August 9, 2013

The Green Spotlight: Tom Sahagian

Tom Sahagian Photo   Tom Sahagian has been the Senior Program Director, Technical Services at Enterprise Community Partners, a national nonprofit in the community development and affordable housing field, for about a year. At Enterprise, he helps to implement PartnerPREP (Partner Portfolio Retrofit Engagement Platform), which helps owners and managers of affordable housing to become effective energy stewards of their portfolios. Tom served as director of the Energy Division at Power Concepts for several years prior to joining Enterprise.   Tom’s career path is a fine example of how leaders in green building often come to the field in non-traditional ways. A journalism major in college, he came to New York to work at Popular Mechanics magazine, but soon co-founded a small construction company that did energy efficiency retrofits for some of its clients. This work led him to an internship with a wind turbine project in the Bronx, then to the office of energy conservation at NYC’s Dept. of Housing Preservation & Development (HPD), and finally to the Weatherization Assistance Program (WAP), where he eventually rose to become HPD’s WAP director.   Tom credits his considerable success in green building to a curiosity that keeps him continually searching for new solutions. “I wasn’t afraid to ask a million questions, read every book on the subject I could find, and network all the time with people in our field,” he says. All of us could learn from Tom’s persistent approach, fueled by his passion for delivering energy-efficient building practices to his clients.   To learn more about The Green Spotlight, click here!

August 7, 2013

The Green Spotlight

“Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us.”  In F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, the green light that shines across the water from Tom Buchanan’s estate represents Gatsby’s ambitions that are so close yet too far, weakened by time passing. Gatsby’s love for Daisy is the past that can’t be reintroduced into his future. A love for the Earth that houses and sustains us over the years, on the other hand, is the green light that is both attainable and essential for our future.  There are many leaders in the sustainability field who channel their passion towards greening the built environment.  GreenHomeNYC would like to celebrate by shining the green spotlight upon a few of these notable individuals!

The Green Light

  CLICK HERE to register for BE NYC 13.   CLICK HERE for more information on workshops, sponsorship and exhibiting at BE NYC 13.   To see all of our Green Spotlight interviews, CLICK HERE!