Harvest House

Empowering the Community Through Sustainability

Harvest House provides a standard supportive housing model to serve members of the community, helping to revitalize neighborhoods, instill a sense of place and confidence, and rebuild lives. Known as a transformative organization for members of the community in need, the leaders of Harvest House continue to pioneer service-enriched housing programs, which is why the team embraced the opportunity to pioneer an initiative as a Partner for Green Places.

With the organization’s vision to instill confidence and freedom for community members in need, aligning with this movement toward sustainability provided a platform of education and empowerment for those in need that could scale across all Harvest House facilities. Additionally, joining the Partners for Green Places (PGP) initiative opens the door for Harvest House to create informed financial savings decisions while, at the same time, driving the movement toward a greener future.

Environmental & Organizational Benefits

The Audit

Harvest House operates nine supportive housing campuses, each tailored to support a different population from veterans, to families and at-risk youth. With this in mind, leaders of Harvest House chose specific buildings for the Partners for Green Places energy audit, conducted by 15 Lightyears, that would be scalable and replicable across their campuses to create a more sustainable, long-lasting impact. The certified energy raters spent days on the Harvest House campus looking into their building systems and noting opportunities for improvements.

After the Harvest House team received the results and recommendations of the audit, they worked with a local contractor to obtain quotes for the project. Through its partnership with the Partners for Green Places initiative, the audit resulted in a final strategic roadmap, providing Harvest House with a clear trajectory for sustainable enhancements.

Multi-Faceted Conservation

The Recommendations

As a Partner for Green Places partner, Harvest House received a detailed roadmap for their chosen buildings which included prioritized energy and water conservation projects with estimated costs, annual savings, simple payback (ROI), and electrical savings (kWh).

Each recommendation in the roadmap was outlined alongside the environmental and financial benefits of implementing it. This allowed the Harvest House team to easily begin implementing affordable recommendations while equipping them with solid data to inform fundraising plans for future capital upgrades.

The primary recommendations for the Harvest House buildings centered around energy usage and conservation. Programmable thermostats were a vital change that would result in significant improvements in energy use due to the widespread amount of units across the organization’s nine campuses. Harvest House has also chosen to replace five HVAC units with more efficient models, providing significant long-term savings.

To this same effect in saving energy, another major recommendation in the roadmap facilitated by Partners for Green Places was to hire someone part-time to care for the air conditioning units. This one person can be trusted to constantly maintain the units, rather than sending out a separate contractor for replacements, maintenance, and repairs.

Not only would this reduce the cost of contracting a company, it would also minimize and prevent damages and malfunctions that would waste energy.

A Greener Future for All

The Outcome

Since Harvest House became part of the collective in the PGP initiative, there has been an organization-wide excitement for sustainability and eco-friendly practices. The nonprofit is using its position as a leader in the Partner for Green Places movement to not only implement energy-efficient improvements across its campuses, but also to educate the people they serve, creating a ripple effect in the community.

Harvest House is passing on its new knowledge from its PGP audit by inviting Florida Power and Light (FPL) to come on-location and present classes to families to improve their future homes and save money at the same time. The organization is also emphasizing the simplicity and ease of some changes that can create a long-term impact.

Stay informed as the leaders of Harvest House continue to implement recommendations from their roadmap. They are currently in the process of hiring a part-time AC maintenance worker and have already began preparations for programmable thermostats. Their ultimate goal is to teach sustainable habits to their clients and scale these sustainable practices across all nine campuses.