"Empowerhouse": A Multiyear, Inter-Institutional Collaboration with Community Partners: Community Members and Partner Organizations Affirmed That the Role of a Higher Education Institution Was Indispensable in Developing Such an Innovative Approach

THE SOLAR DECATHLON: A CONTEXT FOR COLLABORATION THREE YEARS AGO, faculty and students from Parsons The New School for Design; the Milano School of International Affairs, Management, and Urban Policy at The New School; and the Stevens Institute of Technology came together to form the Empowerhouse Collaborative to compete in the U.S. Department of Energy 2011 Solar Decathlon. The team organized around a goal: to change the way affordable housing is developed by building the first net-zero site home in our nation's capital. From the start, our team sought to design a house that would be more than an exhibition piece on the National Mall. We wanted to create a house that would have a lasting impact and serve as a real-world experience for our students (see figure 1). [FIGURE 1 OMITTED] To achieve this goal, we realized that we needed to create an interdisciplinary team that built expertise by breaking boundaries between the disciplines. By allowing time and developing a structure for multiple types of interaction, we provided for a much deeper understanding between students. For instance, those students working on policy issues had direct access to student and faculty experts in building science, and those students working on aesthetic questions were informed by engineering issues. Throughout the life span of the project, the team incorporated the ideas and efforts of over 200 dedicated students and faculty. The values and ideas that drove the team were woven into a wide variety of related courses with topics ranging from community engagement and advocacy to mechanical engineering, civil engineering, environmental policy, sustainability management, fashion design, lighting design, organizational change management, urban policy, environmental studies, architecture, and product design. Throughout the process, we also extended our educational reach beyond the walls of academia by planning a series of sustainability forums and job-training workshops. These events raised awareness among local residents and built momentum for our work. In addition, Parsons hosted several Passive House Training Seminars for over 200 practitioners as part of our mission to educate the largest possible audience about the highest form of sustainable construction. These seminars were run through Parsons' School of Constructed Environments as part of our continuing education program, and they provided us with a forum for educating our partners along with our students. What we learned from these efforts has been incorporated into a more structured and streamlined series of courses that have not ended with the completion of the house--by spring 2013 a two-family residence--but have continued into the present course structure. Developing group cohesion and efficiency was a key part of our strategy. Early on, we examined the challenges that might arise from the size and composition of our team (e.g., logistical, managerial, financial, communications). Having identified potential organizational problems, we collectively engineered a solution under which our operations were divided among Management Committees, Design Teams, and Research Groups. Work products from the three were discussed in regularly scheduled, faculty-moderated "Design Congresses," during which final decisions were made through a consensus model. This structure facilitated flexible thinking across the Design Teams while supporting specialized solutions that emerged from within the Research Groups. At the same time, our approach mitigated conflicts by distributing responsibilities across different organizational levels. In the end, this meant that each team member had the chance to make big contributions on some elements as well as small contributions on almost every element. In effect, The New School and Stevens entered the 2011 competition (spanning fall 2009-fall 2011) with a set of goals that used the competition's objectives and rules as merely a starting point for a project intended to have a wider impact than a technology demonstration. …