It took a hard-nosed business executive and a very engaged volunteer board to put the green back in the Green Institute.
The Minneapolis icon of a decade ago, which arose from once-contaminated land, retrieves and sells reusable materials from gutted buildings. It has saved hundreds of tons of useful stuff from landfills and millions of dollars from energy bills since 1993.
"When I interviewed for my first job here, I told them that I recycled my beer cans and paper, but I probably wasn't the greenest guy," recalled Executive Director Jamie Heipel, who came aboard to run the institute's "ReUse Center and Deconstruction Services" in 2003. "We used to do a lot of different things. Today, we go after things that fit our green niche and that also are economical."
Heipel, 42, joined the Green Institute after nearly seven years at Ameriprise Financial Inc., working as kind of an Everyman George Clooney, the corporate hatchet man of "Up in the Air." Heipel spent six years trying to help marginally profitable Ameriprise planners get profitable or get out.
Heipel and his wife tired of his road-warrior schedule, and he went looking for work. He was hired by the Green Institute's former executive director, who was focused on the neighborhood and a vision.
"We used to kind of just chase grant money," said board president Lisa McDonald, a corporate sales manager and former Minneapolis City Council member. "We have figured out where we want to go and how we want to get there. But now that the environmental and energy movements are going gangbusters, we had to make sure our programs make sense. ... Jamie wants to make sure that everything we do fits our mission and also that it produces revenue."
The institute, in the Phillips neighborhood in south Minneapolis, served an early and important role as an environmental symbol and then, eventually, in translating green thinking from concept to construction. Institute programs save money and energy for residents and small businesses. The institute's building features passive solar, solar collectors and a green roof that yielded data incorporated into other buildings.
Heipel set about paring costs when he took over as executive director in 2006. It was a bit of a culture shock at a place conceived as a community victory 20 years ago when it thwarted Hennepin County's plans to expand a garbage-transfer station in the middle of a working-poor neighborhood that was sick of other people's trash.
