Following up on the Death and Life of the Green Building Movement
- Jennifer Diamond
- Oct 8
- 13 min read
Updated: 1 day ago
A few weeks ago, I joined a summit on the green building movement/industry that asked us to do a lot in a short period of time. The Death and Life of the Green Building Movement, as it was billed, asked 50 or so individuals to come together (after quite a bit of homework) to recognize the harsh truths of 2025 for us and the planet under the auspices of defining a way forward, documentary to follow.
I am a professional consultant, in that I have made it a career to facilitate the work of others, so I have some mad skills for getting groups to do cool things together. I can see when those skills are being used hard, and credit to the team that tried to fit a week’s worth of think tank effort into a 9-4 Saturday workshop with a lunch break for walks on Bainbridge Island celebrating the autumnal equinox in fine style.
I have lots of notes, but we really tried to fit 10 pounds of intention into a one-pound bag. It wasn’t smooth, seams burst, and there were a lot of questions about what we achieved and what comes next. As an "outsider" to the this green building movement, but deeply embedded in the language of change and how we use it for good, I have thoughts. :)
Teams are synthesizing what we said and there’s a documentary or something planned, but I participated, and I listened, and many who were there are connecting and we want to do more.
My recommendation
Freely offered, here’s my recommendation for next steps over the next 12 months, followed by my rationale based on what I heard. I'll share my sketches for illustrated thought processes as we go, but here's the TLDR to start:
Phase 0: Organize and orient on Affordable Housing as the umbrella scope of the new green built environment movement. (led by operating team through ILFI/SoRD) Timing - before January 2026.
Phase 1A: Honor and translate each of the key anchors of the previous 50 years of green building into pull-forward sprints led by the learning generations (led by architecture firms, schools) Kicks off January 2026
Phase 1B: Learn one, do one, teach one to identify opportunity waves of piloting and micro-testing (led by community leaders and actors) Kicks off January 2026
Phase 1C: Define and guide the shift with advocacy and influence to enable systemic change we need (led by NGO and advocacy leaders) Kicks off January 2026
Phase 2: Roadmap into workstreams of workshops, projects, media management, advocacy and legal, marketing and fundraising (led by operating team through ILFI) (Spans 2026, with quarterly course corrections)
Just to show the work, here's the originating sketch that is NOT required reading:
Values and Process
This community loves frameworks, organizations, and long horizons. Let's crack that. Let's limit our conversation to the next 12 months, and instead of more frameworks, let's try something else.
I came up with some values to consider based on what I heard. Similar to the Agile Manifesto, these could be more valuations than values, and they absolutely do have bias and weight reflecting the behavior and thinking shifts I heard being requested, just as the Agile Manifesto did in its time:
We value:
results over posterity,
engagement over motivation,
reach over depth,
clarity over exclusivity,
application over reinvention.
These may feel loaded, and if so, challenge that feeling as provocation. Considering reach over depth, for example, could feel like a challenge to deep knowledge and experience. What if deep knowledge and experience is valued also by how much it is shared and transmitted successfully to others? What does success look like then?
Based on the tendencies I observed and we called out, we can also incorporate intentional shifts:
When we (do this), we will engage our stakeholders to (do this instead to correct).
When we oversimplify the problem, we will engage our stakeholders to widen our views.
When we overextend our scope, we will engage out stakeholders to narrow our focus.
When we overvalue our own understanding, we will engage our stakeholders to challenge our assumptions.
When we overemploy our credentials, we will engage our stakeholders to confirm the skills we need.
Asking the big question: Do we agree on who our stakeholders are?
No, because that’s not the big question.
What is our scope? The Built Environment? Green Building? Sustainability? Higher Education? Climate Change? Capitalism?
That’s the big question. Our initial problem was not clarifying what the problem is. And that’s an old saw in the sustainability space, so I’m suggesting we just move past it and align on Affordable Housing as the problem at hand now.
Isn’t understanding stakeholder participation easier just from that deep breath?
So…part of our code of ethics, developed and agreed in Phase 0 at the start is that we will identify, confirm and organize around stakeholders by initiative, whether a pilot solar-driven water purification project for a community wetland, a luxury materials taste change campaign, or urban real estate use conversion.
Here's how that all looked in my sketch as I thought it out, imagining a working group from our summit:
Phase by Phase
Now, that Too Long Didn't Read plan above and these values may seem flip, but let me show my work. My “leaps” of assumption are as follows:
Affordable Housing as a focus point for scoping the new green building solution set is an effective umbrella that:
encompasses a significant majority of the goals and concerns of all of our participants,
Has the most significant social impact this movement can achieve in the current horizon
Has the most available logical momentum in experimentation, funding, and scale
We do not need another organization to do this, if we use ILFI as a platform that already has invested in learning tools, content management, storytelling, and advocacy, with support but also independence. It also has access to resources to help get the work done, like me. Beyond operations through ILFI, defining shared values and guiding principles we just talked covered with some governance processes will suffice.
With this work design, it is possible for all participants (organizations and individuals) to act in their own (higher) best interests and achieve significant outcomes.
With this in mind, let me click in a bit on what I mean in each phase.
Phase 0: Orient on Affordable Housing
I recommend reconvening an “action” group to anchor the next phases of work. This “sprint 0” confirms and enables three parallel paths to then feed into a working roadmap, so it’s a working and organizing activity set.
Conduct Phase 0 workshop - 2 days, working teams to define the work of the next 12 months, including objectives and impact statements
Orient and confirm 2026 scope as a working team including what’s in, what’s out and stakeholder communities of impact
Establish working guardrails and draft values/codes of conduct and governance
(Agree on scope of Phases 1A, 1B, 1C)
Break into planning teams to work in parallel:
Define Phase 1A - Choose anchoring thought leaders, define approaches for success, choose teams, plan next steps.
Define Phase 1B - Surface a working list of pilot implementation, testing, research or innovation candidate communities, structures or systems, define approaches for success, establish engagement
Define Phase 1C - Advocacy and Influence - Define the change we’re advocating for, hard look at current SWOT, prioritize for impact
Regroup: Organize into working roadmap of commitment: 3 months, 6 months, 9 months, one year, including targeted milestones and metrics for those intervals.
Sign a working charter to kick off.
Establish operations to support roadmap, including communication, collaboration, and engagement.
Kick off Phase 1 parallel streams.
Phase 1A: Honor and translate
Here's truth. We heard, when we listened, that the next generations of leaders do not communicate the way previous generations did. They do not learn the same way, and they do not activate the same way. Honoring outdated methods of translation rather than the message is a miss. Let’s fix that. Fewer books, more podcasts, more do and show, less tell.
In Phase 0, the planners for this stream identified the Green Building heroes for the Affordable Housing conversation, and have enlisted next generation Green Building heroes to build forward. They also sketched their approaches for translation to create cohesive output to engage, educate, and innovate from the foundational achievements, discoveries, and thought architecture we honor. Given the reliance on thought leadership and expertise, Phase 0 would have identified that this phase should be led through science and technique-based teams, like architecture firms, respected schools of thought, both expert and “inpert”, following similar scripts to honor uniquely.
In this phase, they execute on those plans, which could include:
Intentional translation: Dedicated activities to bring forward, creating a body of work that integrates, democratizes, extends and applies what we have already worked so hard to do and learn.
Content and storytelling: Podcast development, audio and video content production, test case designs, hackathon events
Deep innovation: Application of cross-discipline approaches to complex problems, using best in class or best in world design and innovation techniques to derive new solutions to try
Whatever else we are not thinking of which is why we would have Phase 0
Phase 1B: Learn one, do one, teach one
In Phase 0, we gathered representative community leaders together to plan our DOING steps, because it’s time to get out there, folks. We have communities that would benefit from an afternoon of volunteers, and we have dire needs that can’t wait for another summit.
In parallel with anchoring our knowledge, Phase 1B gets us in the community of practice. Gathering small steps into large journeys, with organization and collaboration is how real success, real change, and real movement occurs.
This phase is setting up a marketplace of communities that are willing and a backlog of ways to help that need practice, application, and just getting it done over and over.
From choosing pilot communities and simply asking “what do you need” and building a plan to identifying projects open to piloting innovations that need scale, this phase refines and kicks off immediate and short term ideas that Phase 0 surfaced and establishes a pattern of doing in the real world and telling the story.
Skill sets here are pragmatic planning, community activation, project leadership, and techniques to deliver complex solutions without disruptive intrusion, over and over. (I'm super excited about this!!)
Phase 1C: Guide the shift
This is a really hard body of work, especially for the current members of the movement. It requires them to do several things:
Focus energy and intention into a central mission for one year - Affordable Housing, using the umbrella to reduce competing and non-complimentary noise to maintain progress on specific (huge) issues like land use, biodiversity, materials, and infrastructure remediation
Recognize that marketing messaging and influence management is now more important than broader policy and regulatory impact management for long-term impact on behavior change, and that requires an adjustment in how to show up
Look current message (and movement) biases in the face and see them for the distancing and othering impacts they are having on outreach and engagement
I have the least experience with this space as it is currently in practice in the policy space, but if we are talking about successful product introduction and change implementation, that’s been my career.
From my perspective, this is one big communication and engagement planning exercise, mapping messages, audiences, purposes, and venues into an actual action plan, and operating that plan. Treating it that way gets pragmatic about impact, hopefully lightening the emotional load for those who have journeyed long, and getting to action for those who didn’t suffer the trauma (yet).
Two considerations for success here:
Operations through ILFI - For now, I see ILFI as the strongest existing organization to house the operations elements, like ongoing communications, content production, etc. without a lot of other affiliationed complexity. From the outside of the "industry", it's the most welcoming door to me. So much has already been in refined operation for quite a long time, so it’s adding capacity and capabilities as they define the need. Defining that need and enlisting support through members and related organizations is the work here.
Partner for humanizing voices - I also see that the scientific disciplines of the green building movement are acknowledging a gap in the universal human dignity conversation (as demonstrated by comments, asides, and ingrained humor), so adding in-depth research in those fields might add balance to what deserves respect. Whether it’s systems thinking, seeing privilege, or updated interpersonal norms, there’s opportunity for growth here.
Commentary on #2 - A way to look at the failure of the green building movement is one of retail product innovation and adoption, and there is an adjacent community of study that could be useful. PDMA houses research on product development that includes deep science that has already walked the grounds of consumer shifts toward less destructive behaviors, just as a starting point. Partnering with experts in that work might provide the gravitas and at least research basis for how product innovation messaging and marketing can be better deployed for wider product awareness and adoption, the main concern I heard from the summit participants in this space.
More than that, PDMA has connections to research institutions worldwide exploring ways humans interact with products, so common cause and common interests can create deeply rewarding experiences for up and coming researchers and practitioners across all the lived experiences fields.
Phase 2 Roadmapping the workstreams forward for 2026
Phase 0 and Phase 1 orient, plan and kick off the work, having built an operating roadmap to launch.
Workstreams on the roadmap give us the cadences and rhythms that keep momentum alive. Milestones will give us the celebratory bumps and storytelling highlights that feed optimism and focus (and fundraising).
In no particular order, the rolling roadmap includes:
Workshop schedule of collaborative bursts across the portfolio, reviewed and supported for timing, participation, operations, etc.
Project portfolio of pilots, implementations, and campaigns
Production, media management, marketing, outreach, fundraising
Advocacy, policy and legal engagement
Planners generated the first roadmap and its structure in Phase 0. Throughout Phase 1’s parallel efforts, their refinements move the roadmap as a living document. As the initiation work from
Phase 0 uses what remains of 2025 to kick us off. Phase 1 finishes in year 1, the Phase 2 roadmap itself will shift and we actually have no idea what that will look like yet. That’s kind of the point.
Umbrella Test: Affordable Housing
To test Affordable Housing as a scope refinement, I ran it against every topic I could remember anyone bringing up during the summit or from the pre-reading. If we were in a workshop environment, we would each be adding what mattered most to us, so I did my best to remember what I heard. I came back to this page several times over a few hours, adding as I remembered more.
Having gotten to this point, I did conclude in the lower right that this is an existing path that can be leveraged, and in the spirit of being “provocative” at the summit, I questioned SoRD as a construct in its impact on a stated goal, and its inability to create enough community for us to share our email addresses.
If we were in a workshop together and we decided it had value to do so, we would weigh, sort or heat map these topics against central definitions of what affordable housing means to us to refine priorities and guidelines. That’s work to do but for now, it’s a good overall landscape to stretch impact intention against, under a single banner.
Test result - passed
Each and all of these has a home under the scope and goal set of Affordable Housing. If we define it to be the transformation of the built environment to foster equitable, just, accessible and dignity-affirming prosocial life, we can welcome all the other definitions, from the SDGs to biophilic patterns to proposed building standards that incorporate mycelium insulation.
At the same time, I’m being terribly lazy! This is not new ground. ILFI has had Affordable Housing summits for years, and there are already amazing stories ready for wider telling. There are very few populations that don’t agree that housing is an issue, globally. Politically, economically, socially, it’s a winning storyline with immediate impact opportunities. We can war over precision (see values) or we can get on board an already moving train.
Downside? Some may call it unsexy.
Commodity architecture. Normalized to mediocrity. The money that is available is highly scrutinized. There’s a lot of compromise and not a lot of room for naming and and shining. “Nobody goes to architecture school to study affordable housing…” I heard that at the summit. From policy wonks to interior systems architects, affordable housing feels slower, less fun, and out of the limelight.
Hm. Can that be challenged?
I think there’s a generation of architects who have eaten other people’s urban and dense living design cooking and have a point of view to share. I think there have been enough heroes and pioneers that the way has been paved for showcasing real commitment to innovation in systems and solutions only shared and scaled projects can yield. That’s why I’ve “jumped” those co-design steps to just wade in and say this is the path I recommend. (Very unconsulting of me.)
Readability check - Here’s the Umbrella Test list as I captured it:
Biodiversity, species preservation, childhood development, poverty alleviation, urban climate response, food scarcity, design for human dignity, social engagement, political protection, land stewardship, indigenous and native respect, application of biophilic patterning, communication/storytelling, influence engagement, shift of consumer preferences, new social contracts, technology use, respectful AI (?), net positive, renewable/renewing construction, innovative materials management, biomaterial advocacy, regulatory innovation and advocacy, infrastructure modernization/replacement, off-grid development, family support, life stage support, mental health, physical health and wellbeing, accessibility, energy use, water use, waste management, behavior leadership, wealth management, community building, utilization of public funds, research opportunities, case studies, private/public partnerships, urban and rural renewal, food deserts, economic disruption, microgrids
Benefits to participants
Nothing in this plan is asking someone to be someone they’re not. Human nature is a design constraint. Given that, if we were together we would be brainstorming our own personal, small group, organization, and “all of the all” benefits we see from participating, gathering them and doing a little sorting (wallowing) in them to build ourselves up. Doing some externalizing…
IFLI: Becomes an operating arm of the new green build movement, if it wasn’t already. Fosters credentialing, outreach, fundraising, and impact.
Participating architecture and built environment actors: Creates a positive affiliation for sales and recruiting, provides access to leading practices, creates “virtuous”delivery methods and messages, essentially supports operating on the side of legacy and longevity.
Learning institutions: Provides scaffolding for collaborative research, method and practice development and testing, relevance for career advancement, and reinforced connections to the applied environment
Practicing institutions: Provides connections to innovations, scientific advancement, community, and resources to achieve relevant objectives.
Carriers of legacy: voice in core design of mission, methods, message and modes of engagement, access to learning and applying communities
Voices of hope: a home for getting stuff done, man. I’m getting a little tired of playing the “what’s in it for me” (WIFM) and “why do I care” (WDIC) INSIDE the house! Let’s just get to it!
Start Phase 0 now
There is little point doing more detailed planning than this, other than to coordinate and kick off Phase 0, which will inform everything else! If you were there, wanted to be there, or should have been there, there's no reason not to start.
For the Maypop practitioner community, this "plan" is actually complete for purpose, so it's a matter of getting started. If I were generating a consulting proposal from this, I would only bid and scope Phase 0, which would probably be in the assessment/analysis range of pricing, with more developed illustrations of what facilitating Phase 1 could look like, with bids/proposals to follow the main workshop as part of the Phase 0 deliverables.
In reality, I'm offering this up as a path forward to a community of deeply experienced practictioners so I've not only not fully scoped this, I've left in the color of a participant, not cleansed as a facilitator. That's license I'm taking, not an example of great practice.
This piece is a capture of a working plan that can convert ideas from the Death and Life of the Green Building Movement workshop conducted on September 20, 2025 into value for our community, shared freely to inspire next steps!
(BTW, generative AI was not used to create this post, so all the edits and mistakes are absolutely mine.)
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