Alliance Honors Energy Efficiency's Unsung Heroes

The evening of Feb. 15, 2011, the Alliance honored those who worked tirelessly and effectively in 2010 to advance energy efficiency, but who have not yet been recognized, with the Unsung Heroes Award.

Award recipients were:

•  Neil Brown, senior professional staff member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee
  •  Presented by Senator Richard Lugar (R-Ind.)
    
• Sam Ricketts, executive director of the Sustainable Energy and Environment Coalition
  • Presented by Rep. Jay Inslee (D-Wash.)
• Kevin Kampschroer, director of the General Services Administration (GSA)’s Office of Federal High-Performance Green Buildings.
  • Presented by GSA Administrator Martha Johnson

Neil Brown

Neil Brown is an advisor to the U.S. Senate’s most senior Republican, Richard G. Lugar of Indiana. He serves as a senior professional staff member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, with responsibility for energy security and the Nunn-Lugar non-proliferation program.

Brown earned masters degrees in political theory and forced migration while studying as a Rhodes Scholar at theUniversity of Oxford (U.K.). He also holds a bachelor's from Harvard University. He did substantial field work while living in South Asia, Namibia and Egypt, and he has worked with the Harvard Institute for International Development and the Center for Strategic and International Studies. He is a board member of the Association of American Rhodes Scholars and a trustee of the Merton College Charitable Corporation, and was a Washington Fellow of the National Review Institute in 2009. Neil is from Iowa, where his family farm is located.

Sam Ricketts

Sam Ricketts is the executive director for the Sustainable Energy and Environment Coalition (SEEC), a caucus of 47 House Democrats devoted to advancing policies to promote clean energy and environmental protection, and address climate change. Ricketts came to the Hill in December 2008, and has been with SEEC since its founding at the start of the 111th Congress.

Prior to working on the Hill, Ricketts served as the campaign coordinator to Rep. Jay Inslee (D-Wash.)'s 2008 campaign for re-election, and prior to this worked for the campaigns of numerous candidates for federal, state, and local office across New York state. Ricketts received his bachelor's from Syracuse University in Syracuse, New York. He is a native of Seattle, Washington.

Kevin Kampschroer

Kevin Kampschroer has been leading GSA’s activities in response to the 2005 and 2007 energy bills; the new executive order on the federal leadership in environmental, energy and economic performance; the strategy for GSA to fulfill its role in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act; and, beginning in January 2011, to define the role, competencies and skills for the professions needed to operate and maintain high-performance green buildings. Kampschroer is the first director of the Office of Federal High-Performance Green Buildings, intended to consolidate and coordinate federal efforts in the broad realm of building sustainability, as well as influence and accelerate industry capability and adoption of sustainable principles across all aspects of asset creation, operation, maintenance and disposal.

Kampschroer also created the framework for GSA to respond to the challenges of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act’s mandate to move the GSA federal building inventory toward high-performance green building. He has worked on expanding the scope of sustainability across all the real estate disciplines. Kampschroer contributed to the creation of real estate portfolio management and the establishment of performance measures linked to pay and budget, as well as developed an overall information technology strategy for a re-engineered real estate business in GSA. He was the first project manager for the Ronald Reagan Federal Building and Trade Center, then the second-largest office building in the United States. He was worked for GSA for more than 35 years and is a graduate of Yale University.