My team at the Institute for Sustainable Communities last month put on a building energy retrofit + green job creation "Green Boot Camp" in partnership with Living Cities, a consortium of foundations and financial institutions. It brought together teams of up to 7 people from each of 16 leading-edge cities to discuss and work on their challenges to scaling up energy retrofits: policy and outreach, funding, creating job opportunities, and creating systems to coordinate long-term activities. A lot of time was spent developing a peer-learning and team-building environment. The biggest obstacle really was that city departments tend to be silo-ed. Some folks from the same city government had never met each other, particularly the energy folks and workforce folks.
We have feedback forms a few weeks after the event that told us that some of the teams have continued to meet to work on this initiative together, which was to us a huge success indicator. One event wasn't going to solve the problem of how to scale up energy retrofits in such leading cities as Seattle and Chicago, but if the event brought the folks together who need to coordinate such an effort, then there's more of a chance that it will be solved.
http://greenbootcamp.livingcities.org/
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