Four Years with Winter Blitz
I first found Winter Blitz as a freshman, wandering timidly around the overwhelming Purple Key Fair, looking for a group that would help me find some volunteer opportunities. Nat Davidson ‘22, one of the co-directors of Winter Blitz at the time, caught my eye and offered to give me the spiel of the program.
Winter Blitz is a program designed to help low-income community members weatherize their homes. Weatherization can range from small changes (e.g., filling cracks and gaps around windows and doors with caulk) to larger ones (e.g., like adding insulation in walls and roofs). It is helpful on multiple fronts. Most weatherization measures help trap heat in during the winter and keep houses cooler in the summer. In turn, this leads to reducing the energy needs for heating and cooling, which saves people money, and by reducing greenhouse gas emissions, is ultimately better for the environment. Unfortunately, weatherization efforts sometimes require a lot of up-front costs, so they are not always accessible to those in the low-income bracket. This is what Winter Blitz seeks to address.

In the program’s original form, students would go into community members’ houses to weatherize them directly during an all-day event and Williams would provide the weatherization materials. In response to COVID-19 and under Nat and their co-director Blue Jordan ‘23, Winter Blitz shifted to a collaboration with a local non-profit organization and giving out weatherization supply bags. This is what I joined as a freshman.
My first responsibility that year was phone banking. For someone who grew up in a generation based on texting, the idea of cold-calling strangers for a program I was still learning about was intimidating. But after a couple of calls, I fell into a rhythm, and it was rewarding to talk to people and hear how happy they were that the program existed.
Window Dressers, an organization that makes low-cost insulation panels. These inserts act as storm windows, creating a little pocket of insulation between the air inside and the air outside that keeps heat from escaping through the windows. I had fun building the inserts, and it allowed me to talk to other students and community members outside of Williams College. Having spent my childhood playing with LEGOs, the repetition of assembling the frames by adding layers of plastic and tape was also a welcome break from the rigors of Williams’ academic life.
At the end of that year, Christine Seibert, former Sustainability Coordinator at the Zilkha Center, reached out to me to ask if I would be interested in taking over Nat’s position as co-director after she graduated. I happily accepted.

The next year, Blue and I oversaw a shift in the Winter Blitz program. Our original decision to continue with the Window Dressers collaboration was due to continued uncertainty over COVID-19 and our desire to ensure everyone was safe. After our fall build, however, we took stock of the program and what it was looking to accomplish. We researched what weatherization programs in the area were offering, talked to former leaders of Winter Blitz, and thought about how we could best engage Williams students in helping people weatherize. Finding that many of the offerings of the original program model could be accessed at a professional level without cost to community members through programs like Mass Save, we decided to switch to a permanent Window Dressers collaboration program model.
This switch was made with a larger goal in mind: To bring a Window Dressers build to campus to build free window-frame inserts for low-income community members. This would allow us to engage a broader portion of the student body in promoting weatherization by eliminating travel time and result in shorter shifts. Planning and implementing an on-campus build would also involve a more active role for Winter Blitz directors like myself, and continue our involvement with the broader community.
Window Dressers was very receptive and eager to collaborate when we proposed this new model of Winter Blitz. Unfortunately, due to tax reasons for the Vermont-based Window Dressers operating within Massachusetts, we have not been able to implement this new vision of Winter Blitz. This has been a particularly hard blow as it was something I had eagerly hoped to see before I graduated.

However, Window Dresser’s expansion to Massachusetts is something they hope to resolve soon, and when they do, the Williams’ Winter Blitz crew will be ready. We have spent the last two years building up institutional knowledge of how Window Dressers community builds operate and how the Window frame inserts are made. And while it is disappointing that I will not be ableto be a director when it happens, I know that the Winter Blitz directors, who are there to see this vision achieved, will be extraordinary, and I am proud to have been a part of creating this new course for the program.
Written by Abby Moffett ‘25, ZCE WinterBlitz Student Director