On Thursday, February 11th the Center on Sustainable Communities will bring their entire team to visit Fairfield to scout out the city as a potential site for their summer programming.

The Center on Sustainable Communities had a connection with Fairfield from its inception. Lynnae Hentzen, their Executive Director, moved to Iowa in 2004 and wanted to perform a green upgrade on her “new old home”. She had a difficult time finding anyone who knew what she was talking about – until she came to Fairfield and linked up with Joel Hirschberg at Green Building Supply. She was amazed at the wealth of resources in a town that she considers to be the “greenest spot in Iowa”.

She was a stay at home mom for two years, and began thinking about how she could help create a satellite of green buildings in Des Moines and Iowa. She partnered with Beth Hicks and founded COSC, whose annual budget is now over one million dollars and holds award-winning workshops across the state. The mission of COSC is to “serve as a resource to encourage, promote and educate about sustainable building practices among professionals and homeowners.” They are currently running a free 10-session series in West Union for contractors, subcontractors, planners, architects, appraisers, city officials and other professionals to develop a “comprehensive understanding of green building best practices” – and also to support disaster recovery efforts in Northeast Iowa.

Recently, when the City of Fairfield was awarded an Office of Energy Independence grant to upgrade and retrofit their public buildings – Scott Timm, Sustainability Coordinator for Fairfield, began communicating with Lynnae to see if the City could utilize COSC programming to run educational workshops around those projects or other private projects planned for this summer. Now that it looks very likely that the City will forge this partnership with COSC, we would like to invite businesses and community members who have an interest in COSC to attend the monthly Greendrinks meeting this coming Thursday the 11th at 12pm, upstairs in Revelations.

Lynnae remarked, “We’re just excited to see what role we can play to support the initiatives that are going on down there.” This is a fantastic opportunity to create professional development opportunities for a wide range of Fairfield residents, and we look forward to growing our partnership with COSC!