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Eric Howard
October 12, 2023
Months into the job, E2Tech leader looks to boost organization's brand
Two months into his tenure as executive director of E2Tech, Eric Howard is on a mission to bolster the organization's brand.
“I would like to make more people aware that it exists and can be helpful to them,” Howard told Mainebiz in a phone interview.
Howard, who started in August, succeeded Marty Grohman, who stepped down after four years at the helm of E2Tech. Grohman is on the Nov. 7 ballot for mayor of Biddeford.
E2Tech, founded in 2002 and formally known as the Environmental & Energy Council of Maine, is a statewide organization with around 200 members, ranging in size from one and two-person businesses to offices of multinational corporations with a large Maine presence, according to Howard.
Howard's message to the wider business community, he said, is that the state’s environmental and energy community is growing.
On the energy side, he said that growth is being led by opportunities in solar and wind, and on the environmental side “”because a number of businesses and individuals have decided that Maine is a nice place to work and live, so their business operations are now in Maine as well.”
The membership organization aims to build and expand Maine’s environmental, energy and clean technology sectors by facilitating networking, serving as an information clearinghouse and leading efforts to promote economic development in the state’s cleantech sector.
Howard comes to the job after a long career in the environmental and energy sectors in the U.S. and overseas.
His experience includes managing institutional partnerships, memberships and programs for institutions such as the Maine Wood Products Association, Northeastern University’s College of Engineering and, at the start of his career in 1990, at the United Nations Information Unit on Climate Change in Bonn, Germany.
Howard is a graduate of Wesleyan University in Connecticut, where he majored in environmental science/geology and German and Boston’s Northeastern University, from whom he received a Doctor of Education degree in organizational leadership.
At E2Tech he is one half of a two-person staff based in Cumberland County, joined this month by Jacqui Baker as the organization's cleantech policy and program manager.
Baker is a recent graduate of St. Lawrence University, where she had a double major of environmental studies and sociology.
E2Tech events
Upcoming E2Tech events include a virtual presentation from Muddy River Farm Aquaponics in Topsham on Wednesday, Oct. 25, and a winter social at the Baxter Academy of Science & Technology in Portland on Wednesday, Dec. 6.
Find the full events calendar and register here.
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