Our own sparkling wine!

At our ribbon cutting, Ed Anewalt, the owner of Anewalt's Landscape Contractor presented all the members of The Community Foundation staff with a commemorative bottle of Brut sparkling wine from Clover Hill Winery. Ed's family owns the winery and designed a special label to commemorate the opening of the building.

I still see a lot of bottles around the office, but they're all empty!

Water Bottles

According to "All about water.org" about 1.5 million tons of plastic are used bottling water. Of course, there are places where bottled water is a great way to get hydrated, but our building isn't one of them.

We placed filters on all the taps in our building and have banned water bottles from the building. It's one little step toward cutting down on the waste in our landfills and reducing energy usage in bottling and transporting water.

And we're finding that we like Reading City tap water just fine!

The plants....

There's not a lot of space for landscaping around the building, but we wanted to use what space we had to create at least a small urban green space. We hired Jonathan Alderson Landscape Architects to design a landscape plan that reflected the environmental mission of the building. We think they did a great job and that the landscaping will be a nice addition to downtown. By using native plants, we reduce the amount of water that is required to maintain them. In fact, after they're established, the plants should thrive on their own.

Fortunately, we found a great local landscaping company, Anewalt's Landscape Contractors to install the landscaping and last week, it was all completed. The rainy summer we've had has continued, so the plants have needed very little watering, but of course, all the water that we would use comes from our cistern, meaning we're not using Reading Water Authority water where we don't need it.

Where do those soda bottles go?

It's too bad that we had to build a fence between us and Zion Baptist Church. The church didn't want it, and neither did we, but the City of Reading requires it.

We made the best of it, and like all things tried to make it as green as possible. The fence is made of a product called "Trex," which is made of post-consumer plastic and can be used to replace wood. It's virtually indestructible, and keeps the plastics out of the landfill. Amity Fence Company from Reading installed the fence.

Trex is also used in the bike rack we installed. So far, we've had two events in the building and the bike rack was used both times!!

Some national attention

The Funders' Network for Smart Growth and Livable Communities recently released a publication by Catharine Porter highlighting our building project as an example of leadership by community foundations on climate change. Click here to download a copy.

We also presented this work on a conference call with about 100 foundation executives from around the country, also sponsored by The Funders' Network.

Moving for peanuts

One of the advantages to our new location is our proximity to Reading's great restaurants. The oldest and most famous of these is Jimmie Kramer's Peanut Bar. Our good friends Harold and Michael Leifer who own the Peanut Bar invited our entire staff to a lunch in the private room called "Harold's Hideaway." They even had a special "Welcome To The Neighborhood" menu for us!

One time, when we were searching for a location, one of the realtors helping us asked me to define what an acceptable location was. "Well," I said, "I guess we want to be downtown, which would mean any place within walking distance of the Peanut Bar." I think it always amused Michael that we had such scientific site selection criteria.

But our lunch was a welcome respite from the unpacking frenzy and we're grateful to our friends at the Peanut Bar for their kind welcome.

A green move?

This photo shows some of our moving crew, from L&J Transportation unloading what we lovingly came to call "Tyga Boxes." These plastic boxes, which are made from recycled material, replace the old corrugated cardboard boxes, which would have been discarded (while putting them into the recycling stream is better than not......it's better still to reuse).

Members of our team loaded all of their office belongings into Tyga boxes, labeled them and stacked them four high on a cart. The L&J team loaded them onto an eighteen wheel truck along with our furniture and a few hours later, the whole job was complete. We completed the move in one day rather than the scheduled two days thanks to L&J's hard work and by August 28, we were able to begin unpacking some of the boxes.

The Tyga boxes were cool and very functional. But the folks from L&J told me that they're doing other things to go green, including adding governors to the engines of their trucks to limit speeds and improve fuel economy.

We're In.....

We held our official ribbon cutting ceremony yesterday and are now open for business at 237 Court Street. The hectic events of the past two weeks have kept me away from the blog, but there will be much to come as we report on the move and more of the cool features of our new digs.

WFMZ, our next door neighbors, did a great story on the ribbon cutting, it's available here: http://wfmz.img.entriq.net/htm/PopUpPlayer-v3.htm?articleID=1266727