EESI at 40: Board Chair Jared Blum Reflects on EESI’s Impact

To help commemorate EESI’s 40th anniversary, we sat down with Board Chair Jared Blum to hear about his experience joining, contributing to, and leading EESI’s board of directors. Blum has served on EESI’s board since 1999, and began his tenure as chair in 2010.

How did you first learn about EESI?

In my prior life, I was the CEO of a trade association, the Polyisocyanurate Insulation Manufacturers Association (PIMA), that promotes the use of energy-efficient insulation, solar panels, and reflective roofing to reduce the heating and cooling load on commercial and residential buildings. We were searching to partner with organizations that were active in the environmental and energy space.

This was about 30 years ago, and as a business group, we were familiar with a broad array of proactive environmentally-oriented groups. My board at PIMA had concluded that only with partnerships among and between private and public interest organizations would necessary marketplace, technical, and policy change occur. I did a little research and EESI stood out as a non-partisan, effective educational organization that worked with Congress on energy efficiency and climate issues.

Then, I met with Carol Werner, who was the executive director at the time, and became a friend of the organization. In 1999, she asked me to serve on the board, and I agreed. Serving on EESI’s board allowed me to both be engaged with the private sector as a CEO and to have public sector input as an EESI board member.

What was the EESI board like when you joined?

At the time I joined, the EESI board was made up of former Democratic and Republican members of Congress, union representatives, academics, and members of advocacy groups in the environmental space, but there were not many private-sector perspectives. There was a real need for my voice at the table.

Quite frankly, joining the board is one of the smartest decisions I made in my role as CEO of the trade association. It allowed me to better understand what the obstacles to our work were from a policy standpoint. It also encouraged me as well as my industry to support some of the more aggressive, more effective policies to promote model energy building codes and energy-efficiency technologies. It educated me and my industry enough for PIMA to be one of the first industry groups to endorse the U.N. international climate negotiations, starting with Kyoto in 1997, and we were one of the first business communities to win the EPA Climate Protection award.

Can you give a brief synopsis of your time at EESI? What are some of your favorite projects you have worked on?

As a member of the board, I have spent time learning from the master and EESI’s founder, former U.S. Rep. Dick Ottinger. He taught me a lot about EESI’s role within the educational sphere. I learned about the value of having different groups and industries represented during our board meetings. 

I think the most important takeaway from my time on EESI’s board, and then as its chair, is the ability to feel comfortable with and confident in your fellow board members. This allows us to achieve consensus in helping develop EESI priorities. 

An essential project that I had the pleasure of working on was EESI’s push for adaptation and resilience measures in this country. After getting some experience developing educational resources on climate-related disasters, we became a hub to promote resilience in public policy. We were instrumental in developing support for legislation passed in 2018 that provided pre-disaster mitigation funding, now known as the Building Resilience Infrastructure and Communities program. It allows communities to adapt their infrastructure for greater resilience prior to a disaster occurring.

This effort was undertaken as part of a coalition more broadly supporting amendments to the Stafford Act, which is the basis for the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). We have continued to provide educational resources on climate adaptation and resilience via our Congressional briefings, and we support funding for these pre-disaster mitigation programs.

You have held leadership positions and sat on the boards of many organizations throughout your career. What makes your experience with EESI stand out?

One of the real challenges here is that we are totally reliant on grantmaking or independent funding by people who look at what we do and understand and appreciate our work. I think that is a real wake-up call for anyone in the private sector, who has had reliable corporate funding for their ac