Each year, over 900 local community organizations work with state and federal government programs to improve the energy efficiency of low-income households through the Weatherization Assistance Program.

Since its creation in 1976, the Weatherization Assistance Program has weatherized more than 6.2 million homes across the country. On average, it reduces energy bills by 23% every year after the upgrades are made. In 2008, this meant families in the weatherized homes saved $413, while reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

Building a Weatherization Workforce

ExxonMobil has teamed up with the National Community Action Foundation, the organization that represents the 900 agencies from around the country that are involved in weatherization, to enhance
community-based weatherization training programs.

We are gratified by the strong interest in the National Community Action Foundation/ExxonMobil Weatherization Training Partnership's grant program to design and test new approaches to training weatherization workers. Having received and reviewed innovative proposals from a sizable group of applicants, we note that the requests exceed the funds allocated for the project. Nevertheless we are confident that even though establishing priorities will be difficult, the competitive selection process will ensure that we could apply funding to innovative programs. Although a number of important activities may not be funded in the near term, we are hopeful that projects with a replicability factor will result from our Partnership.

Weatherization workers:

• Measure the systems that heat, ventilate and cool the whole home.
• Pressurize the house to identify leaks in a building’s shell using blower doors and infrared imaging
• Check for blocked air movement or conflicting pressures, health hazards, poor heating system performance including water heating, cooling equipment, and lighting fixtures.

Weatherization skills are ‘green collar’ job skills, and the experience of the Weatherization workforce can become the base on which they can build additional expertise to prepare for long-term career opportunities in the growing fields of energy efficiency. This will require that our Weatherization-focused training programs be expanded in scale and scope.