Welcoming Brittany Heller to the HeatSpring Team

This week, HeatSpring welcomes the new addition of Brittany “Brit” Heller to the staff team. Brit brings with her a passion for lifelong learning and years of experience leading educational programs for individuals joining the solar industry. 

Brit first started her career in clean energy in 2015 where she initially worked in lead generation, knocking on doors for a Louisiana solar company. She was quickly moved into a Solar Consultant role, where she met with homeowners to explain the benefits and process of going solar. 

For Brit, it wasn’t enough to only be able to talk about solar, she wanted to learn how to build it. In 2017, she completed a year-long construction fellowship with a Colorado solar nonprofit. She built systems across the state, ranging from 2 kW residential installations to 200 kW commercial rooftop arrays to 2 MW community solar farms, all while teaching and leading volunteers on the job sites. 

At that time, her love for training had been ignited and fortified. In 2018, Brit moved into a role as Workforce Program Manager. She taught solar coursework, fundraised for educational programs, and built relationships across government entities, private sector companies, and community organizations to increase equitable access to the living-wage, rewarding careers in clean energy. 

Brit holds two NABCEP certifications – Photovoltaic Installation Professional (PVIP) and Photovoltaic Technical Sales (PVTS). In fact, she leaned on HeatSpring resources and instructors to prepare when she sat for those exams several years ago.

Now, she joins HeatSpring on our mission to provide professionals with the knowledge and real-world skills they need to continue making positive change in the world. Brit believes that to create a better, more sustainable world, high quality technical education should be available and accessible for those willing to learn. She is excited to connect with HeatSpring students to explore the topics most important to them as well as build relationships with subject matter experts so that they share their knowledge with the world. 

When she isn’t immersed in training, Brit is a budding regenerative farmer just outside of Atlanta where she is developing a 17-acre farm rooted in permaculture principles. She can be found building soil health, cultivating edible & medicinal plants, caring for her animals or building functional art.

 

Why We Are So Excited About Working with Brit Heller

Written by Brian Hayden

Here’s what I want you to know: we didn’t hire Brit Heller to fill an open job – we hired Brit because she’s the perfect person to help us grow as a company. She’s not going to fully brag about herself, but here are some of the reasons we asked her to join the team:

• Brit cares deeply about sustainability and equity and she lives her values. I got to see that first hand in her work at GRID and in the way she treats people.
• She’s also really good at selling. Early in her career she sold residential solar door-to-door and was excellent at it. 
• She has her NABCEP PVIP and PVTS and has a lot of teaching experience. In her job at GRID she managed training programs, placing students into solar jobs at growing companies.
• She’s excited about the seasonal flexibility of the work at HeatSpring because it will allow her to do permaculture on her farm in Georgia. We love that she’s such an interesting and well-rounded person because we don’t know where the world is headed and value different perspectives. Plus it’s fun to learn from each other.
• Brit has talked about doing permaculture education in the future, which seems like an obviously good idea to me.
• She speaks Spanish, having lived in South America for several years. We’ve been slow to produce Spanish-language courses and hope to fix that in the years ahead.
• Brit has started two companies in the past and studied marketing in college. Entrepreneurship is something we love almost as much as renewable energy (possibly more). HeatSpring’s best customers are entrepreneurial problem solvers.

We believe Brit is going to do incredible things at HeatSpring and beyond because she values relationships and learning. Please find a way to connect with her. She’s got a lot of flexibility in her new role and none of the biases I have from my fifteen years in this business.

– Brian

Why I’m Excited About this Work

Written by Brit Heller

For me, life is too short to spend time and energy working somewhere that isn’t making the world a better place. Not only is HeatSpring a leading source of quality knowledge in forward-thinking areas like solar and green building, all HeatSpring students are in their respective jobs taking this information and catalyzing it into exponential positive impact. It’s an absolute privilege to be a part of it all!

I’m here to support and build the community that finds themselves at HeatSpring. I’m also here to grow our community, reaching more students and experimenting with new areas of study. I’m here to listen to you, take action, and work together to create the world that we all want to live in. 

Please tell me what you would like to learn or how I can be of service in your journey at HeatSpring and beyond! I can be reached at Brit@HeatSpring.com.

– Brit