A trash can is a peculiar place to begin a story about the energy transition. Yet the public bin offers a good introduction to Leila Dillon's work. It is useful, ordinary and largely ignored until something goes wrong. Make it solar powered, add a compactor, connect it to the cloud, and the object becomes more than street furniture. It can tell a collection crew when it is full. It can spare a truck an unnecessary trip. It can even host Wi-Fi, cellular equipment and sensors. The value is technical, but the proof arrives in the shape of a cleaner corner and a more sensible route.
Dillon learned to tell that story as an executive at Bigbelly, the Massachusetts company behind connected waste and recycling stations. Today she is Senior Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer at Ameresco, where the nouns are bigger: renewable generation, energy efficiency, distributed resources, resilience, infrastructure finance. The scale changed. Her recurring assignment did not. She makes complicated systems understandable by returning them to the places and people they serve.
The view from the collection route
In 2017, while explaining a Bigbelly deployment in Los Angeles, Dillon offered a detail that reveals more than a product diagram could. “We walk the streets with the collectors, with the people who really know what's going on there,” she said. The sentence placed the people who empty bins ahead of the sensors inside them. It also captured a practical method: go where the system is used, learn what the operator sees, and design the deployment around the local problem.
Los Angeles had mapped street cleanliness and installed more than 1,500 public bins. Bigbelly's units could report their status in real time. Dillon described data arriving the moment a unit reached the street, allowing equipment to be moved, added or changed as conditions became clearer. A container could be both physical service and information node. The marketing insight was equally dual-purpose: explain the object in front of people, then show the system hiding behind it.
Her point was never that every bin needed to become a gadget. Cities already had the practical burden of waste collection and little appetite for more poles, towers and boxes. Existing street infrastructure could carry added functions. In interviews, Dillon discussed air-quality and foot-traffic sensors, Wi-Fi hotspots and small-cell equipment. The larger smart-city idea fit inside something residents already recognized.
By the nature of what we do, we happen to be in the places exactly where the people are.Leila Dillon, speaking about Bigbelly in 2017
That period also placed Dillon on international stages. She served on the program committee for the IoT Solutions World Congress, chaired buildings and infrastructure programming, and moderated discussions involving leaders from Microsoft, Hitachi and Nokia. In Barcelona, she led sessions on multi-purpose infrastructure and women in industrial IoT. Her work sat at a useful intersection: technology companies wanted platforms; cities wanted services that worked; residents wanted less clutter and better public space.
A bigger machine, the same human scale
Ameresco appointed Dillon vice president of marketing and communications in January 2019. She arrived with more than two decades of experience spanning corporate communications, platform strategy and business development. Her earlier roles included leading her own communications firm and serving as a public-relations executive at Liquid Advertising. Bigbelly had given her a vocabulary of cloud software, mobile networks and municipal operations. Ameresco added energy savings and generation.
Dillon described the move as an expansion of her smart-city education. She wanted to broaden that knowledge into energy solutions, savings and generation. The phrasing matters. Rather than present the new job as a departure, she treated it as another layer of the same civic system. A connected bin changes when a truck rolls. An efficiency retrofit changes how a school or city uses energy. A microgrid changes what happens when the wider grid is interrupted. Each project combines machinery, software, finance and behavior. Each needs a story that a buyer, employee, investor and resident can understand without pretending the details are simple.
Led global marketing and North American distribution work at Bigbelly.
Joined Ameresco as vice president of marketing and communications.
Helped launch the employee ESG Ambassadors behind the first ESG report.
Named to Ragan's Top Women in Communications class.
Listed by Ameresco as senior vice president and chief marketing officer.
Her current remit reaches across the usual boundaries. Ameresco says she shapes media and public relations, internal corporate communications and training. She guides lead and demand generation and participates in investor relations as a strategist on the executive team. These audiences ask different questions. A customer wants to know whether a project works and how it is financed. An employee needs context and direction. An investor wants a credible account of opportunity, execution and risk. A reporter needs clarity that survives contact with specifics.
Dillon's role is to maintain a coherent center while changing the angle. It is less like broadcasting one slogan and more like operating a switchyard. The facts must travel to different destinations without losing their shape.
When the report becomes a network
The most revealing Ameresco project attached to Dillon may be organizational rather than promotional. In 2020, she helped launch the company's ESG Ambassadors. The group spearheaded Ameresco's first ESG report, “Doing Well by Doing Good,” and continued as a force behind the company's environmental, social and governance work. Dillon served as an ambassador herself, with responsibility for identifying, communicating and reporting how those ideas appeared in company culture.
A report is an artifact. An ambassador group is a network of people. The difference changes where communication begins. Instead of asking a small team to assemble a yearly account at the end, the structure creates observers throughout an organization who can notice activity, connect colleagues and turn abstract commitments into examples. Reporting still matters, but it becomes the visible surface of an internal practice.
At the end of the day, we grew in ways we never thought possible. I couldn't be more grateful to be a part of this Ameresco team.Leila Dillon, Ameresco's 2021 ESG report
Her language in that report was unusually tactile for a corporate document. She recalled colleagues coming together with paint brushes, gardening gloves, backpacks and school supplies. These are small objects beside a portfolio of energy infrastructure. They made company culture observable. The same instinct appears in her strongest smart-city comments: collectors walking routes, bins reporting fullness, equipment changing locations. Dillon repeatedly locates a large idea inside something a person can touch or do.
In 2025, Ragan included her in its Top Women in Communications class. The recognition fits a career that has expanded the communications function into product positioning, channel strategy, demand creation, internal training and corporate impact. Yet the more useful measure is the consistency underneath those titles. Dillon has stayed close to technologies that operate in the background and to institutions that must make long-lived decisions about them.
The climate story after the slogan
Clean energy communication can drift upward into language that is worthy, frictionless and hard to picture. Dillon's record suggests a route back down. Talk about the building. Name the operating constraint. Explain the financing. Show what resilience changes. Let the larger climate argument emerge from a project that a school, city or company can actually complete.
That approach does not shrink the ambition. It gives the ambition a place to stand. Ameresco works across energy efficiency, infrastructure upgrades, renewable generation and distributed energy resources. The menu is broad because the customers and their constraints are broad. The common thread is a practical transition: an aging asset becomes more efficient; an expense becomes a financed improvement; a vulnerable facility gains a measure of resilience.
Dillon's career has followed that transition from street scale to energy scale. At Bigbelly, she argued that cities could get more from infrastructure they already needed. At Ameresco, she helps explain how organizations can modernize systems they cannot do without. Both stories begin with existing reality rather than a blank slate.
The lesson travels beyond marketing. People trust a complex project when they can see who uses it, what constraint it resolves and how the result will be measured. They remember the collector more readily than the cloud architecture. They understand the avoided truck trip before the platform strategy. They can picture a school with reliable power long before they memorize the design of a microgrid.
Infrastructure is supposed to recede into daily life. Dillon's work is to bring it forward just long enough for people to make a decision about it. Then the system can return to the background, doing its quiet job on a street, inside a building or across an energy network.