Completed applications from eligible applicants must be received by Wednesday, April 3, 2013 at 5:00pm. Click here to download the Request For Proposal and Application Forms.  For more information, please contact Simona Caplan at caplans@jcrcny.org or 212-983-4800 x122.

Refine your idea.

Get coaching from a business mentor.

Win seed money to launch your business.

The Green Business Plan Competition is a new way to help current students and alumni of SSBx’s Bronx Environmental Stewardship Training (BEST) Academy launch their own green businesses. All applicants will receive feedback from a successful business professional; up to six finalists will be selected to pitch their business idea to a live panel of judges and win up to $1,500 in seed funding to launch or grow their business. Finalists will be paired with a business mentor and will develop a 10-minute PowerPoint presentation; three winners will be chosen to receive start-up capital.

GBPC is open to all current and former BEST students. Teams can be as large as three people, provided at least one team member is a BEST grad or current student.

Sustainable South Bronx’s BEST Academy is dedicated to training the future green collar workers of New York City, and now, with the help of Capital One Bank, we’re training green collar entrepreneurs as well.

Here’s how it works:

1. Enter the competition by completing this on-line application by January 25, 2013. As noted above, you can apply on your own or as a team of two or three people.

2. The Green Business Plan competition is open to all green start-up businesses and/or green small businesses with no more than 5 employees.
3. An open “Question & Answer” session will be provided for all interested persons via “Bidder’s Conference Call” on Thursday, January 17, 2013 from 6:30pm-7:30pm. The Dial-in-Number is 1-605-475-5950. The Access Code is 701272.
4. The most successful applications will be those that combine a clear expression of the business’s goal with an innovative approach to providing a service or product to a market that is not being served (or well-served) at the current time.
5. Up to six finalists will each be matched with a Capital One Bank mentor who will help develop the idea over the course of several weeks. (Finalists will be notified on February 8, 2013.)
6. In mid-March, finalists will each present a 10-minute business pitch via a PowerPoint presentation to a live panel of judges consisting of Capital One Bank associates, SSBx employees, and SSBx Board members. Panelists will score finalists on the presentation, business idea, and readiness for success.
7. The three highest-scoring individuals or teams will receive seed funding for their projects:
• $1,500 for the winner
• $1,000 for the runner-up
• $500 for the third place finisher

Apply Now

“This is my family home. It’s a beautiful home,” says Garwood. “My mom raised four kids in this house as a single parent. I gave her my word that we would remain in the house as long as we could. But the heating bills are crazy.”

Then she heard about Green Jobs-Green New York. Through GJ-GNY, a certified contractor conducts a free or reduced-cost energy assessment of a home, and then performs a retrofit of the home that promotes energy efficiency. A retrofit can save a homeowner hundreds or even thousands of dollars each year. SSBx helps homeowners apply for low-interest financing and subsidies through New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA) to help pay for the work.

Garwood made an appointment with Cynthia Ngombe, SSBx’s GJ-GNY Program Manager, and scheduled an energy assessment. The assessment indicated that all exterior walls of her 2,300-square-foot home needed to be insulated by injecting the walls with insulated foam – a process that didn’t exist when the home was built in 1920. The cost for the insulation was more than Ms. Garwood could afford and she did not qualify for the financing that was available through NYSERDA’s financial institution.

This was a problem Ngombe had seen before. “Everyone’s financial situation is different, and having only one creditor offering financing wasn’t enough of a solution for enough people,” says Ngombe. “We realized we needed to find a way to offer other options.”

Ngombe began working with community-based organizations to find other funding options. Her efforts led to SSBx forming a partnership with the Bronx branch of Neighborhood Housing Services (NHS) of New York City. NHS is a national, community-based nonprofit offering low-interest financing and grants for income-qualified homeowners seeking to make improvements. “This partnership allows SSBx to expand our reach because NHS has more flexible financing criteria,” says Ngombe. “NHS also works with homeowners to help them qualify for a grant-loan package to cover the retrofit cost.”

A year after having the energy assessment, Garwood reapplied for financial assistance, this time through NHS. After working with NHS, Garwood received a grant and low-interest loan that enabled the retrofit work to begin. “It’s not even winter yet, but already I can stand in the kitchen for longer than I ever could before,” says Garwood. “I think it’s a wonderful program.”

SSBx is currently seeking additional ways to make retrofits financially accessible to more people, including seeking grants to provide some subsidy assistance directly to the homeowners.

For more information or to schedule a home visit and energy assessment, contact Cynthia Ngombe at cngombe@ssbx.org.

BEST graduate Michael Mendez, Conservation Manager at Bronx River Alliance.

Bronx native Michael Mendez was working in a factory, printing out shipping labels, when a friend told him about BEST Academy. He’d always had “a thing about being outdoors,” so he applied for the second-ever BEST Ecology class, in 2004. He was accepted to the class, and threw himself into the training. He particularly enjoyed the sessions spent working with the Bronx River Alliance.

Immediately after graduation, he was hired by the Bronx River Alliance as a Crew Member, responsible for planting wetland trees such as willow birches and sycamores, clearing debris from the river, and removing invasive plants.

A year and a half later, he was promoted to Crew Leader, and this December, he was promoted again to Conservation Manager, a role that involves overseeing about 10 Crew Members and up to 150 volunteers.

The secret of his success? Hard work, great training, and loving what he does. “You get the satisfaction of the people in the community appreciating what you do. People come out on these canoe trips we have, and these events on the river, and they’ve never done that before. It feels good to give the community a connection to the river. Growing up, my building’s backyard was a basketball court and benches. I didn’t even know the Bronx had a river running through it. Now we’re out there every day, and we represent this river.”

BEST Graduate Pablo Villegas, doing facilities management at a green school.

Working on the river for eight years has given Michael a chance to see the impact of his work over time. “Planting a tree from a seedling and watching it grow 30 feet tall, it’s like, ‘Wow! I helped plant this area up!’”

Meanwhile, recent BEST graduates continue to find jobs in a variety of fields. Pablo Villegas, also from the Bronx, completed BEST for Buildings in 2012. He was hired to do facilities management for Avenues, a recently opened green school in Chelsea that’s part of an international educational system with 20 schools worldwide.

Villegas says his BEST training landed him the job. “The guy who interviewed me hired me because I was the only person to have the G-PRO [Green Professional Building Skills] certification. No one else has the training I have.”

Avenues has a philosophy of supporting personal growth for both students and employees. For Villegas, it’s a change to be on a career track for the first time. “I’ve learned so many different things and I can branch out in different ways. They really want me to move on, and whenever that time comes, I’m ready. I feel so lucky to have done the BEST training.”

The results? A resounding success.

“Sustainable South Bronx were a wonderful addition to the NYC °CoolRoofs program this season,” says Wendy Dessy, Partnerships Manager at the Mayor’s Office/NYC Service. “The SSBX team coated 268,654 square feet of rooftops this season and helped prepare buildings for the program’s volunteer days. Their hard work, dedication and enthusiasm helped us exceed our goal and coat 1,192,931 square feet of rooftops this season.”

The application of white, reflective paint to the roofs helps reduce cooling costs, cut energy usage, and lower greenhouse gas emission. For the BEST grads, it was a chance to participate in an exciting project while gaining valuable job experience. The fact that they were helping the environment made the work more rewarding. “We felt we were making a difference to the city, keeping the energy cost down. We really could feel that,” says Pierre Moore, a BEST B4B 2012 graduate who worked on °CoolRoofs all summer. ”We had a lot of people come out and ask about what we were doing. We told them we were there to clean the roof, paint it, and save you guys energy and money on your heating and electric bills. They were really interested and very grateful. Especially the supers and building owners.”

For B4B graduate Yolanda Regis, this was her first job doing physical labor outdoors. Formerly a retail store manager, Regis was promoted to Crew Leader mid-summer. “I wasn’t afraid to try because I like to learn new things, and I’m a worker,” says Regis. “But at first, I thought, ‘Man, I’m not going to be able to carry those buckets up and down the stairs.’ But then I got to the point where I was able to lift two buckets. It was like ‘Wow! I can do this.’ It was empowering.”

Residents were thrilled with the project. “I just wanted to send out a big thank you to all the volunteers of Sustainable South Bronx who made the dream of making our buildings a ‘greener’ place to live come true,” wrote Troy Martin, a resident of Hamilton Co-Op in Brooklyn. “Everyone was so friendly and hard working and we could not have gotten this done so quickly without your help. Thank you all!”

For Regis, the summer in the sun had a second, more personal benefit. “I’d been really struggling with my weight, and I lost 15 pounds doing CoolRoofs. I feel healthier. I have more energy. My blood pressure was borderline and that went down. And I can take these skills to the next job.”

The next job, for Regis, was helping with Hurricane Sandy, tearing down sheetrock, skimming oil off water and hauling away debris from Battery Park. “I had the strength to do the work because of CoolRoofs,” says Regis. Read about our BEST graduates’ work to help with hurricane clean-up here.

For more information about °CoolRoofs and SSBx’s social enterprise, SmartRoofs, contact SSBx Executive Director, Michael Brotchner, at mbrotchner@ssbx.org.

BEST Students Build Green Solutions

Water Blues – Green Solutions, a documentary about innovators creating green solutions to urban flooding, features about a dozen of our BEST Ecology (BECO) students building a rain garden in the Bronx.

The production crew interviewed Kimberly Beazer, SSBx’s BECO Field Manager, who was leading the class, as well as BEST Academy Director Annette Williams. The documentary is being produced through WPSU, Penn State Public Broadcasting, and will air on PBS stations nationwide in the fall of 2013.

“We looked at where we could find compelling stories about green infrastructure and where people are engaged in solving water problems,” says Frank Christopher, the producer and director of Water Blues – Green Solutions. “The South Bronx was very compelling because of the confluence of organizations working around the restoration of the river.”

Christopher first heard about SSBx and our partners such as the Bronx River Alliance and Rocking the Boat while in Seattle, researching similar community-based efforts to improve the local environment. The documentary is focusing on urban community groups that are actively addressing problems related to stormwater run-off, water conservation, and the rehabilitation of wetlands. In addition to the South Bronx, the documentary will highlight initiatives taking place in Philadelphia, San Antonio and Portland.

“The event we just went through with Sandy points out how vulnerable we are to climate change. Planning for climate change is really critical,” says Christopher. “We need holistic solutions to flooding, sewer overflows, preventing problems in our water supply and thinking about nature.”

About the size of an apple, an AirCasting air monitor connects to a smartphone and lets a student canvass the neighborhood, measuring and mapping air quality. “Students identify pollution hot spots and try to connect them to specific sources,” says SSBx Education Director Nina Sander. “Then we’ll work together to figure out what we can do to address these sources of pollution.”

With AirCasting technology, students can share their findings with a global audience. The AirCasting app allows “Casters” to upload air quality data in real time to an online map, called a CrowdMap. As a Caster walks around the neighborhood taking readings, a color-coded trail of air quality data appears on the CrowdMap—green for clean air, “yellow for not-so-clean air, and red for really dirty air,” says Sander.

Casters can also annotate their maps on their smart phones while in the field. “Say you’re AirCasting on Bruckner Boulevard in Hunts Point,” says Sander. “You notice a spike in pollution on your phone, look up and see a dozen trucks rumbling down the street. You can drop a pin on the map at your location and write a note about what you observed. Then anyone looking at the CrowdMap online can see and understand the connection between what was happening in the community and the air quality there.”

AirCasting sensors can be installed with different features to track specific parameters of air quality. For the South Bronx AirCasting project, students will measure particulate matter, such as soot, which mainly comes from incomplete combustion of fossil fuels and can cause respiratory and cardiovascular disease. Students will also track carbon monoxide, nitrogen dioxide, temperature and humidity.

For the program, SSBx is working with HabitatMap, a nonprofit that released AirCasters in December 2012. “Our goal is to allow communities to record health and environmental information, then share that via the web,” says Michael Heimbinder, founder and Executive Director of HabitatMap. “People are excited about it. They like that they can easily flip between seeing where they are on the map and seeing the graph over time of the castings.”

Nate Thayer White, a science teacher and curriculum designer at Bronx Design and Construction Academy, says AirCasting is a great way to make environmental sustainability concrete. “Science is sometimes ambiguous because you can’t see it, particularly something like greenhouse gas and air pollutants. But this lets you walk around the community where you live and see this hand-held device light up. There’s also a really cool vest you wear that lights up and gives quick visual feedback about your exposure level.”

Want to Help?

The EPA grant has allowed SSBx to buy eight air-casting units, develop the curriculum for high school students, and run the program. We’re looking for:

• Eight Android phones for these units
• Additional support to purchase more units
• Other interested schools

Please contact Nina Sander at nsander@ssbx.org. For more information about the AirCasting program, go to aircasting.org.

Enter BEST Academy graduates. Over 20 BEST graduates are currently employed on post-Sandy clean-up projects through Resource Options Inc. (ROI), a staffing agency involved in environmental issues.

Some of the training that BEST Academy trainees receive proves very useful in disaster relief. Both our B4B and BECO graduates obtain the following certifications as part of their training: the 40-hour OSHA Hazardous Waste and Emergency Response (HAZWOPER) certification and the 10-hour OSHA Confined Space certification. These certifications provide specialized training for dealing with the hazardous materials found in a storm’s aftermath and for entering damaged homes and other buildings.

“I started reaching out to everyone we’d worked with in the past to see if they needed help,” says Migdalia Taveras, one of SSBx’s terrific Business Account Managers. “This company had hired our graduates for the Gulf clean-up after the BP explosion, and they needed a large labor force now. I also reached out to our BEST grads to see who was interested.”

SSBx’s B4B Field Manager, Jerome Barner, taught a class that enabled interested grads to renew their certifications and therefore be eligible for employment with ROI.

BEST grads soon began working throughout the New York region. “We worked at a parking garage that had flooded at 17 Battery Park,” says Yolanda Regis, a B4B 2012 graduate who had served as a crew leader over the summer as BEST grads worked on the NYC CoolRoofs initiative. “We were in a stairwell loaded with oil and water. We skimmed oil off the water with a hose. You put the hose just on top of the water and it sucks the oil off the water. You actually see the water coming clear. That was amazing to see.”

Trevonne Baker, another BEST Academy 2012 graduate, worked in Queens. “We moved trash from Breezy Point to Jacob Riis Park with a boom truck, which is like a big garbage truck with a boom on it,” says Baker. “My favorite part was riding on the boom truck. It was like those fifty-cent game machines where you try to pick up the teddy bear with the claw. We picked up everything you can imagine that came out of people’s houses. Drywall, washing machines, beds, dressers. It felt cool to actually be a part of the clean-up.”

For Pierre Moore, a 2012 BEST graduate who also worked in Battery Park, the experience highlighted the importance of what he’d learned. “I felt like I made a difference,” says Moore. “This is the second hurricane in two years that came up the East Coast. It is related to climate change. It shows how relevant our training really is.”

We’d deeply grateful for the support of our wonderful sponsors who provided funding, prizes, volunteers and more. Their support helped make the Hustle one of the year’s best community events in the South Bronx.

The 6th Annual Hunts Point Hustle was generously sponsored by: Coca-Cola, Waste Management, Sims Metal Management, Action Environmental, Apex Engineering

Race and raffle prizes provided by: JetBlue, Patagonia, ABC Kitchen, Ceetay, Bruckner Bar & Grill, Bronx Zoo

Food provided by: Reyes Produce, New York Produce, PowerBar

Food prepared by: Wildcat Academy

Media sponsors were: News 12 The Bronx and The Bronx Free Press.

And the winners of the Hunts Point Hustle are . . .

Top male finisher Jonah Blumstin (16:49)

Top female finisher Denise Mazzeo (16:57)

Winners by age category

Age 0 – 5: Male, Zenchi Sun, 49:05; Female, Bethania Griffen, 59:04.