The Babylon Project President and Founder Steve Bellone, Executive Director Dorian Dale, Deputy Director Sam Chu and Board Member Rich Manning joined fifteen major cities such as New York, Boston, Cleveland, Chicago, and San Francisco to share strategies on making their existing building stock more efficient.  The Boot Camp, sponsored by Living Cities and orchestrated by the Institute for Sustainable Communities, was an intense two day exchange on strategies for bringing the retrofitting of existing buildings to scale.  The opening dinner, on May 31^st, featured an inspiring talk by Ron Sims, Deputy Secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development. 

During the opening day of the boot camp, Babylon’s Green Homes retrofit model was spotlighted by such speakers as Rob Bennett, Executive Director of Portland + Oregon Sustainability Institute and Cisco DeVries, President of Renewable Funding  which featured a very entertaining post-dinner address from Auden Schendler, author of “Getting Green Done”.   Steve Bellone, who also serves as Babylon Town Supervisor, presented on day 2 of the boot camp on the Emerging Strategies panel, which was moderated by two of the leading figures in this sector, Doug Foy of Serrafix and Joel Rogers, Director of the Center on Wisconsin Strategy.  Bellone laid out Babylon’s Green Homes model, the first municipally financed energy efficiency program in the nation.  He urged attendees to do what they needed to start a program saying, “before you can get to scale, you need to create a scale model.”