vegetated, roofing systems.  Traveling to Rochester, NY, he gained hands-on training with Elevated Landscape Technologies (ELT), a Canadian company that makes lightweight green roof systems well suited for existing buildings.

Cory also became certified with LiveRoof, a manufacturer of modular green roofing systems.   Most recently, he earned his highest accreditation as a Green Roof Professional (GRP) from Green Roofs for Healthy Cities, the largest industry trade group in the green roofing field.

Cory recently completed five green roofs in partnership with Green Homeworks on Bancroft Green, a row of townhomes in South Philadelphia.

He has also won the contract to do twenty carriage-home units for Sheldon Crossing in Manyunk,  “We’re actually going       to have a lawn with small trees and shrubs on top of a house,” says Cory, adding that “if you plan ahead, the sky’s the limit.” 

As Cory’s business grows and wins lucrative contracts, he is also working to fulfill the rest of his vision—to expand the cool and green roof industry city-wide by speaking and advocating whenever and wherever he can, and to offer lower-cost green roofs in low-income communities.

Last summer Cory did a pilot program with The Partnership Community Development Corporation, a non-profit neighborhood development organization in West Philadelphia.   The executive director, Steve Williams, excited by Cory’s concept of low-cost green roofs and his interest in training others, asked Cory to ‘teach some of the guys in the neighborhood.’  

Cory trained three ex-offenders and together they installed two cool roofs and a large green roof on The Partnership CDC headquarters.   The project was so successful that PECO provided a generous grant to Partnership CDC for between twenty and thirty cool roofs and ten green roofs in the neighborhood.

Cory is training five more ex-offenders to work with him on the project. “We’re hoping to transform a whole block of row houses,” says Cory.  “My goal now,“ he adds, “is to train the guys well enough to pass a professional accreditation exam.”

True to his entrepreneurial spirit and social conscience, Cory observes “I have to do what I can as one person to help see our city transformed into a whole sea of green and white roofs,” which is fitting, he notes, since green and white are the Eagles’ colors. 

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Dawn Moody, Energy Coordinating Agency  

By: Susan Boni 

Dawn Moody will go to extremes to help people, especially when she’s helping them heat their homes and conserve energy.   That is why Moody, at the age of 42, left a comfortable, salaried position to train for a green collar job as an energy auditor earning $11 an hour. 

While a Director of the Friends Neighborhood Guild’s Neighborhood Energy Center, Dawn, who grew up in West Philadelphia and now lives in Olney, realized “that a lot of low-income clients we served were pretty uneducated on energy conservation.”  The Guild’s NEC helped folks access government grants for lighting and heating; however, once the grants ended homeowners still struggled with ways to conserve energy. 

That is when Dawn, undaunted by her lack of tool knowledge and hands-on experience, decided to help people weatherize their homes.  The petite single mother of two applied for a position as an Energy Auditor with the Energy Coordinating Agency (ECA), a non-profit organization that helps people conserve energy. 

ECA sent Dawn for paid training to Weatherization Training Center (WTC) at Pennsylvania College of Technology in Williamsport where she spent many weeks learning the tools of the trade.  By the time she was certified, Dawn had learned to use sophisticated tools like a blower door assembly, a manometer, a gas leak detector and a combustion analyzer, along with the more ordinary hammer, saw, and screwdriver.  “I ruined a lot of manicures,” she laughs.  

Once Dawn became an Auditor, her biggest on-the-job challenge was her height.  At 5 feet 2 inches, it was difficult to check insulation in people’s attics or insert a hole in a flue pipe that was six feet off the floor.  Ever the problem solver, Dawn alerted ECA who now pairs a tall with a short auditor. 

After sixteen months of auditing homes, Dawn says the most rewarding part of the job is helping customers conserve energy as well as money.  “We run into a lot of customers who have to make decisions about whether they’re going to put oil in their tank or food in their refrigerator.  We come in and install a programmable thermostat, then they don’t have to keep their oil heater running all the time; they are very grateful,” she says. 

Recently, Dawn completed a rigorous national certification program for a BPI Building Analyst, and has been promoted to Project Assistant at ECA’s new John and James Knight Green Jobs Training Center.  Dawn will assist other weatherization workers to become certified in Pennsylvania. 

I asked Dawn if she thought it was easy enough for the average person to follow in her footsteps.  “Absolutely,” she said without hesitation.  “Any ordinary homeowner or resident, who wanted to learn about it, could do it.”  Dawn noted that the hourly entry-level rate for energy auditors has now increased to a minimum of $14 an hour including benefits depending on training and work experience. 

She emphasizes that auditing homes is a great job for women.  “We’re caretakers anyway so I think it’s an easy fit for us.  Women shouldn’t be intimidated by the uniform, the tools, or by the equipment at all.” 

Right now, stimulus funds from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) are creating high demand for weatherization skills.  But even after the funding expires, Dawn believes these kinds of green jobs are here to stay.  “The cost of energy is just going to increase, so energy conservation is going to become vital to us all.” 

Note on the Author: Susan Boni is a local free-lance journalist who has written for the Inquirer, Daily News and Grist Magazine in the past and is now returning to the craft.  The GETF would like to thank her for generously donating her time and effort for this project. 

  

 

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