 So what was that one there that was? That's a new one. So maybe it's still muted. I think you are muted. Good evening. Can you hear me? Is that coming through the sound? I think so. Okay, well, welcome everyone to our lovely building and campus. We're so pleased to be hosting tonight, this meeting in order to give our folks in our community an opportunity to learn more about the Greenway Center for Equity and Sustainability. As many of you read in the press release, the Greenway Center for Equity and Sustainability will offer mission driven college and graduate level engineering and technology coursework that prepares diverse graduates to design and build a more sustainable and equitable future. They have contracted with VCFA for the purchase of five of our buildings. We couldn't be more pleased to have so much of the VCFA campus used for such a worthy purpose. Co-founders Rebecca Holcomb and Troy McBride are here this evening to tell you more about the institute and their future plans and to answer questions you might have. I hate to predict, but I do think that by the end of the evening you'll be as excited as we are about the work that they are planning on doing. So without further delay, let me welcome Rebecca and Troy to the microphone. Hi everybody I'm Troy McBride I grew up just down the road from here about 11 miles down in North Field, Vermont and my parents actually both taught a few courses right over there in stone maybe about 30 years ago I actually was one summer did work for buildings and grounds here the highlight being learning how to drive a bobcat I conceived or came up with the idea of a greenway about 22 years ago when I was in graduate school since then I was an engineering faculty member at E-Town College in Pennsylvania for seven years and then came back to Vermont about 14 years ago to found a sustainable engineering clean technology company in 2011 I co-founded Norris Technologies which is a leading clean energy and renewable energy company that serves Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine and I'm delighted to talk to you today about greenway and this beautiful campus I'm Rebecca Holcomb I started my time in Vermont in Huberton on the other side of the state and lived there for a while until my parents took us abroad to places like Afghanistan, Pakistan, Fiji which is where I grew up and it's an amazing way to grow up but it really did teach you a lot about equity of opportunity and when you give people a fair chance the difference they can make and I think that's the grinding challenges of poverty but also environmental degradation and that's deep in my bones my entire life was a process of coming back to Vermont my parents tried to come back and couldn't because there was no economic development division in the state government at the time they were looking for a job and I was lucky enough to be able to come back and ended up being a teacher and a principal and a district leader and when I stepped down from that job and I was trying to think about how to keep giving to the state that I loved so much I thought back about all the young people I've encountered over the many years in Vermont who can build absolutely anything and are incredibly creative and are incredibly dedicated to their communities who are not going to sit in a lecture hall and listen to a lecture on calculus and physics but who could build the world if we gave them a chance so when Troy approached me about starting a sustainability focused a mission driven engineering program that was entirely hands on and team based and lecture free I thought boy this is an amazing and brilliant idea and it's also exactly what Vermont needs because we have so many students who don't want to talk about making a difference they want to get out there and make that difference and for me I'm just so excited to be part of this project where every year we feel like we're on the road to giving young people the tools they need to deal with the kinds of challenges that we've all seen over the last couple months unfortunately here in Vermont so that's what we aim to do is help prepare the current generation and the next generation to engineer a fair and sustainable future and we're going to say fair and sustainable because we believe you can't have one without the other and we're all about bringing new voices and new faces into the engineering profession so this is just a reminder that we're under contract as Leslie said for five buildings on the VCFA campus here we are focused on starting our program in noble right now sustainable engineering education we are maintaining the lease agreements in the other buildings and talking more so we're going to talk about our first partners I do have to acknowledge our first partner which is really VCFA I just can't express enough gratitude for the way you've been partners in our transition as well and just been extraordinarily generous in sharing your advice, your expertise helping us understand the eccentricities of some of these buildings and it's just been such a pleasure so I just can't tell you what a wonderful team and I hope we can live up to your excellence as we move forward who are we institutionally the first partner we're going to talk about tonight is Elizabeth Town College or E-Town College in Pennsylvania and years ago Troy was faculty there in fact you helped take Elizabeth Town through its first ABET accreditation which is the accreditation for engineering programs that most reputable programs have but E-Town is an incredibly inspiring program it's got a very dynamic dean very strong track record of working particularly with students from rural communities and underrepresented communities to get them engaged in engineering and helping them succeed so we interviewed many many universities and colleges because we know you can't it's really hard to start a college and we knew we needed a college here so we interviewed a number of small engineering programs and found Elizabeth Town as a partner that shares many of the core values that we have again this commitment to serve us this commitment to engaging entrepreneurial activity and this commitment to making sure we're opening the doors of engineering to a more diverse set of students on the other hand we have Greenway Institute and I've been working with Troy for several years now some of you may have heard of our Greenway Sustainable Engineering Challenge we already work with high school students and middle school students to get them engaged with building projects that solve a problem using green energy and green technology and the natural next step was to take the broad and deep expertise that Troy has in this sector and the work that we have with hands-on engineering and find a college partner who would help us put together an amazing and innovative new program and that program is the Greenway Center for Equity and Sustainability which will be located in Noble Hall across the street this program is launched with and supported initially by a big grant from the National Science Foundation if you read the initial press release we received a $1.2 million grant just to design the program which is based on evidence-based practices that we know support the success of students in engineering and if you know anything about engineering you know there's a tremendous attrition rate in many engineering programs we're aiming to turn that around and we've got the right partner to do that and we've got an amazing team across the street that's really excited to make that happen why sustainable engineering and why now I don't even know if we need to answer that question given what's happened over the last couple months my heart goes out to Montpelier that has welcomed us in the middle of an epic catastrophe but we also see this in Hawaii we see this in all parts of the world right now and I think we're all in a moment where we realize our obligation to the future our obligation to preserving the environmental health of the future but also we're realizing that we have to be very attentive to making sure that people have a fair chance to thrive and if you think about even in Vermont we're now hearing that a disproportionate number of the families who are receiving the help from FEMA right now are families with young children and if you can think about why that happens and who has access to resources we don't have a future as a state if we aren't making our decisions with the mind to making sure everybody has a fair chance to take advantage of these opportunities and also we can't design solutions that work for everybody if everybody doesn't have a say in what those solutions are and how they're designed that's why this grant from the NSF, the National Science Foundation is focused on what they call broadening the pipeline into engineering and it's based on practices that we know are proven in research to support the success of underrepresented students in engineering and we believe that the third leg of sustainability is economic there is no prosperity in the future that doesn't involve this pivot to a green energy green technology local renewable and sustainable future and that's really at the heart of our mission and the good thing is we're hearing from students is that's what they want too they don't want to just go to calculus they want to learn how to engineer and learn calculus so that they can build a future that is sustainable we're mission driven because we know that's what they want and why are we different when you come to Greenway and if you come over there and look at our classrooms that we're setting up I know when we first came in Leslie you were saying I don't know if this is going to be the right setup because we're in arts college and I was like yeah that's exactly right we want those open spaces because we're building a fab lab, a fabrication lab where they're going to learn by building and doing because we know that one of the best ways to learn and the best ways for teachers to provide just in time reinforcement and teaching on the things that people haven't mastered yet is to have them build projects to actually have them working on the kinds of problems that they'll deal with in the real world that's what's different about Greenway our students won't be sitting and listening to a lecture about calculus or physics they'll actually be designing green technologies and learning the physics the fluids the calculus in the context so that marinating in that work but in a way that's relevant to what they do after they graduate so the work that any student should be able to tell you at any time what they're learning and why they're learning it it's all mission driven and purpose driven yeah and why Mount Pilier certainly Vermont has a great green reputation and we as a state have a lot of good clean technology jobs but we also have an opportunity to be to do more to be a real leader locally and worldwide so really Greenway is building on Vermont's green energy and green technology potential that we have we really are again what is the solution it's bringing young people and entrepreneurs into our state capitol so that's a very central location and really we're delighted to be in Mount Pilier Mount Pilier as well is on track to be the first net zero capitol in the nation by 2030 and we also see this campus as an excellent place to continue in advance higher education and continue the work that people like my parents did 30 years ago teaching people here I think it's worth pointing out it's pretty cool and we hope to have this the students showing that sometime at the farmers market up here it's off grid and also wanted to introduce a few other people that you'll see around and that are right here so I'll start with a person who isn't here co is a founding faculty member founding engineering faculty member co comes from Smith College to us we have Violet Gannon right here turn it to face the audience so I'm Jay Violet Gannon and I'm really excited to be part of this team and these folks mentioned frequently co-occurring collaboration co-conspiring and you are the bread and butter of that as members of the community we're excited to partner with you to hear your feedback we've got curious students that want to know more about living in Vermont and your wonderful resources so we're excited to partner with you in any ways that we can we need mentors we are open to feedback and are thrilled to be here so thank you for coming tonight also we have Hannah Root who comes to us from Rivendell School and is helping program manager and engineering mentor educational mentor and then we have Maria as well who is program coordinator and comes to us from Vassar we also are hiring a program manager position looking for someone local here to help us with all aspects of program management and if you know people you can also find the listing on our website under the news section I should also add that we will be expanding and including new engineering faculty as well over the next couple of years so we're I think like you you realize that when things happen no one's coming to save you you got to do it yourself we're really excited about this program and we're going to build it right here we're going to grow as we go we are starting actually at the end of this week we have our first pilot cohort it's a deliberately small cohort of students who are going to test run our first sustainable semester abroad these are all sophomores or juniors and they're students who have some engineering in their backgrounds and they're coming here to take the course load and transfer back to Elizabeth Town College they will be learning the same skills they're going to transfer back to Elizabeth Town College but they will be learning it in an applied hands-on way and we're incredibly excited to have them joining us as co-creators you may see some of them around town we're going to give them some shirts so you can recognize them please welcome them and they'll be out Monday morning helping to volunteer with Montpelier Alive so you may see them out there on Monday morning in the spring engineering is kind of hard it's such an intense STEM program it can be very difficult for engineering students to take a semester away what's been interesting as we talk to other engineering programs is how excited they are about having students come to Vermont and learn about sustainability and do it without losing pace in their engineering programs so we are reaching out to build a network of colleges with a similar sense of mission to letting students come here but also are confident that their students will be able to seamlessly return back to their programs so at the end of this year we will have developed a full year of hands-on sustainability focused engineering the second year of an engineering program then in the fall we're about to begin to recruit now for a fall cohort which is an immersive first year of engineering and one of the challenges in engineering is that many students who don't come in knowing they want to be engineers or who don't have strong calculus when they leave high school are not really able to finish an engineering program when they get to college if they don't have that in their background now just think about how many incredibly talented creative people that cuts out and that explains part of why the profession looks like it does in fact rural students in particular are so underrepresented in engineering they aren't even counted to study on that and that's because many small schools can't provide that robust continuous support in math so the program we're designing is designed to immerse them in math through projects over and over again so that when they end that first year they are so strong and so confident they're going to be able to go out and succeed in engineering and that's really our mission and so that immersive pilot program in the fall of 24 the other thing we're doing is launching a series of STEM graduate engineering program that would appeal to current classroom teachers and it's designed you may know that all classroom teachers have to keep taking professional development to maintain their certification this is a STEM certificate that they could use just to meet those certification requirements or they could apply it to a master's instruction the rest of it being delivered remotely but the idea is to bring people from across the state and across New England to Montpelier in the summer to learn how to use engineering projects hands-on projects to teach math and physics so that they can go back and get young people excited about this work and that will roll out hopefully this summer as well I think we are obviously very excited we hope you'll stop by and say hi as you walk by but we really wanted to make sure we save most of this time tonight to hear from you we'd love to know what questions you have we'd love to know what you want us to know about Montpelier and the community and the precious gem that is this campus and the green out there and we'd love to know what brought you here today and what you're looking for as we move forward so I think we'll stop there and if people have questions please feel free to ask them they may want you to use the microphone if you don't mind otherwise they won't be able to pick you up maybe if you want to pass it too this is my first engineering test thank you so much well it's very exciting congratulations my name is Jose I live across the street I have one of the old houses used to be a dorm actually and I guess many of us probably are wondering after listening to your presentations since you're going to be bringing students and you plan to grow the number of universities that you work with so therefore you would only have them when they're not at school at their respective universities and since you're taking you're purchasing several buildings I'm wondering what will happen in between those periods that's a really good question so I think if we go back what we're doing is trying to grow slowly and grow within our means but if you think about this rollout schedule we will have a first and a second year of engineering and our students will be positioned to transition back to Elizabeth Town College to finish engineering there it's a very excited program that's starting to receive national recognition alternatively they could shift to another engineering program within Vermont after that second year we will then begin to grow additional years of program what we do is grow so fast we lose quality and we're carefully growing now and partnering with Elizabeth Town College to make sure that the academic rigor and development here is as powerful as what they're providing on their own campus so the vision is to continue to first of all have slightly larger cohorts so we're starting with a very small pilot group we hope to start making the cohorts bigger next year so the goal is to grow into some of the space that used to be occupied by students at VCFA does that answer your question? I think so and actually I'm very excited about it because I'm actually involved I sponsor some of the projects at the SEED program which is the senior engineering projects at UVM and actually one of the people in charge of it lives here in town my friend so he's actually I think going to be ending his work we're really quite serious what's been wonderful about coming into town is people have been reaching out and saying hey I have this problem or I have this business we'd love to have your students visit a big piece of what we're trying to do is also help students learn how to network because again so much of professional success is knowing how to introduce yourself to a business knowing what options are out there what are the opportunities in the green energy green technology sector that we know because we've read a lot that it is Vermont's most promising one of its highest wage fastest growing sectors it's an engine that really could ensure some of the prosperity of the state but students might not know that and so being able to meet with people like yourself with some of our local businesses is a chance for them to see what they could do with this course of studies that they're pursuing so I hope you'll put your name on the sign up sheet that went around we'll be in touch so much. Thank you. Hi Cindy I live around the corner of former sociology professor at Hofstra University recently retired so first of all I just have to thank you I'm so glad that at least part of the CFA will be maintained as an educational institution thank you for that I'm kind of interested in like what you think your cohort size will be in the fall 24 year will they live on campus is this a tuition driven outfit or will you have I don't know some sort of financial partnership with etown as well as an academic one questions like that and then are you thinking to add a new cohort every year until you reach a four year program what's your semi long-term plan thanks do you want me to start and then you can fill in I mean I think there's a lot there and the first thing is it's going to depend right I mean we're going to focus on quality and we'll grow and we're ready to grow we're starting with a deliberately very small we did not really recruit for this cohort so it's a very small cohort that we are hoping will help us co-create our hope is to recruit cohorts of 20 for next year you know up to 40 on campus and then you'll have because you'll have two a first year program and a semester program and then faculty the summer programs for graduate students would hopefully be 20 students as well you don't want it too big because then it becomes difficult to do some of the hands-on work and they would live here on campus the in terms of the revenue model the power of partnering with very well established and respected institution like e-town as you know from having worked at Hofstra as we're eligible for federal financial aid which makes a huge difference our students will be able to access that right out of the gate that's not possible if you're not accredited it takes years to get accredited so by choosing to partner we're opening our doors to opportunities that wouldn't be available and we're also doing some fundraising to try to support students in the initial years in particular so we can get to that quickly in terms of next cohorts and how that's going to work out I'll tell you Elizabeth town is also extremely interested in a master's program in engineering a one-year master's program for switchers there are a lot of STEM students who take very strong STEM backgrounds in college but they don't have any application for it and people are all about sustainability right now and what we're actually getting maybe they've taken all the physics they've taken all the courses they don't know how to build anything or they're not comfortable in design and so they're looking for a master's program that in one year could equip them to go and do some of those things and that's another market we're looking into do you want to add to that or I don't have much to add other than we as Rebecca was saying we're really focused on delivering excellent program to our initial cohorts and then gradually growing over time good evening I want to say that I'm very excited to have you guys here my name is Joe Castellano I live about a block and a half way very excited about what you're proposing here I know that you are currently in your due diligence phase when do you expect the deal to close for the five buildings that's a good question will there's enough variables that will say as soon as possible but we've already moved in I'm just going to say go ahead hi my name is James Ray I'm here for two reasons first I live straight down about two blocks down the road that way and second my life's work is communicating science and the environment and sustainability the intersection of science, engineering climate change and sustainability has been my life's work and I'm going to talk to you after this about all that because I'd love to help out in that regard but more specifically I would invite you too and I suspect you will but are there any things that you would say now to us in terms of what the program might need or the first cohort of students who are moving in ASAP might need to support them in terms of building materials for the building bedsheets, I don't know what I'm asking but is there anything we can do as a community to help the students settle in and help your program settle in I can see Violet's getting up to answer that one I'm going to ask you to put your name on the mailing list because we do have some thoughts on that we're trying to be very intentional about it though but we'll get back to you if you put your name on the mailing list we're really trying to do now is build relationships because those relationships are what's driving the energy in the classroom right now talking to a business who will say this is the challenge I'm trying to figure out how to do this could your students work on that and sometimes they fit and sometimes they don't but some of the greatest ideas have come from partners who are willing to do that we are fitting out our labs right now and we will continue as we're kind of kidding them out with equipment as we grow so as we add more courses with different types of specialization we'll have to be adding new equipment we've had businesses that have offered equipment that is perfectly usable not their grade but certainly stuff that students can use and we've been taking advantage of that as well so we'd love to follow up and I'll just say the courses this fall include content statistics circuits and electromagnetism as well as a lot in sustainability so if there's any great equipment that you have related to that we'll take it I would also add that the question is a beautiful one and it's one that is unique I think to Vermont and that spirit of community my ulterior motives is to really get these students engaged in Vermont so they stay and just being part of this larger community and that feeling that vibe it's priceless I sat out on the green yesterday and I had dinner on one of the picnic tables and I just watched this natural dance of human beings with different dogs and cut different backgrounds in universes in some ways but yet totally aware of one another and grateful for the community piece of it that's unique to us and if we can demonstrate that to students you will help me in fulfilling my mission of getting some of them to consider our life here I'm glad you mentioned those stories too I remember one of my first principal jobs we had to wire building for internet and we had people come in and crawl through the ceilings on a day and I think that is Vermont to me in a lot of ways and we are going to build this and we're going to build it because we're working together and I just love Vermont and I'm really excited to bring young people here so that they can benefit from that as well Will you always be just using Elizabeth Town students or will you begin to recruit your own students that don't have any relationship with E-Town or is it a continued partnership academically I mean it's a continuing partnership we stayed tight on this year's recruitment because it's harder to sell the program to people until you've got it to offer but we do have one student from Batson and we are hoping to get other students from other colleges in the spring and we are going to be recruiting first year students from all over the state of Vermont we're certainly going to hit the college fairs here but also New England so we are hoping to expand our base but we've been there's a network that Elizabeth Town is part of small engineering programs and we're already reaching out to them to start bringing other students here as well. Sorry just to follow up so will those students be admitted to E-Town as well as this college? The problem is that we won't have the capacity to offer four years here for a while so what we're guaranteeing them is a place they can go to and they can take it elsewhere if they want just like any student can transfer but if they come to us they know they have a place to go after those first two years and Elizabeth Town at this point they have more students than they can accept so there are actually more applicants who are qualified so they see this as an opportunity to expand the number of students they're serving and again I you know when you look at the profile of students that they serve and then the outcomes they get it's they are really committed to service and to broadening the pipeline into engineering they are bringing people into engineering who if they went to other universities might not do that so we're really it's an incredibly dynamic team a very you know an outstanding faculty we spent some time down there really going through their curriculum so that we knew what the points of contact were and they've just been incredible collaborators it's going to make us all better and they see us as an incubation site an innovation site so they will also probably cycle at some point some of their faculty through us for a semester and then bring practices back to Elizabeth Town as well they're very excited about us in that respect Hi I'm Paul Kernahan I live on Sabin Street around the corner I'm sort of going to want to direct the conversation sort of to more practical matters your educational program sounds very exciting and you obviously have a lot of enthusiasm for it and I'm sure that that will take you very far but I'm sort of curious about your financial model for affording the purchase of these buildings and then maintaining them I assume that the NSF is not giving you money to purchase real estate and it doesn't sound like these buildings are going to be owned by E-town so I'm sort of curious about where's the money coming from to purchase these buildings and more importantly as neighbors to maintain these buildings we all know that they need a lot of work VCFA obviously got out for a reason they were really saddled with the expenses of maintaining these buildings you just walk by Schulmeier you know it needs a roof the pieces of roofing fall off every storm we have so I'm sort of curious about the economic viability of ownership of this campus I think we have a few advantages that VCFA you do amazing work at what you do we have some in-house advantages that maybe are a little different from their secret sauce we love their secret sauce we'll take all we can get Troy do you want to address this I'm just yammering away but I mean you've got plans for some of these buildings you want to talk about yeah so on the maintenance buildings and ground side of things VCFA actually has a great buildings and grounds team and we are going to continue to work with that buildings and grounds team and we're delighted to everything they've done so far and that they continue to do and so we will have a shared arrangement with VCFA and other purchasers on the financial model you know it's a series of partners as I mentioned I'm a majority owner of Norwich Technologies which is a partner with us as well and then you know it's other sources of financing for that and so we are committed to overtime not only maintaining but increasing the sustainability of the buildings we certainly are planning to upgrade the heating systems which are all currently oil boilers to electricity means and we're also working to install a solar as well so just a point of clarification though you will be owning the buildings you're not you said you're going to be using the VCFA maintenance crew to maintain your buildings but the condo arrangement is for the land I assume not for the buildings themselves yeah so it's sort of two or maybe three things so three of the buildings, Stone, Schumacher and Dewey are on their own parcel so there's no condo agreement there over this side is there's a condo agreement where there's a parcel that's that's sort of a legal agreement of when there's a shared parcel and the buildings and grounds is a contractual arrangement where it's contracted through VCFA that we pay for our portion of that I think just to be really clear they have an excellent staff it would be ridiculous to lose those people and VCFA but it's been very generous in terms of letting us do shared services on a number of fronts shared part of the challenge of any institution is the overhead and to be able to do shared services with an excellent partner and again they've been generous in their time and we've worked out systems that are useful and helpful to both of us I hope so that's been an asset just to make really if you've been trying to heat your house with fossil fuels with oil over the last couple years this is the life work of what we do and part of what we're doing is figuring out how to make these buildings sustainable in ways that will save a ton of money moving forward as well so that's a skill set that we have through Troy and through his professional background that is going to free up some capital to make some of the improvements that we know are needed here as well and again partnering when it makes sense and it's mutually beneficial we're lucky because VCFA is so amazing and then using the expertise in green energy technologies and solar and storage and heating to try to make that change in ways that will help benefit everybody and I should have mentioned earlier that some of these buildings currently have commercial tenants and our intent is to keep those relationships for now and that helps cover the cost in maintaining those buildings and we'll continue to try to have good relationships with those partners as well. Gail Carrigan also on Sabin Street and my question is a follow-on to what you just said that you have commercial tenants here will you be looking for other tenants in addition because it sounds like if you are looking at a slow growth model these buildings will be idle until you are able to populate them. I mean I think it's well do you want to the short answer is yes and really so we'd love to have especially green energy clean technology companies that are interested in being nearby to be in the buildings but we also have a number of great tenants right now. I think you may have hinted at the answer to this so forgive me again it's James Ray is the long-term intention going to be a semester and I say this having done the American University's Washington semester program many many years ago so I'm a big fan of that semester only approach. Is your long-term plan students come from elsewhere here for a semester and go back somewhere else or are you a slow growth toward eventually four years on this campus? The goal is to move towards degree programs we are starting with semester programs because it's the easiest lift and it gets you the program right but every sophomore semester is when you put it together is your sophomore year then we're building the first year that means we'll have two years of a robust engineering program and then we can begin to build from there so it will be our courses will in terms of the content will be directly aligned with the existing engineering program so it should be interchangeable the difference will be in the mission driven purpose and the mode of delivery but it should be interchangeable with an engineering syllabus at another university. Hi there Rebecca and I have known each other for a long time it's nice to see you I'm Elise Adwarski I live next door to the campus at 31 first next to Dewey with Danny Sagan my husband and I'm really excited that you guys are going to be our neighbors and it's great to hear a little bit more about the program I was wondering if both of you could speak a little more specifically to what will be happening in each of the buildings and how you imagine that I mean it sounds like you're going to be growing so you talked about Noble Hall being a focus right now of course I'm interested in what's happening next Dewey but the other buildings as well and when those will be phased in and how in terms of their use that would be helpful I'll start I don't want to talk too much I'm just sitting here so I'm talking too much but first of all it's great to see you I'm going to be following up with you both the first building that we're starting as I said very small and we'll be all in what's currently called Noble Hall and the building is designed so that there's instructional space on the first floor students will be living on the second floor and we'll actually have a couple of faculty on the third floor for part of it to find housing in Montpelier as you've noticed so that's our current plan and for this year as we grow we'll be moving into other dorms and so obviously Glover next door is housing mostly so that will be a dormitory space for the summer program which brings in a larger group we hope they'll be in there presumably as well once the purchase has gone through we expect these two buildings Stone and Shulmire to maintain in you know current pretty much current use and do you want to talk about Dewey? Yeah and exactly and then growing into Dewey as well Dewey we are exploring a variety of options at Dewey and you know looking forward to working with the community on it One thing that some people have talked about one of the challenges of recent graduate entrepreneurs is it's really hard to start your business and it's really hard to find housing and so one of the things that we've thought about which is a continuation of the current use is thinking of it as Greenway Institute as sort of an incubator for new businesses so hopefully providing lower cost housing to people while they incubate a business or a Vermont business in this sector that's one idea that people have come up with but I'd love to talk to you and hear from you about what you think are good promising opportunities there Yeah, feel free to Yeah, this should be a conversation not just back and forth That's good to hear and I think my observation as being a neighbor for 20 years is that communication between the new owners and I know it's not just you other people are buying the other buildings with neighbors and with the community it's going to be paramount I feel like of course I want this to succeed our own design and build business is based on sustainable principles and has for 30 years so I really appreciate your values but the value of community engagement and letting us know what's happening and engaging us is I think really important in this community and I just encourage you to keep us up to date as things evolve and reach out to talk to us as regularly as is reasonable because I think that will lead to really good, stronger relationship with the community and particularly with the neighbors Yeah, I really appreciate your saying that and to the extent that we're not answering it's because we don't know So I think we need to have that But as it evolves, I'd love to be and I think other people as well really kept up to date on what's happening So again, if you haven't signed there is a clipboard going around and we would love to add you to our email list and we would be happy. First of all, we don't even we haven't even closed yet so we don't even own the buildings yet so it's a little premature to go too far ahead but in some of the buildings have we'll just say there's some considerations around use both in what use is approved and also in the current condition of the buildings that are going to affect what happens but I really appreciate your saying that Alyssa and I think that we would love to use our email list to invite people to this if you put your name on it, you'll be on that email when we have our next meeting and VCFA helped us bring people here tonight we know that this doesn't work unless it's a conversation and so we will fully be sure to have that conversation and I'm going to follow up with you and if it doesn't work for you it's not going to work for us it has to work for everybody Just a quick note that we're working with GBA architects down on the river here as we get more information there you go Paul Karnahan again I just had another follow up question on how the campus is going to work so I assume the students you didn't mention cafeteria services in the but I assume the students will be eating their meals there and then I was also wondering you mentioned faculty living in Noble will there also be staff that's responsible for student life and behavior and sort of making sure that everything goes smoothly for the students living there I'll let you talk in a minute to one of the staff members who's living on site we actually aren't big enough to make food service our students will actually be cooking themselves and so we're working with them to help plan meals and figure that out for the first couple years at some point we would like to do food service but you have to be of a certain size before that's an affordable option and we're just not there yet right now and I think we're in an interesting moment when we began this and students committed to coming here that was all before the flood and what's available is a little bit different now even with respect to food service providers and caterers in town we're all figuring out how to make this moment work it's a great group of students they're all in on making it work and this is an opportunity to introduce them to Vermont food culture and the best of our fields and our farmers markets it's right up there on Saturday afternoon so I think we're going to work through that they'll be there we have two would you want to talk about the living arrangements right now we're very we're following the residence hall policies they're Elizabeth town colleges policies with an addendum that's appropriate thank you again to VCFA to make sure it works it's a small group of students currently as it gets bigger there'll be more staff on site but we'll be right there in the building and I just don't anticipate problems but if you do have concerns again our information is right in the website and give it to you afterwards just always reach out you know you can only help us be better and I will say we are talking with the folks that have run Dewey the last several years and trying to see how we can work with them as we get to a scale that works well with them we're also working with local restaurants to provide food for our students on that scale it's one of the more economic opportunities is to just work with local restaurants I my wife and I are living Dewey right now so we are doing dual duty of noble sorry noble so we're doing dual duty of also providing some of the services but for the most part I'm just going to follow all of Elizabeth town one and we have a much bigger staff than just the people on campus through our partnership with Elizabeth town college was that another way of saying we're almost a one to one ratio right now next year it'll be different hi Justin Turkaud I live down on Monsignor Crosby and I just want to thank you guys for taking the time to explain a lot of this and go into some of the detail it's been really informative and helpful and reassuring to me to get a better sense of what you guys are doing thank you well and I know thank you for saying that and I know you're running a business and people people running businesses need stability they need a little bit of certainty so you know again we want to work tightly with our partners sorry just looking at that you know it's wonderful that who's here showed up for this meeting but it's summer and I know it was delayed because of the flood but I think it would be wonderful as more people come back from their summer activities to have another gathering with the community when maybe more people can attend at some appropriate time in the school year that would be wonderful and I just kind of wish I'd been able to encourage more people to show up and get to know you and hear this and come with their own questions I think you know we planned on doing this before the flood and we didn't want to wait too long but I think your suggestion is an excellent one and maybe in September when people are back and settled that would be a good time and again oh that sounds fun I'm not quite sure what Danny said but it may have been what I was going to say potluck I was going to say it'd be fun to have some sort of student presentations or something like that at the end of the semester so we can see what you're doing or an open house so we can see your need equipment the possibilities are endless but you don't have a traditional campus here so these students can't show their projects to their classmates with a traditional campus but maybe you can use the community as the friends and colleagues of the students so we can see what you're doing and maybe give them a little encouragement to do the things that they're doing I love that and I'm really grateful to that two of the traditions that we're committed to doing one is a community meal with the students so we are going to try to bring people from the community in I think it's every Thursday night right Hannah to have a meal with the group of students and so if you're interested in participating in that reach out to us and let us know the other thing is Fridays we're calling them Friday field trips but we're trying to take the students on the road every Friday to visit some kind of Vermont enterprise or a municipality that's working on an interesting issue related to sustainability because again especially for students who maybe don't grow up in families with engineers to be able to have that kind of one-on-one contact with a professional in the field or somebody who's trying to grapple with the kind of problems that they're going to grapple with when they graduate is so powerful but also you know we were one of the first people coming in as the deputy city manager and listening to her talk about both the impact of the flood on the city and how that intersects with some of the work the city is doing around trying to be net zero by 2030 there's so much knowledge and there's so much passion in this community and I really appreciate your suggestion in the generosity of it because that is what will make this a better experience for students so thank you and if you haven't already please put your name on that sign up list so we can bring you into the program and we will have things to show later so we're going to let them set up their dorm beds first Jose Aguayo again you mentioned that these buildings here we're going to write when it closes you would be owning them and I guess owning the buildings the land everything there's no condominium but this part will be a condominium so who would be your partners in that condominium so right now Greenway and new school new school is a current tenant that's looking to buy their two buildings and then we have three other buildings that will also eventually be part of the condominium association so potentially it could be up to five different entities owning buildings and being part of that condo association just on the idea of open houses and bringing the community your potluck and stuff and you were talking about the students working with folks above them in the professional settings speaking as the father of two high school students I could guarantee you two interested students as high schoolers to come into an open house that goes the other direction using the knowledge and experience of your engineering students to a day or a couple hours or whatever it might be to show off the gear and their knowledge to local high schoolers and middle schoolers so you're singing maria song we have been running for a couple years now and it's a sustainable engineering challenge where there's a problem that they're given every year you know solve a water clean water access issue or an access to food issue and we give them some basic equipment it has to be green available and local and there's a demonstration day and we're hoping actually we can do it right here in the middle of Montpelier and the challenge is open to high school students and middle school students and we've gone all the way up to Burlington all the way down to up to the northeast kingdom and down to Windsor I think is the farthest south we've gone or Springfield they had to drop out the last minute last year but it's been great I mean it's just you know we'll give them a mentor and we're hoping our students will play some of that role and then to have them actually try to figure out how to design and build a project that's powered by solar energy whether it's a solar powered greenhouse or something else some of the students have asked to keep the equipment and we've now got little devices operating in different schools around the state so we're hoping we can continue that and bring you know we know that it's too late if you wait until they get to college we know that part of it is showing middle school students and high school students how fun it is to build how fun it is to solve a problem in a way that's actually useful to somebody where it actually makes a difference I mean the first year it was a clean water challenge then I didn't know that your average cow drinks 40 gallons of water in the winter and so boy were those kids really excited about solar powered devices that would get that water out to the field you learn a lot and it helps they see you know you can you can tell people that climate change is a problem or you can just show them how solar energy can make their life better and that's where the challenge has been so powerful and to be able to have that on the green and have community members come in and give support would be fantastic and another opportunity to engage is as a mentor to those high school projects and teams I wanted to add to that my daughter actually was the only kid from Montpelier who participated in the agro tech project this summer at UVM and it was really amazing to see the kids engage that way I used to teach I worked at a college in far west Texas in a very remote area most of the students were Pell Grant recipients and we happen to have a town out there was very poor one of the poorest in Texas but they have these incredible Filipino science teachers they have a rocketry program there and A&M University partnered up with them and they get invited to DC they get invited all the time for these large rocketry projects so you're picking something like that it's a wonderful idea, that's great I'm really excited about all the things that you guys are presenting what was amazing is different students shine and the power of having a student who maybe doesn't think of themselves as super academic but who builds an incredible device and all of a sudden sees that they're super academic but have that serious conversation with an adult is really a powerful thing and when you're working with these kids I had a lot of students who were first generation going to college most of my students when they go out on these trips and they see these things and they meet people and they exchange ideas it's just so enriching for them absolutely some of the most amazing challenge stuff has been in the Burlington schools in English language learner classes and it's people it's a chance to really show and it's people just amazed you what they're able to do it's amazing when they're allowed to build it's great well you all have been so generous thank you for your feedback please keep reaching out to us you will make us better and we really do want to be good community members and partners I think I speak for Troy when I say we're so grateful to you for taking your evening I know many of you are dealing with a lot else right now so I know it's a it means a lot to us we took the time to show up tonight we will put you on our list and we will be reaching out and I love the idea of a potluck or some way to engage the community and as we get clarity we'll be sure to reach out and have more events like this to get your thoughts so thank you so much really appreciate it and look forward to seeing you out in the lawn