Info & Links

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Questions?

Contact:

• Jesse Foote,
  Manager, Green Campus Building Services - New Construction
  
  
• Darien Crimmin,
  Manager, Green Campus Building Services - Existing Buildings

Start Up Story

In the beginning...

In the beginning, the HGCI was concerned with engaging staff, students and faculty to ‘make the case’ for campus sustainability. Within one year of these efforts it became evident that many staff were very receptive and wanted the HGCI’s help to take action. Over the next two years the HGCI assisted staff to introduce a wide range of new approaches to campus operations. As these experiences evolved, it became evident that staff across Harvard were eager to have a range of mature services for evaluating and implementing building performance improvement options.

In response to this emerging opportunity, the HGCI worked closely with leading departments such as University Operations Services and Harvard Real Estate Services to design, trial and continuously improve a range of formal services. To help this process along, the HGCI recruited two student interns in the summer of 2002.  The HRES Building Systems Intern was given the task of drafting a building auditing approach for residential buildings with HRES, and the High Performance Toolkit Intern developed an educational resource (High Performance Toolkit) for building managers with UOS.

At the conclusion of the internships, the HGCI secured funding to employ a full time staff person for a period of 12 months to build upon the product of the internships and to establish:

• Building Performance Assessment Methodology
• High Performance Building Managers Toolkit (PDF: 1378k)

To ensure the relevance of these efforts, the HGCI established an early building performance assessment project with the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies. The results of this project helped the HGCI to develop a business model to conduct building assessments on a fee-for-service basis.

In early 2003, the HGCI consolidated it’s emerging building performance services into a single program with it’s own dedicated staffing. This program is now known as the HGCI High Performance Building Service (HPBS) and can be utilized by any department within Harvard that is seeking to generate cost-effective building performance improvements and related campus environmental impact reductions.

Since 2003, the HPBS has expanded its client list to University Operations Services, Harvard Real Estate Services’ Residential and University and Commercial groups, and the Harvard Divinity School. In 2007, High Performance Building Services changed its name to Green Campus Building Services (GCBS), for the sake of clarity.