 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 Northfield, 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 Norwich 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. And I'm Rebecca Holcomb. I started my time in Vermont in Hubbardton on the other side of the state and lived there for a while until my parents took us abroad to places like Afghanistan, 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 when you deny them a fair chance, 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 division, 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 secretary of education in the state of Vermont for several years. And when I stepped down from that job and I was trying to think about how to keep giving to the state that I love 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 gonna 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 wanna talk about making a difference. They wanna get out there and make that difference. And for me, I'm just so excited to be part of this project where every day I 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 gonna 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. Engineering, sustainable engineering education. We are maintaining the lease agreements in the other buildings and look forward to talking more with you. So we're gonna talk about our first partners. I do have to acknowledge our first partner which is really VCFA. And 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 gonna 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 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 service, 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. Doesn't he? 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 a 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 wanna just go to calculus. They wanna 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, why don't know if this is gonna be the right setup because we're an arts thing. Arts college, 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 gonna 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 of 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 Montpelier? As 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 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 capital. So that's a very central location and really we're delighted to be in Montpelier. Montpelier as well is on track to be the first net zero capital in the nation by 2030. And we also see this campus as an excellent place to continue an advanced 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 that's a solar powered ice cream. Yeah. We hope to have the students showing that sometime at the farmer's market up here. It's off pop grid, fully school. And I 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 as a program manager and engineering mentor or educational mentor. And then we have Maria as well who is a 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, please let us know. 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 I think like you, you realize that when things happen no one's coming to save you, you gotta do it yourself. We're really excited about this program and we're gonna build it right here bit by bit and we're gonna 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 and knowledge 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 gonna 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, we'll welcome our second cohort and this is a second cohort for semester away students. Engineering's 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 who are open 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. We found one 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 gonna be able to go out and succeed in engineering. And that's really our mission. And so that immersive pilot program will launch in the fall of 24. The other thing we're doing is launching a series of, it's a 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 in curriculum 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. So, 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 Val, if you want to pass it too, yeah. This is my first engineering test. Thanks so much. Well, it's very exciting. Congratulations. My name is Jose Arwayo and I live across the street. I have one of the old houses, so used to be a dorm actually. And I guess many of us probably are wondering since after listening to your presentations, is it since you're going to be bringing students and you plan to grow the number of universities that you work with, is it so therefore you would only have them when they're not at school at their respective universities and since you're purchasing several buildings, I'm wondering what will happen in between those periods? It's a really good question. So I think if we go back, what we're doing is trying to grow slowly so we can 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 don't want to 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 and then we hope to add cohorts as we grow. 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 gonna be ending his work. That's great. Well, I hope you'll, I mean, 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 a professional success is knowing how to introduce yourself to a business, knowing what options are out there. I mean, what are the opportunities in the green energy, green technology sector? 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 signup sheet that went around, we'll be in touch. Thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you. Hi, Cindy Bogard, 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 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 E-Town 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 gonna depend, right? I mean, we're gonna focus on quality and we'll grow when 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 so that we are hoping will help us co-create. Our hope is to recruit cohorts of 20 for next year. So 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. And they would live here on campus. The, in terms of the revenue model, the power of partnering with a 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 that we can get to that quickly. In terms of next cohorts and how that's gonna 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 is people reaching out and asking about, 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 wanna add to that or? I don't have much to add other than, yeah, we, as Rebecca was saying, we're really focused on delivering an excellent program to our initial cohorts and then gradually growing over time. Good evening. I wanna say that I'm very excited to have you guys here. My name's Joe Castellano. I live about a block and a half away. Very excited about what you're proposing here. I know that you are currently in your due diligence phase. But when do you expect the deal to close for the five buildings? That's a good question. I think we'll, there's enough variables that we'll say as soon as possible. But we've already moved in. I'm just gonna say. Go ahead. Hi, my name is James Ray. I'm here for two reasons. First, I live straight down about two blocks down on the right 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 gonna talk to you after this about all that. Because I'd love to help out in that regard. But more specifically, and I would invite you to, 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? And I'm thinking 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. Oh no. I'm gonna 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. And a lot of what 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, again, we're sort 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. And 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. Yeah. And I'll just say that the courses this fall include content in statics, 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, one of them, there's many, 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, all sort of in their own 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 mean, I remember one of my first principal jobs, we had to wire our building for internet, you remember back in those days 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 gonna build this and we're gonna 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? We stay, 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 Babson and we are hoping to get other students from other colleges in the spring and we are going to be recruiting from first year students from all over the state of Vermont we're certainly gonna hit the college fairs here but also New England so we are hoping to expand our base but we've been in, there's a network that Elizabeth Town is part of of small engineering programs and we're already reaching out to them to start bringing other students here as well. So, sorry, just to follow up so will those students be admitted to E-Town as well as this college? Okay. Yeah, and 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. Yeah, and Elizabeth Town at this point they have more students than they can accept so they're actually more applicants who are qualified so they see this as an opportunity to expand the number of students they're serving and again, 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, 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 gonna 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 wanna 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 Schulmeyer, 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 wanna address this? I'm just ear-maring away but I mean you've got plans for some of these buildings you wanna 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 gonna 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, 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 it's other sources of financing for that so we are committed to over time not only maintaining but increasing the sustainability of the buildings. We'll certainly are planning to upgrade the heating systems which are all currently oil boilers to electricity means and we're also working to install 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 at Cologne so 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 has been very generous in terms of letting us do shared services on a number of fronts. Shared serving 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, you can probably guess what the bills are like here. 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 gonna free up some capital to make some of the improvements that we know are needed here as well. And so 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 of maintaining those buildings and we'll continue to try to have good relationships with those partners as well. Gail Carrigan also on Staven 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 read it? Sure, the short answer is yes. And 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. Anyone else has a chance? I think you may have hinted at the answer to this. So forgive me, again, it's James Ray and I don't know. 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, you know, semester, students come from elsewhere here for a semester and go back somewhere else? Or are you, is it 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 gonna 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 gonna be growing so you talked about Noble Hall being a focus right now. Of course I'm interested in what's happening next to Dewey but the other buildings as well and when those will be phased in and how in terms of their uses, that would be helpful. I'll start, I don't wanna talk too much, Troy, I'm just sitting here so I'm talking too much. But first of all, it's great to see you and I'm gonna be following up with you both. The first building that we're starting, as I said, very small and will 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. It's pretty hard to find housing in Montpeliers, you've noticed. So that's our current plan 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 pretty much current use and do you wanna talk about Dewey? Yeah, exactly and then growing into Dewey as well. Dewey, we are exploring a variety of options at Dewey and 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 the sector. That's one idea that people have come up with and I love to talk to you and hear from you about what you think are good promising opportunities there. Yeah, yeah, yeah, feel free to add. 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 who are buying the other buildings with neighbors and with the community it's gonna 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 you're saying that and to the extent that we're not answering it's because we don't know. All right, so I think we need to add. But as it evolves, I'd love to be and I think other people as well really have depth to date on what's happening. That would be important. 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 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 gonna affect what happens. But I really appreciate you're saying that, Alyssa and I think that we would love to use our email list. We send out emails to invite people to this. If you put your name on it, you'll be on that email list 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 gonna follow up with you. Yeah, and if it doesn't work for you it's not gonna work for us. It has to work for everybody. Just a quick note that we're working with GBA architects down that's right on the river here. We get more information. Yeah, there you go. Yeah. Paul Carnahan again. I just had another follow up question on sort of how the campus is going to work. So I assume the students, you didn't mention cafeteria services in Dewey 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? Well, I'll let you talk in a minute to the staff member who, one of the staff members who's living on site but there, we actually aren't big enough to make food service worth it. 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 of 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, right? I mean, 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. We 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 in our farmers markets and it's right up right there on Saturday afternoon. So I think we're gonna work through that. They'll be there. We have two, would you wanna talk about the living arrangements right now? We're very, we're following the residence hall policies, they're Elizabeth Town College's policies within a dendym 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. Happy to speak and give it to you afterwards, just always reach out. 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 and at that scale, it's one of the more economic opportunities is to just work with local restaurants. My wife and I live in Dewey right now so we are doing dual duty of a noble, sorry, that's the wrong name, noble. So we're doing dual duty of also providing some of the services but for the most part, we 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 Turcotte. I live down on Muncie in your Crosby and I just wanna 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 running businesses need stability. They need a little bit of certainty. So again, we wanna work tightly with our partners. Oh, sorry, just looking at that, 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 we planned on doing this before the flood and we didn't wanna wait too long. Yeah, fair. 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. Yeah, I'm not quite sure what Danny said but it may have been what I was going to say. Yeah, it was good. Potluck, I like that. Potluck, okay, I was gonna say you'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 or 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 the 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 and 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 gonna grapple with when they graduate is so powerful but also one of the first people coming in is 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 gonna let them set up their dorm beds first. Jose Aguayo again, you mentioned that these buildings here we're gonna outright when it closes you would be owning them and I guess owning the buildings, the land, everything there's no condominium but this part would 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 or 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's song. We have been running for a couple of years now and it's a sustainable engineering challenge where there's a problem that they're given every year solve a clean water access issue or an access to food issue and we give them some basic equipment. It has to be green, renewable 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, 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 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, 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. The first year was a clean water challenge. 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 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 happened 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, that's a wonderful idea really, that's great. I'm really excited about all the things that you guys are presenting, thank you. And 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 and I, you know, it's 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, so. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Some of the, I mean, the challenge, 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 amaze you what they're able to do, it's amazing. It's when they're allowed to build. Yeah, yeah, 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 means a lot to us that you 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. I really appreciate it and look forward to seeing you out in the lawn.