The Home Energy Efficiency Team (HEET), in partnership with Green Decade/Cambridge, is thrilled to announce that we have been awarded a Martin Luther King Day Project Initiative grant from the Massachusetts Service Alliance. The grant will fund a major event: weatherization barnraisings at the Margaret Fuller Neighborhood House and the Cambridgeport School on Sunday, January 18 from 12:30-5:00pm.
The Margaret Fuller Neighborhood House is located at 71 Cherry Street in Area IV, Cambridge’s poorest neighborhood and one of its most diverse. The Margaret Fuller House has been recognized for over a century as a catalyst for community activities and support. The facility was built in 1807 and is a designated National Historic Landmark.
The Cambridgeport School is located at 89 Elm Street in Cambridge. Founded as an alternative public school in 1990 with a single kindergarten class, it has grown to house 17 classrooms from kindergarten through grade 8. The school community is committed to building a strong sense of belonging for an increasingly diverse group of families, children and staff.
Weatherization barnraisings offer volunteers a great opportunity to help reduce our community’s carbon footprint, to learn weatherization skills you can use on your own home, and to meet neighbors and make new friends. To sign up to help weatherize the Margaret Fuller House and Cambridgeport School, RSVP to Steve Morr-Wineman at swineman@gis.net or call Steve at 617-876-4753.
If you are handy and could serve as a team leader, contact Audrey Schulman at Audrey@AudreySchulman.com.
In the spirit of Dr. King, join us for a day of giving to the community, practicing peace, fighting climate change, and celebrating hope for the inauguration of a new President.
I'd like to see a weatherization barnraising on the White House.
In Cambridge, we are doing a weatherization barnraising once a month, the next in line with Obama's Inaugural service day. Our monthly weatherization service day could be considered a swadeshi, the regular practice of self reliance.
Gandhi thought swadeshi was the active practice of peace. His swadeshi was spinning thread with a hand spinning wheel an hour a day. In his eyes, the ability to make your own cloth or dry your own salt was a political, social, economic, and spiritual act. We could do our own swadeshi by teaching each other how to weatherize houses once a month for the next decade or so (see Architecture 2030 for more on the time frame).
Twenty years should be enough time to expose a couple of generations to the principles of practical thermodynamics.