BUILDING CHANGE, INC.

Empower home/building owners to permission data access in exchange for vital improvement products, services, and braided funding opportunities. BCFF aims to create educational materials and campaigns to raise community awareness around sustainability best practices. Creation of an interface that will allow occupants to monitor and monetize the data their home or building generates and choose whom they will allow to access that data and for how long in an exchange agreement.
Recognize and reward building trades for applying sustainable best practices with market competition driven by verified quality work. Generating new funding streams for home and building owners will create more demand for services. That will invigorate local economies and provide employment opportunities and incentives in the building trades. Creation of educational opportunities through sponsored apprenticeship programs.
Channel funding from Philanthropic and Corporate Social Responsibility into mission specific project areas, resulting in tangible and verifiable public good. There is a housing crisis and a large proportion of American housing stock is aging badly. There are sustainability regulations in most states for new construction, but that does nothing to help young families and aging in place seniors on limited or fixed incomes stuck in housing that is uncomfortable, inefficient, and unhealthy. BCFF intends to address the widespread problem of livability in affordable housing and bring aging housing stock into the 21st century providing occupants improved energy efficiency health and comfort.
BCFF’s aims to actively support building sustainability improvements increasing livability across the country in underserved communities while revitalizing local economies. Below is a look at where the Home Performance industry was three years ago, where we hope it will be by the end of 2021, and where we project it will be by 2027 if we are successful in raising the funding needed to develop and pilot our technological solution.
HOME PERFORMANCE SNAPSHOTS
Total Home Improvement Expenditures
2017: $424B; 2021: $500B; 2027 $1T
Documented Energy Efficiency Expenditures
2017: $7B; 2021: $9B; 2027: $100B
Braidable Funding for Residential Improvements
2017: $800M; 2021: $1.5B; 2027: $10B
Average expenditure per project to improve performance/sustainability:
2017: $2,300; 2021: $5,500; 2027: $15,000
Reducing Administration costs in terms of time, labor, and materials:
Reduction of fraud and opportunity for fraud.
Increased transaction speed and project turnaround
Improved repurposing and waste manageability
Sources of braidable improvement funding:
2017: Government grants & programs, utility rebates
2021: Government, utility rebates, CSR, Philanthropic contributions
2027: All of the above plus in-kind sponsorship and targeted Advertising

BCFF is proposing a fundamental shift – creation of a system which protects consumer data sovereignty, establishing citizens’ intellectual property rights to the data they generate. Our vision is to develop a data collection and stewardship ecosystem that will increase the market value of that data over time. This will be a citizen-permissioned marketplace where the data is the product and the citizens the sellers. Property owners and occupants can leverage the value of their data to finance vital improvements creating stimulus among local construction trades willing to adhere to sustainable best practices and standards of data stewardship governed by consensus with transparency.
Our Three Guiding Principles:
Principle 1: Data Privacy & Control. Property owners and renters have primary control of building performance and operational data related to the property.
Principle 2: Serving as a Public Good. As the hub of a new circular ecosystem focused on principles of global sustainability, this data marketplace is a shared and decentralized public good to be continually enriched and enhanced by all who participate. It is intended to provide the ethos connecting interoperable systems through Governance Body rules and protocols.
Principle 3: Transparent Governance. The rules of participation use and access are transparent and determined via consensus. The initial governance body, convened by BCFF, is to be comprised of representatives from contractor trade associations, certification organizations, aggregators, regional and/or national labs, consumer protection advocates, data scientists, academic and research organizations, utilities, healthcare agencies, financial institutions, manufacturers, retailers, and government agencies. Governance body operations are anticipated to be funded by transaction fees for ecosystem participation use and access.
BCFF’s Three Roles:
As a Catalyst: BCFF will spearhead this effort. The organization was founded as a 501(c)3 Non-Profit corporation because, as a public good, the governance of this marketplace should not be profit motivated. BCFF will conceptualize and develop this ecosystem and serve as initial pilot program manager with a view to taking the Building Performance Institute’s HPXML protocol to the next level.
As a Conduit: BCFF will serve as initial data aggregator, facilitator/registrar for transaction tracking, and marketplace topographer gathering and analyzing data to identify gaps, necessary improvements/innovations and monitor for privacy and/or security concerns.
As a Convener: BCFF will provide thought leadership, convening a multiorganizational and multidisciplinary collaborative from which the ecosystem’s governing body will emerge. That governing body will set the standards to which all marketplace participants will be bound to adhere, the rules of conduct, as well as consequences for violation of those standards and rules.

Currently BCFF has partnership agreements with the Maryland Energy Administration and Department of Housing and Community Development, Edge Energy and Tru Tech Tools for the implementation of its current weatherization projects. To develop the Wayfinder Initiative to generate a thriving building performance ecosystem BCFF is convening thought leaders like Esther Obonyo PhD of the Penn State Engineering Department’s Materials Research Institute and Yasmin Saadat PhD of the Hunt Institute for Engineering and Humanity.
The target being to enhance the Building Performance Institute’s opensource HPXML residential data standard with blockchain encryption and permissioning technology to facilitate the flow of funding from commercial, research, private and philanthropic funding sources to be braided into mission aligned projects which do public good while generating high quality measurable and verifiable performance data that will drive innovation and generate value in the marketplace.
Simultaneously BCFF is designing educational materials and programs. On the one hand informing home and building owners about the impact of vital health, safety and energy efficiency improvements upon livability, structural integrity, and property values. On the other training construction trades in data stewardship and the importance of providing verifiable quality work to invigorate local markets and improve livelihoods.
With your support essential infrastructure can be created to inaugurate a circular economic model that will revolutionize the way that building improvement projects are financed, revitalize underserved communities improving local quality of life and property values while providing corporate social responsibility funds measurable and verifiable sustainability goal attainment.
BCFF is currently in contention for a number of five figure grants. Those grants are all for project application and have no resource provision for research and development of the novel innovation we are attempting to develop. Subject Matter Experts will be required that cannot generally be expected to volunteer their time or expertise. Also specialized environments and materials may be required which is where funding from non-government sources will be of vital importance. Your support will spearhead the creation of a new building performance paradigm.

On August 19 and August 31, 2020 the first and second advisory committee meetings were held. The purpose of these meetings was to discuss the practical necessities of the undertaking, the benefits it could offer the home performance industry at large and what logical next steps would be. Committee members to date:
Keith Aldridge - Building Performance Association
Matthew Brown - National Energy Improvement Fund
Jim Flynn - BCFF Program Manager
Jay Murdoch - Owens Corning
Esther Obonyo - Penn State University
Kevin Powell - Redhorse Corporation
Dave Roberts - National Renewable Energy Laboratory
Yasmin Saadat - Hunt Institute for Engineering & Humanity
Bill Spohn - Tru Tech Tools
Jeaneen Zappa - Keystone Energy Efficiency Alliance
The months of September and October were dedicated to grant applications and research regarding the tech components required for realizing the Wayfinder Initiative.