Natural Building Intensive Open House & Graduation Ceremony

We are excited to announce the upcoming open house and graduation ceremony for our Summer 2009 Natural Building Intensive program next Friday August 21st. The Natural Building Intensive (NBI) is a unique 12-week course of study that brings together a collaborative group of experienced and enthusiastic instructors with students in an in-depth, hands-on experience in natural building, from the design and planning stages through the finishing touches. The open house is from 4-5pm at the project site, located on Jones Rd in Warren (off Plunkton Rd) at the Brodeur residence, and reflects what is capable in current natural building technology. The open house will be followed by a graduation ceremony for its 10 participants from 5-6pm. The building is an innovative, cutting-edge sustainable design/build project, featuring a hand-cut timber frame cut from local timber, a super-insulated roof system, and straw bale walls finished with natural lime and clay plasters. In addition, there are the added amenities of a masonry Rumford-style fireplace, radiant concrete floors, and natural daylighting features. For anyone interested in affordable and sustainable construction this would be a great opportunity to talk with students and instructors alike, as well as the owner, who are sure to offer both informative and diverse perspectives on the subject. In addition, as one work culminates another must begin; thus, we are currently soliciting a client for next year’s build. This person or group should already be considering a small scale building for the following year, and could see their project being enhanced by the inclusion of natural building methods.

Matt O'Connell's 7/22 Lecture Online

Continuous Transformations: Something Old, Something New in Making Next Generation Buildings with Matt O'Connell
This talk presents highlights from twenty years of transforming buildings and discusses the specific mechanics of integrating the design and construction processes with examples from collaborations that produced dynamic environments at various scales, from rooms to buildings and landscapes.


http://blip.tv/file/2445150

Testimonial: Ben Griffin

In January of 2009, I officially incorporated my first small business, Greener Living Inc., a company focused on natural and green building; home energy audits and weatherization; as well as an educational component of teaching workshops. The most significant event that led me to starting my own business involved the 11 week Natural Building Intensive program at Yestermorrow. There were many experiences during the course that seemed to prepare me for the next steps of becoming an entrepreneur. Most importantly, the training I received gave me the confidence that I could pursue natural building as a career. Secondly, I saw individuals pursuing their passions in sustainable ways, and making a good living. Thirdly, I now had more tangible experience and relevant references to present to potential clients. With a certificate from a reputable institution and instructors who could, and happily would, vouch for my experience, skill, and ability I felt much more confident in marketing myself.

I left Yestermorrow at the end of July 2008 with a renewed positivity that I could make a living doing what I love and that earning money didn't have to harm the environment. I felt more confident than ever that I possessed the skills and knowledge to provide valuable insight and quality work to my clients. Furthermore, I had gained more awareness of how to run a business from engaging in many conversations with the instructors of the program. Perhaps most of all, I simply felt inspired, positive, and full of energy to take action, whatever direction that might have been.

Mosaics class at Yestermorrow

I took a break from my kitchen and garden duties a few weekends ago to take the mosaics class. We were all able to go from start to finish on a project through the weekend and I decided I'd use my newly learned skill to spruce up the unisex bathroom in the lobby as one of my intern projects. I just finished and installed them. The artistic tiles were donated by one of my classmates.

Mosaics are not terribly difficult to create, though there are time intensive. Aside from their relative ease , I love mosaics for their bright and colorful use of garbage. Most of the materials are broken mugs, plates or random colorful bits that are scavenged and kept out of the wastestream. This past weekend we had one of our instructors and an artist create an art installation using reclaimed materials--garbage otherwise. The regenerative nature of recycled materials art is really attractive to me: in addition to materials being reclaimed and kept out of the waste strem, out of garbage comes something beautiful.

Dan Reicher Lecture Review

Dan Reicher, the director of Energy and Climate Initiatives at Google, spoke last night at Yestermorrow to an "overflow crowd of summer program students, area professionals and interested public," as part of the free summer lecture series. He previewed an array of Google sponsored R&D projects that deal specifically with energy consumption and alternative fuel. For more read these two reviews by Design Cultivation and Light Amber. Watch the lecture online at: http://blip.tv/file/2446293.

Art in the English Garden

Despite some epic rain (clearly Vermont is not the only place experiencing an extremely wet summer), our student in the Art in the English Garden course with instructor Thea Alvin had a wonderful time and pulled off an amazing project while also visiting some amazing gardens, seeing the local sites, and enjoing tea and scones! Full slideshow to come, but here's a glimpse of the final product...

Tonight! Dan Reicher from Google at Yestermorrow

Dan Reicher, Director of Energy and Climate Initiatives at Google, former Assistant Secretary of Energy, and Obama Transition Team member will be at Yestermorrow tonight at 7pm to talk about the current state of play in energy and climate technology, policy and investment. He will discuss Google's increasing focus in the energy world and the critical role of Washington, Wall Street, and Silicon Valley including the massive energy stimulus package.

John Ringel Lecture 7/15 online

Thoughts on Designing Additions:
From Context to Content and Intention to Invention

Topic Summary:
An “addition” attempts to transform an “existing condition”--with its unique history---into a new configuration for the present owner’s future aspirations. The Design has to account for the existing context with all its foibles, implications and technical challenges. The Design has to articulate the present intentions both stated and implied. The Design becomes an invention—a product of the imagination—that will be a future owners’ existing condition. This lecture will reflect, with examples, on some of the speaker’s experiences “adding on” to numerous residences over the years. It will also show as an example the currently Proposed Yestermorrow Design/Build School Shop Addition.

Bio:
John Ringel has been a design/builder since 1972 when he co-founded Jersey Devil design/build firm with Steve Badanes. His natural propensities led him to concerns of sun, site, and energy in buildings. He has specialized in energy and sustainable design and has design/built numerous homes, additions, and alterations to existing residences. John has taught at Yestermorrow since 1990.

Forest Management on Campus

Those of you who've visited Yestermorrow's campus know that one of the things we have an abundance of here are trees. Of our 38-acre campus, about 22 acres are in woodland. When Yestermorrow purchased the property in 1990, the hillside had been previously logged, and had grown back in a mixture of pine, hemlock and some mixed hardwoods at the upper parts of the slope. Over the past 10 years we've harvested a handful of trees in our Stump to Sticker classes and milled them up for use in projects around campus. We also harvested nearly 10,000 board feet of pine last year from around the Chalet for use in our Natural Building Intensive class project at Knoll Farm.

This year we've taken a new fresh look at our forest management plan in anticipation of clearing a new cabin site on the north edge of our campus. As a result, we've decided to bring in a local logger to harvest a number of pines which we'll be able to mill and use for upcoming projects. At the same time, we'll clear space for a new 2 room cabin and our new fabric formed concrete structure. It makes sense for us to cut many of the surrounding mature pines at the same time, before they get too big to safely harvest (especially once the new cabins are in the way), and concentrate the inevitable disruption at one time. All in all we'll harvest 40-50 pines and a number of smaller poplars along the northern border of the campus in the next week or so.

While it'll be hard to see these big beautiful trees go when the skidder and chipper are here, we're looking forward to the long term possibilities that will result from the harvest. We will work to transition this mature pine stand into a mixed hardwood forest. The area opened up by the clearing is an ideal location for future food forest development especially in the form of large nut trees and hardwoods like oaks, walnuts, hickories, and chestnuts with some fruit trees along the edge of the meadow. The upcoming forest management activity represents an opportunity to stimulate real action on regenerative land transition on campus and move forward with our larger goals of campus master planning incorporating Permaculture principles.

Yestermorrow is looking for a cob building project

Yestermorrow is looking for a community client for our upcoming Introduction to Cob Building course September 6-12th. Cob is a combination of clay sediment, sand, and straw mixed together with water and hand formed into walls to create an affordable, safe and ecologically sound method of construction. This 6-day Yestermorrow course is looking for a project site in the Mad River Valley where we could build a small structure or create infill walls in an existing structure. Typically cob walls are finished with an earthen plaster after the cob has dried thoroughly. Potential projects could include a small shed, chicken coop, or garden wall which incorporates a door and windows. The community client is responsible for preparing the project site and paying for the cost of building materials, but all student and instructor labor is provided at no charge to the client.

If you know of a potential project for the upcoming Cob Building course, or would like to find out more information, please call José Galarza, Community Outreach Coordinator, at Yestermorrow: 802-496-5545 or by email at jose@yestermorrow.org.

New video! Lecture by Jacob Deva Racusin

Check out the 7/8 summer lecture by Jacob Deva Racusin on Bridging the Gap: Bringing Together the Worlds of Natural and Green Building at http://blip.tv/file/2394709. He discusses how the modern natural building movement has been growing slowly but steadily for decades across the globe, yet much misunderstanding still remains about its form, function, purpose, and potential. The growth of the green building movement has helped increase awareness of energy efficiency, building performance, and ecological sensitivity. Developments in natural building and design in our cold climate are addressing these concerns, while continuing to support core issues of social and ecological justice and affordability. Come find out how the natural and green building movements can - and must - learn from and work with each other to reach mutual goals.

Jacob Deva Racusin is co-owner of New Frameworks Natural Building, a Vermont-based contracting and consulting business specializing in the integration of natural materials, holistic design principles, and intentional process to create high performance structures of beauty. Jacob has been creating functional art with wood, stone, straw, earth, and other found materials since 2000, when he began design and construction on a solar-oriented straw bale house in Montgomery, Vermont, in which he lives with his family. He has led Yestermorrow's Natural Building Intensive program in 2008 and 2009.

Stay tuned to http://www.yestermorrow.blip.tv/ for each week's public lectures, or join us in person at the School at 7pm on Wednesdays through the end of August. For a full schedule of the Summer Lecture Series, please visit www.yestermorrow.org/Lecture09.htm.

A few summer shots

We've posted a few new photo albums on our Picasa site from summer classes and just neat happenings around campus- check it out!

Summer Lecture Series video online

We're thrilled to have our summer lecture series video online now thanks to volunteer Cornelius Murphy! We'll be posting the presentations weekly on the new channel at www.yestermorrow.blip.tv. Check it out! You can also subscribe via RSS feed or iTunes to get notification of new videos as they're posted.

Click here for the first lecture from 6/24 with Jeff Parsons and Jared W. Poor from Beeken Parsons furnituremaking studio in Shelburne, VT on "What Were We Thinking? Reflections on how Place, Personality and Process Influence Furniture Design at Beeken Parsons"

2009 Summer Lecture Series

Yestermorrow is pleased to announce the 10th Annual Summer Lecture Series starting Wednesday, June 24th and continuing Wednesday evenings at 7pm through the end of August. The lecture series features a wide range of professionals related to the field of design/build speaking on topics as diverse as clean energy technology, compost, furnituremaking, real estate development, energy efficiency, natural building and much more.
For a full lineup of speakers and topics can be found at:
http://tinyurl.com/kk6sgg
Please join us!
p.s. lectures will also be videotaped and shown on Channel 44 here in the Mad River Valley and posted online at http://www.yestermorrow.blip.tv.

Pecha Kucha comes to Yestermorrow

We had a wonderful time Saturday night at Yestermorrow's Board and Faculty meeting. Good meetings during the day, a wonderful dinner by Heidi, Carrie and Austin, and then Yestermorrow's first ever Pecha Kucha (pronounced pe-chak-cha). The concept comes from the Japanese word for "chit chat" and this idea has been sweeping the design world by storm over the past few years. The idea is to see a lot of work in a short period of time, so each presenter can choose only 20 slides, and gets 20 seconds to say whatever they want to say about each one. We had 14 presenters, including Paul Hanke, Matt O'Connell, Josh Jackson, Mac Rood, Kathy Meyer, Skip Dewhirst, Ace McArleton, Monica DiGiovanni, Hilary Russell, Rich Montena, Keith Giamportone, Jeff Schoellkopf, Dave Sellers, Tyler Kobick, and Chris Cook (for WMAP). It was a classic demonstration of the diversity of the Yestermorrow community, showing work ranging from boatbuilding to historic preservation to timberframing to furniture to large scale architecture to hydropower to photography to food!

I've combined all the slides into two short (10 minute) videos:


It's split into two halves- for Part 2 click on:


or you can watch the individual presenters in short clips at: http://yestermorrow.blip.tv.

Yestermorrow to host fabric formed concrete course

Yestermorrow and the School of Architecture and Art at Norwich University are co-sponsoring a one-week program in concrete construction. The course is built around the annual workshop of ISOFF (The International Society of Fabric Formers) which is geared towards educators, practitioners, and students. Around the globe, from cutting-edge research in universities and institutes, to contractors and architects working in the field, fabric forming is a significant new force in concrete construction.
This one-week event will bring together the world's leading innovators in the field to share techniques and strategies, while forming and pouring a series of concrete architectural components that allow for high efficiency, thermally massive, durable and sustainable structures. Participants will tour local architecture projects that use fabric form work and examine case studies to learn about the science and art of building with concrete.
The workshop will be held at Yestermorrow August 24-28 and is being co-sponsored by The School of Architecture and Art at Norwich University. Participants can register for the full week-long program ($1,200) or a one day Friday session, which includes hands-on casting and tour of local structures ($150). AIA continuing education credits available. Call 888-496-5541 for more information or Register Online. Click here for the planned workshop and conference schedule.

The chickens are here!

Our new chickens have arrived this morning! A dozen pullets raised by YM alum Cathy Rubacalba. Check out this sweet mobile coop built by our interns over the past two weeks. Once these little guys get a little bigger, we're looking forward to collecting our own homegrown eggs every morning!

The crew and the chicken tractor

More photos at http://picasaweb.google.com/yestermorrowschool/Coop#

Welcome new interns!

Yestermorrow welcomed two new interns on May 18th. They have survived the past 2 weeks and are already hard at work!

Karie Reinertson--Originally from Santa Barbara, CA, Karie has lived in nearly every major city on the east and west coasts, most recently Washington, DC. While working for the Landscape Architecture Foundation, an environmental design non-profit in DC, she realized that she needed to find out more about the type of design projects she was funding, hands-on. LAF supported this decision and Karie went to southern Spain to learn straw bale building and, after another stint with LAF, she learned cob building in the Costa Rican rain forest. She’s traveled extensively throughout the United States, Southeast Asia, parts of Central America, Europe, and Egypt. She received a Bachelor of Fine Arts in 2003 and hopes to start graduate architecture school in 2010, focusing on responsible community design/build in Latin America.


Tim Terway-- Tim joins Yestermorrow from Brooklyn, NY where he was working on ecological and urban regeneration strategies including the NYC reforestation plan, an industrial ecology and development vision for the Southwest Brooklyn waterfront, and a cultural preservation plan for the bioregionally-dependent Maasai tribes of Southern Kenya. Originally from the anthracite coal lands of Pottsville, Pennsylvania and trained as a landscape architect and city planner, he has been to 5 continents while working to reconcile the design of cities with the natural systems they're dependent on in the wake of unprecedented resource challenges. Tim will use his time at Yestermorrow to immerse himself in the beauty of learning by doing while accepting that he'll no longer have an excuse to not help is dad with any building project imaginable.

Garden Updates on Ethicurean

Check out Kitchen/Garden Intern Stephanie Pierce's update on the Ethicurean blog about her experiences so far in the Yester-garden...

http://www.ethicurean.com/2009/05/28/strawbale-coldframe/

YM Alum Guthrie Smith Shares Her Story

From 2007 Home Design/Build graduate Guthrie Smith:

"Ever since I was a child, I had planned to build a house. In 1975, pregnant with my first child, I built a log cabin in Huntington woods with my partner. Sixteen years later, when I was trying to move back to Vermont, I took the summer to build a cabin with my husband-to-be (I didn’t know it at the time) in Belvidere as a retreat for me and my four children. That same year I heard about Yestermorrow and wanted in the worst way to take a class there! I really never let go of that idea, and another sixteen years later, when it was time to build a REAL house, it was clear that the Home Design/Build class was finally going to happen for me.

I came to the class with enthusiasm, motivation to learn and do, and some bare-minimum skills in the building area. I left with a great house design and the ability to make designs, some more and better building skills, and some great ideas. The class was amazing – working all day and sometimes into the night with others, all of us focused on our own visions. I learned from everyone, not just the instructors. The most important thing I got from taking the class was the confidence and excitement to actually take what I had begun and make it into what would end up my home!

I waited many years for the right time to take this class, and as much as I looked forward to it, I could never have imagined it being quite as helpful and life-changing as it was! I was involved in every aspect of the design of the house, practicing my newly-acquired drafting skills, and tried my hand at as much as I felt able to do in the building process. During the year of building, I did some basic carpentry work, window and door trim, laid and cut tile. Now, among other things, I’m making some shelves and cabinets, a result of another great Yestermorrow class!"

Filipino Design/Build Project

Check out this great design/build project in the Phillipines led by Yestermorrow instructor and board member Kyle Bergman and his longtime friend and collaborator Jim Hubbell. This project is part of their ongoing Pacific Rim Parks project and has been a design/build process involving Filipino architecture students over the past month. There are lots more amazing images on their blog: http://www.prppearls.blogspot.com/. The posts are chronological, so if you want to start at the beginning, go to the bottom of the page and scroll up.

A Hands-on Revolution- Financial Times feature

Financial Times- May 23, 2009
A Hands-on Revolution by Madeleine Johnson

A few years ago Jon Biehler took a life-changing bicycle ride through the US state of Maine. He happened upon a school – the Shelter Institute – which would eventually transform him from a teacher into an architect and builder, the sort of man able to put a roof over his own head.

“[I was] already interested in building a house for myself with good construction techniques and a very open feeling [and] I realised that Shelter Institute could give me the knowledge to either contract out or take on whatever portion of the work I wanted,” recalls Biehler, who is based in Germany. “A few summers later, I took their three-week post-and-beam course.”

Enchanted by the school’s surroundings, he bought a nearby plot of land, where he erected a pre-cut 20ft by 40ft post-and-beam structure, which he finished himself, while calling in professionals for wiring and plumbing. Within three summers he had a completed vacation house, garden shed and boat house. And now, after getting “invigorated” by his summer 2008 school project – a frame cabin – he has started work on a year-round retirement home.

Read more... (Yestermorrow story starts a few paragraphs down)

New York Times Article Hits Home

The most emailed story from the New York Times today was "The Case for Working with Your Hands." Our changing economy is one force that is apparently helping the trades look more appealing than many office desk jobs, probably for the first time in several generations. I know that as a young "knowledge worker" I often craved a visible result or a tired body from my workday. This craving, combined with my desire to learn how to approach work in a way that leaves the world a better place rather than a more toxic place, is part of what drove me to the internship program at Yestermorrow.

It's an interesting article that resonated with me when I read it. Enjoy.

New Regenerative Design Course: June 28-July 3

The leading edge of the sustainable building movement is beginning to push the envelope beyond the greening of conventional buildings, into the territory of regenerative design and development -- the process of integrating buildings, communities, and their inhabitants as healthy contributors to the living places of which they are a part. This course begins with the practical essentials of building system integration -- the process required to achieve affordable and effective environmental design. Deeper technical system integration will also be addressed relating to the design of buildings that function as organisms -- net positive energy generators and clean water contributors (Living Buildings).

This new course, to be taught by three pioneers in the fields of sustainable, integrated, and regenerative design -- Bill Reed, John Boecker, and Joel Glanzberg -- will provide a rare opportunity to explore the design world's cutting edge with some of the field's pre-eminent practitioners. Course dates are June 28 to July 3. Click here to learn more about the Regenerative Design & Development course. To register, click here for online registration, email shannon@yestermorrow.org or call us at 888-496-5541.

Permaculture 101

From the great Bioneers.org site:
Permaculture expert Penny Livingston-Stark shows how natural systems can teach us better design practices. Learning to work with the earth not only creates a healthier environment, it also nourishes the people who live in it.

Find more videos like this on Bioneers Community

May 2009 Newsletter Now Online

In this issue...
Student Profile: Mike Horgan
Upcoming Classes
Class Spotlight: Regenerative Design
Bike and Build
Fabric Formed Concrete Conference
Public Information Sessions in NYC and Philadelphia

Visit http://www.yestermorrow.org/pdf/May09newsletter.pdf view the latest Yestermorrow e-newsletter.

Biophilic Design Book Wins Award

Yestermorrow Board member Stephen Kellert's recent book, "Biophilic Design: the Theory, Science and Practice of Bringing Buildings to Life" (John Wiley 2008) just won the 2008 American Publishers Award for Professional and Scholarly Excellence (the PROSE awards) in the Architecture and Urban Planning category. Congrats Stephen!

Instructor Thea Alvin's show opens May 4th

Yestermorrow instructor Thea Alvin (Art of Stone, Art in the English Garden) will debut a show of drawings from her recent trip to China and the calligraphy for it at the Bees Knees in Morrisville, VT. She's also binding books of the story that she wrote home on her trip. May 4th at 6 pm.

Online Auction continues

Yestermorrow's online ART AUCTION continues this week with a piece made by Sarah Phillips entitled "Security Sunscape".

Mixed media collage created from used security envelopes.

The piece measures 9" x 7 3/4" and is signed on the back by the artist.

Approximate value is $290.

Sarah Nicole Phillips is a Toronto born, Brookly-based artist. Sarah has donated this work to Yestermorrow Design/Build School (www.yestermorrow.org) to help us raise funds for our mission to inspire people to create a better, more sustainable world by providing hands-on education that integrates design and craft as a creative, interactive process.

Visit our eBay Giving Works auction site to place your bid today:
http://tinyurl.com/cn4cy9

Images from Stained Glass last week

Interesting NYTimes Article on Earthquake Resistant Strawbale

http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/04/06/straw-simplicity-quake-resistance/

Dot Earth: Straw + Simplicity = Quake Resistance
By By Andrew C. Revkin
Published: April 6, 2009
A shaky test reveals the strength of a simple design for safe structures in poor places.

Thoughts on Farm Design

A guest blog from Yestermorrow instructor Jesse Selman

Broad Context
A farm is a complex system that involves the movement of vast amounts of mass and energy. This warrants a certain degree of foresight. Most farmers make business plans that look years into the future. A key part of this is the articulation of goals and strategies to achieve those goals. A farm design is a spatial energetic plan that can be anything from a snapshot of the present to a multi-generational road map to a farm for the future. The key is to put goals and strategies into the context of the whole farm, watershed, foodshed, ecology, and community resilience.

Sense of Place
Understanding place begins with information gathering. It means walking the land. Watching the effects of the earth moving around the sun. Seeing wet and dry. Making lists, maps, and diagrams. Watching the animals including humans. (It can be very hard to step outside oneself, especially in the routines of agriculture. Yet it is useful to take time away from the routine in order to get the mental space needed to examine it.) Observation can lead to a deeper understanding of the system beyond what needs to get done. Cows prefer to walk up hill and towards light. People tend to not put things away if the storage place is hard to access. This roof is covered in moss, that one isn’t.

Design is a process
The challenge is applying big picture goals to the complex situation of a real farm. This is not just about a new barn or greenhouse. It is about hopes, dreams, and expectations mixed with budgets, phases, and coordinated steps towards a set of goals. A far-reaching design will create an infrastructure that is adaptable to changes in climate, economy, society, or the changing needs of the farmer and her family. The design process should be set up to mimic the dynamic reality of a farm. Make it flexible, adaptable, and useful when a set of plans gets pulled off the shelf in 10 years. The process itself can create its own benefits, such as the transfer of experience from one person’s mind to a group leading to a more stable system of shared knowledge. Tracking how decisions were made will provide useful information as ideas naturally get revisited.

Good design is the communication of ideas
At my most wonderfully inarticulate moments my wife kindly reminds me of the adage “if you can’t explain something then you don’t understand it.” I believe there are other ways to understand things that don’t involve words, but the concept is very important. The simple act of articulation brings about varied levels of understanding and points of view. It is a way to test ideas and show them to others. Perhaps one articulates the land by mapping it. That act of representing the sensory experience of a place is a powerful way for the designer to see a point of view and test ideas. The result is a sharable view that can be exchanged with apprentices, neighbors, contractors, or lenders. Simple diagrams that show a process or relationship can clarify leverage points and guide decisions of where the effort of time or money should be invested.

Innovation, beauty, and durability
At some point design becomes reality; whether that means a hedgerow or barbed wire fence. For all the practical reasons to take certain actions it can be easy to leave out the simple poetry of a clever, handsomely crafted, and rugged product. I would not consider it superfluous to take the extra time to make something special. A farmer I know recently put up some new paddocks and needed half a dozen gates. He bought some, but the ones he would pass through each day he made himself. They were composed of the left over arched tubular steel from an old greenhouse. He used the curved pieces to make an elegant series of gates that will be enjoyed for years and bring pleasure as he passes through them.

Be humble
Despite all the lofty goals we can throw at any endeavor, I will never forget the wise words once said to me as I fussed over an eighth of an inch while placing a new beam above a pig pen. The farmer watched me squint at my level and rolled her eyes. As she walked away, she called out, “Done is perfect.”

Jesse Selman will co-teach a course on Farm Design/Build this fall (October 25-November 6, 2009) at the Yestermorrow Design/Build School in Warren, VT. He approaches green building and design with over a decade of experience growing food and creating and managing sustainable farmscapes. In 2003, he created Small Farm Builder offering sustainable agriculture infrastructure design and a pedagogical building experience to non-profits and small farms. He has worked with numerous farms on master plans, infrastructure implementation, housing, root cellars & farm structures. As a farmer and educator his experience ranges from animal husbandry to watershed stewardship. He currently works at Coldham & Hartman Architects - a firm committed to ecologically intelligent design – while pursuing his graduate studies in architecture.

A great quote from Vitruvius

Our Board Chair and Instructor Mac Rood recently sent along this great quote from the first century Roman architect Vitruvius in his introduction to The Ten Books of Architecture. I think it articulates well the importance of the design/build approach-- clearly something which is not new, but in fact reflects an ancient practice.

The architect should be equipped with knowledge of many branches of study and varied kinds of learning, for it is by his judgment that all work done by the other arts is put to test. This knowledge is the child of practice and theory. Practice is the continuous and regular exercise of employment where manual work is done with any necessary material according to the design of the drawing. Theory, on the other hand, is the ability to demonstrate and explain the productions of dexterity on the principles of proportion.

It follows, therefore, that architects who have aimed at acquiring manual skill without scholarship have never been able to reach a position of authority to correspond to their pains, while those who relied only upon theories and scholarship were obviously hunting the shadow, not the substance. But those who have a thorough knowledge of both, like men armed at all point, have the sooner attained their object and carried authority with them.

Courses for AIA Sustainable Design Credit

Yestermorrow Design/Build School offers architects an excellent opportunity to take classes to fulfill their AIA requirements. This is an opportune time to build on a firm’s strengths, add to employees’ areas of competence, or fill in gaps in skills. The American Institute of Architects (AIA) requires that all members participate in continuing education, and in 2009 introduced a new requirement of 4 units of Sustainable Design. Yestermorrow is a Registered Continuing Education Systems Provider through the AIA and has been offering courses on the topic of sustainable design for nearly 30 years.

Yestermorrow Design/Build School offers over fifty 1-day, 2-day, 1-week, and 2-week courses that fulfill AIA Continuing Education requirements. AIA members are required to take 18 units of continuing education per year, including 8 units of Health, Safety, and Welfare. Many states also require additional learning units to maintain registration of one’s architecture license.

Some Yestermorrow courses that meet the AIA’s Sustainable Design requirements include Green Development Best Practices, Constructed Wetlands, and Real Time Building Energy Analysis. A full listing of Yestermorrow’s AIA credit courses is available at www.yestermorrow.org/aia-ces.htm. The AIA Board instituted the requirement for Sustainable Design credits in response to the issue of climate change and the impact of buildings on carbon emissions. The requirement became effective at the beginning of 2009 and extends through 2012.

Founded in 1980, the mission of Yestermorrow is to inspire people to create a better more sustainable world by providing hands-on education that integrates design and craft as a creative interactive process. Yestermorrow is committed to providing educational opportunities for practicing professionals and students in the fields of architecture, environmental design, fine arts, landscape design, engineering, and planning. The School’s goal is to expand the horizons of those already in the design and construction field, and to deepen their understanding of the interrelationships between the design process and the construction process.

Yestermorrow Announces Advisory Board

Five nationally and internationally recognized leaders in architecture, green building, energy and the environment have agreed to serve on Yestermorrow's newly announced Advisory Board.

Bill McDonough - is an internationally renowned designer and one of the primary proponents and shapers of what he and his partners call 'The Next Industrial Revolution.' Mr. McDonough is the founding principal of William McDonough + Partners, an internationally recognized design firm practicing ecologically, socially, and economically intelligent architecture and planning in the U.S. and abroad.

Bill McKibben - is an American environmentalist and writer who frequently writes about global warming, alternative energy, and the risks associated with human genetic engineering. He is the author of The End of Nature, and Deep Economy: the Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future. He is a Scholar in Residence at Vermont's Middlebury College and is a leader in the movement to raise awareness about and combat climate change.

Dan Reicher - is the Director of Climate Change and Energy Initiatives for Google.org which works to advance policy in the areas of climate change and energy, global poverty, and global health. Dan has been a dedicated public servant, holding the post of Assistant Secretary of Energy for Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy at the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) from 1997 - 2001, among many other positions with the DOE.

Dave Sellers - is a practicing architect in Warren, VT (Sellers and Co.), and was named as one of the 100 foremost architects in the world by Architectural Digest. Mr. Sellers' body of work includes 46 years of continuous experiments and designs from architecture to industrial design, from town planning to research and teaching. In addition to former teaching positions at Yale and MIT, Dave has been an influential instructor at Yestermorrow for nearly 20 years.

Sylvia Smith - is a Senior Partner at FXFOWLE Architects and directs the firm's Cultural/Educational Studio which has won numerous awards for design excellence. She believes that every project, regardless of type or size, can make an architectural move that empowers it and enlivens the experiences of people who visit or pass by. Her current work includes the redesign of the Lincoln Center public spaces and the expansion of the Juilliard School (with Diller Scofidio + Renfro), the Lion House reconstruction and the Jose E. Serrano Center for Global Conservation, both at the Bronx Zoo.

It's an honor for the School to have such a high caliber of supporters and advisors. You can read their full biographies on our website.

When I'm not on the clock...

I've been working on a mobile drafting kit that I can take back and forth with me to the studio and the chalet. It started as our shop orientation project and found a life of its own. I entered it into the "Outside of the Box" contest on FineWoodworking.com. Check it out if you'd like.

Tim's mobile drafting kit

My next personal project is a rolling tool cart that I can stack all of my individual tool boxes on. I think I'd like to incorporate some beefed up shoji screens as well as some green wood and maybe some turnings. Stay tuned.

Vote for Sprawl Free Vermont

Dear friends of Yestermorrow,

We're partnering with Dave Sellers on a proposal to create a statewide design competition to create fossil fuel free communities. Over the past few years Dave has taught a Yestermorrow course on Sustainable Communities of the Future, and this proposal is a natural outgrowth of that work.

Sprawl Free Vermont is a collaborative organization seeking to unite the rail towns of Vermont under a cohesive design forum to fortify and enrich the ecosystem of environmental and human community. All Vermont public schools, colleges and community groups will be invited to participate in an annual design competition to develop strategies for designing and implementing revised and new configurations for communities that will last for 500 years plus with minimum to zero requirement for fossil fuels to support civic societies that can change and evolve over time. Emphasis will be focused on adjusting and generating new technologies, but maintaining important traditions, artistic integrity and respect for natural and civil interactions between residents, businesses, craft and manufacturing.

The overall goal of Sprawl Free Vermont is to generate interest and awareness of the opportunities and creativity available world wide, regionally, and locally for long-term human settlement that does not invade, damage, limit, exhaust resources, or pollute the planet. Ultimately, Sprawl Free Vermont seeks to recognize creative and inclusive configurations that challenge and inspire future change, yet recognize important, unique aspects of the Vermont cultural and environmental landscape.

You can support this proposal with your vote-- the proposals which receive the most public support will be considered for a $200,000 grant from Green Mountain Coffee Roasters.Just click here- it's easy:http://www.justmeans.com/competitionidea/10222/promoteidea.html

What's going on?

The Yestermorrow interns have been busy with various projects and classes around the campus lately, so I thought I'd post what we're all up to.

Will, Tressa and Stephanie spent time in Architectural Woodcarving this past week with Bill Schnute. Bill is a great guy and an amazing wood carver. It was incredible to see people's progress in only one week's instruction. Tressa's fish is a great example of what was accomplished. Zach and Kendall were participating in the NESEA Building Energy Conference in Boston, so I spent the majority of my week fixing broken tools. I'm into that type of thing, so it was fun.

This week, Kendall and Tressa are taking Beginning Furnituremaking, so Stephanie wrangled the remaining three of us and put us to work on gardening preparation: building straw bale cold frames, garden siting and compost area clearing. Now that the snow has left the garden patch, she has a better idea of what she is working with (and up against). Herb planting boxes are next on the list, and we've found some barky slabs that we're planning on using for them.

Tomorrow, we'll head up to Randy Taplin's shop to continue working on the router table we've been redesigning and building with him. Randy has been great in teaching us traditional cabinetry methods and skiing with us on his property. The views up there are out of hand, and our new router table will be almost too nice to use (or abuse) when it's finished.

I'm signed up for Efficiency by Design this weekend and am really looking forward to it. I'm fairly new to building efficiency and this class is purported to be a knowledge bomb that I hope will help Stephanie and me out when we're looking to build our own home one day. I would love it if we could have a home one day that met all of it's own needs and ours without negatively affecting other people and the environment.

Yestermorrow Partners with Green Mountain College on Renewable Energy and EcoDesign program

Starting in the fall of 2009, Green Mountain College in Poultney, VT will offer a certificate program in Renewable Energy and EcoDesign (REED). Undergraduate students at GMC have the opportunity to explore the renewable energy and green building fields through the REED program. It reflects the same characteristics as GMC’s award-winning Environmental Liberal Arts curriculum: the program is field-based and interdisciplinary. GMC has partnered with Yestermorrow Design/Build School and Solar Energy International to provide an external 3-credit practicum to offer REED students real-world technical training in building and alternative energy systems. The program is open to GMC students in any major and is made up of 18 credits of coursework.

Timberframing Part 3: The Raising

In the past two parts of my timberframing primer, I wrote about theory, layout and some joinery. In this post, I'm going to talk a little bit about the raising of the 10 x 8 shed we built (mostly - we didn't get to the rafters). The first thing to know is that raising is a community event. It takes a bit of group strength and coordination to lift hundreds of pounds of hemlock into position safely - our instructors were extremely experienced in handling structures much larger than our shed.

Most all of our joints were too tight and had to be tweaked before they fit well. After one bent's joints were satisfactory, we tilted it into place. Major rules for lifting these beasts are:

1. One person is in charge and everyone listens to him/her.
2. Don't lift if you don't have to. (use crowbars and levers when possible)
   
3. Don't lift timbers alone. Ever.

I'll wrap up with some photos that tell the rest of the story.

Enjoy.

Permaculture Project Wanted

Interested in a permaculture design for your property, but don't have time to come take our 2-week Permaculture Design Certification course? Here's a great opportunity for you... one of the students in the upcoming class (who also happens to be a Yestermorrow stone masonry instructor) is looking for a project to focus on in our upcoming April Permaculture class.

Dan Bermingham owns a small landscaping company in Huntington, VT focused on organic landcare, stonework, and permaculture design and installation. If you would be interested in working with Dan to design a permaculture landcape for your land at a steep discounted rate, please email Dan at smallaxelandcare@hotmail.com -- the sooner the better! Small Axe Landcare website: http://www.smallaxellc.com/

Highway 2.0

Check out this great video produced by Yestermorrow instructor and board member Ben Falk and his team at Whole Systems Design in Moretown, VT.
Vacant land along Americas interstate highway system is renewed through the growing of quick-cycling biomass crops and the installation of wind turbines and solar photovoltaics. This represents an entirely new economy: Interstate Energy Farming. A redeveloped interstate corridor would be the backbone of an adaptive landscape reuse strategy on a national level.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AP80j_mz4Jo

Yestermorrow Instructor Thea Alvin Featured in Vermont Magazine

Check out the great article and photos of stonemason Thea Alvin in the current issue of Vermont Magazine! Thea will be offering two Yestermorrow courses this summer as part of her busy schedule-- The Art of Stone, July 5-10th and Art in the English Garden, July 19-27 (a travel study trip to England building stone walls and arches).

Quite the world traveller, "..she was recently in Arizona, leading a seminar of executives in the intricate skill of building a stone arch (the lesson— out of hard work comes balance and harmony). She was recently in England,finishing a grotto at a country estate. She spent a month in China, where she built ten arches from bricks, tiles, slate and marble. She also has built stone sculpture in Canada, France and Italy; in fact, Thea wants to travel the world, leaving works of stone art behind."-- Vermont Magazine, March/April 2009

Economic Stimulus Bill Initiatives for Home Energy Efficiency

A quick update on new initiatives available through the 2009 Economic Recovery Bill recently signed by President Obama (thanks to Enterprise Community Partners for sharing this summary). "The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 provides unprecedented funding for building energy retrofits...The bill extends the current law tax credit for improvements to energy-efficient existing homes through 2010. For 2009 and 2010, the bill will increase the amount of tax credit to thirty percent of the amount paid or incurred by the taxpayer for qualified energy efficiency improvements during the taxable year. The bill will also eliminate the property-by-property dollar caps on this tax credit and provide an aggregate $1,500 cap on all property qualifying for the credit." An additional $300 million is available through DOE for states to provide rebates to consumers who replace appliances with Energy Star models. For more information, visit http://www.enterprisecommunity.org/public_policy/documents/economic_recovery_bill.pdf

A note from a former student and intern

"I quit my job and moved to the Yestermorrow School as an intern in the fall of 2006. Unsure of where I wanted to put my engineering degree to use, I started hitting things with a hammer and drawing without a straight edge. Somewhere in between studying the tools of the past and the technological possibilities of the future I began to find my way, and a vision of creativity and sustainability blossomed. I took a timber framing class for the fun of it, and soon found the missing link between engineering and artistic construction. Since leaving the Mad River Valley I have pursued timber framing education and employment and am more excited about my future then I have ever been. I have traveled throughout the country and worked side-by-side with some of the brightest minds in the field. This week I am working with a team to install the final rafters of a barn from the 1860’s that we have completely restored. My plan for the future is to start my own design/build timber frame company and to keep true to the principles that began to take root at the Yestermorrow School. I am confident that built world of tomorrow will be a better place thanks in-part to the instructors and students from this special school in the heart of the Green Mountains." –Brian Malone

Slideshow from Rigging, Rolling and Raising

Mooooose!

I found this in the snow behind the chalet (or "Dojo" as we've begun to call it since installing the chin-up bar) a few mornings ago.

Timberframing Part 2: Laying Out/Cutting a Tenon

In my last post, I wrote about using the square rule to make my timber a uniform dimension at the joint locations. This week, I'll show briefly how to lay out and cut one tenon on a specific post using the square rule. The tenon is made to fit into a mortise in the plate which will eventually support the rafters and roof of the shed, so these joints must be nearly perfect. A good square and sharp pencil are crucial to getting these joints to work well.

In this picture, you can see the reference face of my post designated by the dark triangle pointing to the reference edge. The reference faces are the most square to each other, so we'll base all of our measurements from those faces. The photo also shows how I laid out my pencil lines for the tenon. The tenon is 1.5 inches from the reference face and 1.5 inches in thickness. One leg of my framing square is 1.5 inches, so it makes things a lot easier.

There's more to layout than what's shown and you'll want to do all of that before cutting, but for simplicity, I'll move on. The first cut is with a carpenter's crosscut saw. It's pretty hard to do well and I have a lot to improve technique-wise.

Once the majority of the meat is cut away from both sides of the tenon, the tenon's "cheeks" are cleaned up and flattened with a chisel and rabbet plane.

After planing, I removed the parts of the tenon that will make it 4.5 inches across as well as the housing that will help the tenon slide right into it's mortise. A slight taper on the tenon's faces, chamfers on it's edges and ends, and a peg hole and it's all done.

I'll post some photos from our shed raising in the next and last edition of my timberframing overview - probably next week.

Living Big in a Small World

Yestermorrow instructor Moneca Kaiser was recently profiled in the Ottawa Citizen (2/7/09).

"When Moneca Kaiser talks about smart home storage ideas, she has the voice of authority. Hardly surprising. The owner of Moneca Kaiser Design Build (www.mkdesignbuild.ca) lives in a 325-square foot apartment. What’s more, she works from her east-end home and is so efficient at keeping things tucked away that, last Sunday, she hosted a Chinese New Year’s party for 25 friends.

For Kaiser, a committed environmentalist, good storage starts with minimizing possessions. That said, she does have stuff. Office supplies, for example. To keep her home looking mostly like a home, she stores business items in a repurposed chest of drawers, using dividers to separate pens and pencils from sticky notes. Other supplies, including paper and envelopes, are easy to find in see-through plastic bins stacked on closet shelves. Paper clips sit in a magnetized cup on the side of her work table. “If you have limited space,” she says, “you have to be very thoughtful about what you need to have, not what you want to have, at your fingertips.” Files and other items sit in wicker chests that she bought at Pier 1. Like many other items in Kaiser’s apartment, the chests do double duty as end tables or night tables when needed. While she did once own a standard bed with all sorts of things stashed below in pull-out storage containers, Kaiser now uses a futon on the floor, complemented by a Persian rug with plenty of cushions. “I love that Asian feeling. It makes everything feel so much bigger.” She also found an inexpensive pine wardrobe at IKEA with sliding, glass-panelled doors. She can put her futon up against the wardrobe and still have easy access to the contents."

To read the full article, visit: http://www.pressdisplay.com/pressdisplay/viewer.aspx

From Brooklyn to Blogosphere...

Check out this fantastic blog post about Yestermorrow on casaCARA, a great blogger from Brooklyn who writes about finding and renovating old houses:

Hey, old-house renovators from Brooklyn to the Hudson Valley: wouldn’t it be great if there was, like, a school you could go to for anywhere from 2 to 12 days to get some hands-on, experiential learning in building design and construction?

And what if it was located in central Vermont’s Mad River Valley, and wasn’t too expensive, and the food was good?

There is such a place: it’s called Yestermorrow Design/Build School, and since 1980, it’s been offering courses in all aspects of the building arts and trades to students, homeowners, architects, and builders on its 38-acre campus. The instructors are all pros in their fields, and the teacher-to-student ratio is high.

Read the whole post at http://casacara.wordpress.com/2009/02/10/renovation-education/

Visits

Last week, we interns trekked down the road a piece to Carol Thompson's house: a fantastically high-tech, site-specific, super-efficient creation of Robert Riversong. Her house is a model of elegant design that smartly stacks functions and utilizes innovative technologies, materials and building methods to slash both energy and cost inputs. It was truly impressive to visit her home and both see and feel how so many of the ecological design principles Yestermorrow teaches and preaches can be manifested in a wonderfully comfortable and low-cost structure. Here are some of the special features of Carol's home:
* Frost protected, insulated slab foundation is “greener” than a full foundation
* Radiant heat floors in upstairs and downstairs zones
* Solar orientation – large windows on south allow sun in to heat thermal mass of concrete floor/slab in winter; overhangs provide shade in summer
* Airlets in each room and bathroom fans with timers for full-house ventilation
* Larsen truss framing system with rough sawn local hemlock
* Upstairs space is independent of downstairs (gasket on door, separate heat, ventilation)
* No plastic vapor barrier – used special primer on all inside walls for vapor barrier
* No window trim on outside or inside of house cuts costs but looks great
* Structural "novelty" siding thicker means sheathing underneath not needed
* Continuous insulation envelope – blown cellulose insulation is also treated with borate for fire retardation and critter-proofing
* Tile work acts as a heat shield for wood stove, tub surround, shower walls, window sills
* Chimney blocks dry stacked with mortar on outside
* Cost of house was approximately $100 per square foot!!

This weekend, I hosted my sister, Anna, at Yestermorrow. She came up to ski and stayed with me on campus for a few days. Much as I was inspired by Carol Thompson's home, my sister oohed and ahhed her way around the Yestermorrow campus. She wanted her picture taken in the treehouse, she exclaimed that the wooden pegs and cob bench in the timberframe cabin were "really cool," and she was duly impressed by the lack of any offensive odor issuing from the [very full] humanure toilet in my living quarters in the chalet. When she left, she commented on how refreshingly different everything and everyone was here compared to "back home" in suburban Philadelphia. If only we can get more urban and suburbanites thinking about how their built environment and communities can better relate to and work within the balance of nature...

Which brings me to the owl I encountered today. I was walking at dusk, when I saw a large, fluffy, gray bird wing across a field and alight on an electric wire. When I recognized the bird as an owl, and I felt overwhelmed with good fortune and awe. "You're beautiful!," I exclaimed aloud to the bird. In response, the creature cocked its head and peered at me with its piercing eyes. Beauty, grace and elegance collided in the timeless gaze of this animal, which seemed to say both, "I know," and "What are you doing here?" My answer: I am yet striving to learn how to achieve the natural harmony and balance that you, owl, so perfectly embody.

Spring?

In the morning, instead of shooting straight over to the main building, I often take what I like to call "the scenic route" to breakfast. This entails a walk up an old logging road behind the intern chalet, across the top of the hill near the old Bundy Center for the Arts and back down next to a stream and the wickedest sledding hill on campus. I pop out of the woods somewhere around the solar shower and the composting privy. Since we've had some warmer temperatures this past weekend, the woods are beginning to look very spring-like. The air seems heavier but my vision is clearer, especially when the sun is out.

The recent rain has turned our snowshoe trails into rock hard roads and our old boot prints into potholes, so I was taking it kind of slowly today. Halfway through my descent, I detected movement below me. At first, I thought it was another intern poking around the trails, but it was a whitetail deer foraging the places where the snow has worn away to brown and green again. Upon watching her for a moment, I noticed more deer. There were actually five in a line working their way across the slope below me. They hadn't seen me yet, so I was able to observe their activities unnoticed. Once I continued down, they saw me and bounded off to the south, their white tails bobbing up and down like flags behind them. I stopped to watch them go, and the crunch of our fading footfalls gave way to the soft burbling of springs converging just down the trail.

Timberframing Intro : Part 1

I am so excited about what I learned in my timberframing course that I thought I'd offer a newbie's overview of timberframing for anyone out there who has ever seen a beautiful frame and wondered a little bit about how it's done. I had no idea before I took this amazing class. Even raw beginners can be making tight-fitting (usually too tight) joints in a short amount of time.

Timberframing is basically the joining of timbers (cut logs) to form a framework for the creation of a structure like a house, shed or barn. I like to think of it as furniture quality joinery for the purposes of making a beautiful, hearty and safe building.

There are two basic methods of working through laying out and performing the joinery in a timber frame building: scribe rule and square rule. Jack Sobon's works are great resources for learning more about these techniques. Scribing means that timbers are mated by placing them near each other and marking the timbers to follow the natural contours of the each. This means that each timber will only fit well in one particular place in the building and all members must be marked so that the puzzle can be put together properly at raising time.

We used the "square rule" technique for laying out the joinery for the 8' x 10' garden shed we were building for one of my classmates. The square rule operates on the premise that inside each raw timber is a smaller perfect timber to which we'll mark and cut the joints. This is advantageous because it makes some of the members interchangeable (to a degree). For example, our posts were all approximately 7" x 7" hemlock timbers and we square ruled them down to use the perfect 6.5" x 6.5" timber within wherever there was a joint. To illustrate it further, you can see in the picture how I reduced the top edge of the post I was working on to 6.5" in order to mate with the adjoining timber.

To use the square rule on a timber, you must first make a thorough inspection of the sides to try to determine which two adjacent sides are closest to being square with each other. Your sawyer should be able to cut the logs well enough for this to be possible on at least two sides. We used framing squares for this as well as for nearly all of our layout tasks. Once you've determined the two squared sides, make black triangles on those sides pointing to their common corner along the timber. These sides of the timber are your reference edges from which all joinery will based.

Our joinery was specifically designed to take advantage of the framing square as it uses many 1.5" and 2" dimensions which match the widths of the two legs of the framing square (as well as the 1.5" and 2" chisels we used). As a side note: If you're using a newer framing square, make sure your legs actually match this dimension instead of taking it for granted. One of my classmates had a brand new square that was slightly bigger than these standard dimensions.

Next time, I'll talk about crucial dimensions and laying out some joints.

Tax Credits for Energy Efficiency Improvements

Have you been planning energy efficiency upgrades on your home for the coming year? You should know that on October 3, 2008, President Bush signed into law the “Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008.” This bill extended tax credits for energy efficient home improvements (windows, doors, roofs, insulation, HVAC, and non-solar water heaters). Tax credits for these residential products, which had expired at the end of 2007, will now be available for improvements made during 2009. However, improvements made during 2008 are not eligible for a tax credit. The bill also extended tax credits for solar energy systems and fuel cells to 2016. New tax credits were established for small wind energy systems and plug-in hybrid electric vehicles. Tax credits for builders of new energy efficient homes and tax deductions for owners and designers of energy efficient commercial buildings were also extended. For more details on specific upgrades which are eligible for tax credits, see http://www.energystar.gov/index.cfm?c=products.pr_tax_credits.

How has Yestermorrow impacted YOU?

We’re looking for stories and testimonials from students, instructors, staff and interns on how the Yestermorrow experience has changed your life—examples of projects you’ve gone on to design or build, career transformations you’ve undergone, or changes you’ve made in your personal life as a result of your time here.

We hope to profile members of the Yestermorrow community in our upcoming newsletters and on our website. If you can offer a testimonial, please email Kate Stephenson (kate@yestermorrow.org) and if possible, include pictures of you and/or your project(s).

Thanks!
Kate