Friends and Supporters of Living City Block;
Welcome to the first edition of Living City Block’s Newsletter, our monthly mailing to keep you up to speed on all of the developments and advances at LCB. As we enter our third month of operations out of the Alliance Center on Wynkoop Street in Lower Downtown Denver, Living City Block continues to build momentum and add essential partners.
Living City Block hosted a Charrette on March 18 and 19 that was attended by many of you. We thank you again for your important participation and contributions. We have now concluded our report of the charrette work and we are proud to offer it for your study and perusal. It can be downloaded by following this link. You are also invited to participate in our LCB Forum by requesting access here.
As you will see when you read the Charrette Report, the establishment of Work Stream Groups is the most important work to come out of this process. These groups are forming during the first weeks of May and consist of work around the following topics:
– Energy Efficiency and Renewable Integration
- Mobility Integration
- Livable Community and Creating Place
- Materials Flow, Waste and Water
- Financial and Business Case Analysis
- Marketing and Outreach
Many of you will be contacted in the upcoming weeks about participating in these work streams. If you know that you would like to be involved, please contact Buffy Andrews at bandrews@livingcityblock.org or Nick Groos at ngroos@livingcityblock.org for more information.
At our LCB LoDo Pilot project, we have begun the early and vital work of commissioning, energy auditing, and energy modeling. Our partners, Green Building Services and Xcel Energy will be working with LCB and our various building owners, business owners and residents to perform this energy modeling over the next months, with a goal of completion by early Fall of 2010. Once we have this information in hand we will begin to put together proposals for building by building and block wide energy efficiency retrofitting. We are also working with Geo Energy Services to begin a feasibility study for block wide Geo thermal heating and cooling applications.
Discussions with representatives of three other neighborhoods in Denver have begun: Westwood, Five Points and 10th & Osage/La Alma/Lincoln Park. We will know within the next several months if we will be launching Living City Blocks in these communities, and we hope to be able to update you in the next Newsletter.
Our staff has grown to include myself, Llewellyn Wells, President; Chad Riley, Director of Finance and Business Case Analysis; Buffy Andrews, Project Manager of LCB LoDo; Doug Laub, Director of External Relations; Lindsay Franta, Livable Communities; Jonah Bea-Taylor, Livable Communities; Nick Groos, Sister Neighborhoods and Fund Raising; Tucker Miller, Associate for Financial and Business Case Analysis; Roger Burleigh, Associate with LCB LoDo; and Jack Sinclair, City and County of Denver Liaison.
On the partnership front, we are proud to continue our strong primary partnerships with Rocky Mountain Institute and Alliance for Sustainable Colorado. We also have important partnerships with a number of government, academic and corporate organizations. Please see a full list of LCB partners here.
Funding is progressing, and again we hope to announce many exciting developments in our next newsletter.
Living City Block launched in January of this year out of the nurturing and protective cacoon of our parent organization Rocky Mountain Institute. Since then, we have grown substantially, further evolved our goals and our organizational framework, and have begun the long term process of developing lasting partnerships and funding sources. We have launched the on the ground analysis and planning work essential to the success of our Living City Block LoDo pilot project. We could not have gotten this far without the support of each and everyone of you.
We thank you and look forward to working with each of you even more closely as Living City Block evolves over the years.
Best,
Llewellyn Wells
President – Living City Block
