Home › View all posts by admin › Page 14

Author: admin

The Roof Trusses go on!

Posted on by

Last month, we reported to you on the drama of raising the CAPACES Leadership Institute building’s walls.  That, it turns out, was nothing, compared to the roof trusses installation.

At dawn last Wednesday, a truck with a large crane and a load of custom-built trusses rumbled onto the building site.  By early afternoon some 70 trusses were all in place, thanks also to the quick and skilled work of our core building team, augmented by several volunteers from the Carpenters’ union.

Thanks to time-lapsed photography, set up and edited by Gene Wixson (our chief construction consultant from Greenhammer), you can paste this link http://db.tt/fo4vuPe into your browser and see in 30 seconds a good amount of the installation.

On August 15th, passersby at the site saw only framed walls laying on the concrete slab floor.  Thirty days later, the walls were up, the internal concrete block walls finished, and the trusses installed, thanks to incredible support from individuals like stone mason Pedro Martínez and organizations like Portland Youth Builders.  This coming Saturday, the weekly work brigade will be composed of and led by women—both from the local community and our supporter network.

Our fundraiser last week in New York City was a clear success.  On a busy weeknight, 18 people gathered to learn about the Institute and deepen relationships with our movement.  We still need to raise about $30,000 from individuals to reach our goal; you can make a tax-deductible contribution online at https://npo.networkforgood.org/Donate/Donate.aspx?npoSubscriptionId=1002782&code=Donantes%202010)

We’re not waiting to have doors to open in order to offer the Institute’s first course.  Tomorrow, we’ll hold the first class of the five-session course we call “Movement 101.”  A dozen leaders new to our movement will dig into our history, our values, accomplishments, beliefs, and challenges, as well as articulate what calls them to serve and organize.

Sincerely,

CAPACES Leadership Institute

Volunteer Profile: Gene Wixson

Posted on by

Imagine a built environment which has the power to inspire its surrounding community, as well as its builders and inhabitants. Imagine that the construction of a single office building could teach some of the country’s most disenfranchised laborers the skills necessary to join the “Green Building” workforce. Meet Gene Wixson.

Gene builds ultra high performance buildings. Sounds cool, right? It is cool. Ultra high performance, or Passive House, buildings are so efficient that they can actually produce as much energy as they consume. In a Passive House building, because the insulation and roofing are so progressive, the main energy cost is actually hot water, and electrical plugs. As of August 2010, there were only 13 such buildings in the US. Add one more.

Gene is a Construction Manager for Green Hammer, a Portland based design firm specializing in ultra high performance building, and he is currently working with PCUN on the CAPACES Leadership Institute (CLI), which, aside from providing the CAPACES sister organizations with a headquarters from which to train tomorrow’s Latino leadership, will be the nation’s first office building built to the Passive House standard. Gene’s role on the CLI project is many faceted; he does everything from coordinating the needs of the architects with those of the structural engineers to arranging with suppliers and manufacturers for supplies. According to Gene, finding manufacturers who design products significantly better than code is one of the most difficult challenges the CLI campaign faces, but it is also a challenge he feels will improve the position of PCUN and the Latino workforce they represent by helping them to build connections in an area of the “Green” industry that is seeing steady growth.

Gene specialized in Environmental Studies at Lewis and Clark College, where he succeeded in writing LEED into the campus building standards in 1996, but he has been a builder much longer than that. From working on “Heritage” buildings in the Antarctic to working with PCUN today, Gene has always been interested in the cutting edge of design. His experience on contracting jobs has also brought him into contact with the large Latino contracting workforce, and this has given him a deeper understanding of how his work with the CLI will strengthen our community. Working on the CLI project is a teaching opportunity for Gene and his Green Hammer associates, a chance to increase the job skills of the Latino framing crews that have had virtually no exposure to ultra high performance design, but will ultimately build the CLI structure from the ground up. This is a chance that Gene relishes. Gene says, of his work on the CLI project, “I love that this is a group of people who may not have work next month, who may not even be in this part of the country next month, but are still willing to donate their time and skills toward putting together what will be the coolest building in the country. That inspires me.”