You can see photos from this event here.

Tuesday, May 28

6pm-9pm: Optional Get Together at Rek'Lis Brewery for people arriving early (2085 Main St, Bethlehem, NH)

Wednesday, May 29

Optional Morning Hike:
Mt. Willard, via Mt. Willard Trail. Meet at 8am at the trailhead (or at 7:45am in the hotel lobby to carpool). 3.2 miles round trip. Awesome view of Crawford Notch. Medium difficulty with elevation gain, rocks, roots, etc. +/- 2 hrs round trip. Directions to trailhead, which is 3.9 miles from the hotel.

Alternate option for a shorter, easy/mostly flat hike:
Ammonoosuc Lake via the Around the Lake Trail behind the AMC Highland Center, which has parking. Approximately 1.2 mile total loop. Also 3.9 miles from the hotel.

11am-12pm: Check-in/Arrival Window. Collect your badge in the Grand Ballroom Lobby before heading to Lunch

12pm-1pm:  Lunch (Grand Ballroom)

1pm-5pm: Afternoon Breakouts - Existing Groups Meet

5pm-6pm: Break

6:30pm-8:30pm: Dinner (Grand Ballroom)

8:30pm: Evening Entertainment:

Thursday, May 30

7:00am-8:30am: Breakfast (Sun Dining Room)

8:30am-10am Opening Session, Presidential Ballroom

10 Years-to-Date, 10 Years Ahead: A celebration of what we’ve accomplished and what’s to come.

In this opening session, we will reflect on who we are, why we’re here, and where we’re headed. We’ll hear from folks involved in Bottom Lines since its inception, and from voices just joining our community. With this context, we’ll set the tone and directive for a day full of engaged, insightful, provocative, and visionary discussions.

10:00am-10:30am: Break

10:30am-12:00pm: Bottom Lines Communities of Practice
If you do not currently participate in one of the communities of practice, please feel free to join any room that interests you.

Business Administrators

The Business Administrators Community of Practice is geared toward people who work in office management operations, finance, and HR, including owner-operators who encompass all of those roles. This session will include an interactive exercise to identify the many job functions performed by business administrators, how those tasks fit into the triple bottom line, and how we can directly and indirectly have an impact through our diverse roles. We’ll also touch on the history of the group and the types of topics we have covered, and identify barriers to participation so we can learn how to overcome them.

Anti-Racist Action Group

ARAG is a place to come together to discuss how to make our businesses and organizations anti-racist. In our time together, we’ll talk about what we’ve already done and learned, deepen our connections to each other, and reach out to new folks and new companies interested in discussing this work in a welcoming and open space. If you haven’t had the time or space or were just too intimidated by this really hard topic, now is a great time to come say hi.

Leadership and Transitions

The Leadership and Transitions COP engages in conversations about our company's practical experiences with leadership development and ownership structures and their transitions. This morning we will gather to explore your experiences and challenges with leadership development, building that capacity, and what we can learn from each other about how to think and act in ways that sustain our dynamic businesses over time. An afternoon session will be devoted to ownership and succession.

Architects’ Huddle

The Architects’ Hub is the place within Bottom Lines where architects from all peer groups gather to discuss architecture-specific Triple Bottom Lines topics.  Thursday morning we plan discuss Impact and Purpose in the context of our practices, asking questions like:

• What are your firm's priorities for minimizing Impact?  
• What have you done successfully on a recent project that feels like low-hanging fruit for other firms to embrace?
• What have you tried and failed?
• Are you setting targets and measuring Impact?
• What are you doing to advocate/raise awareness in our industry?
• What are the biggest obstacles to reducing Impact?
• What national/global initiatives like Architecture 2030 are you participating in, and why did you choose it?

If we get through one or two of these bullets and get to know each other better in the process we’ll consider it a great success!

12pm-1pm: Lunch (Grand Ballroom)

1pm-2:15pm:  Afternoon Breakouts Block #1:

Employee Ownership & Your Succession Plan

John Abrams

Very few small businesses have succession plans. Most owners think “we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it”. But all, from those just out of the gate to the most mature, should have one in progress or in place. For Bottom Lines companies this often involves consideration of employee ownership. Let’s think and talk together about the options, share where you are in this process, and answer each other’s questions.
 

Surviving Capitalism: Measuring Prosperity and Using Profit for Impact 

Paul Eldrenkamp & Kate Stephenson

In this session we'll explore Prosperity as a critical element of the triple bottom line, and how it can support both People and Planet. When we are profitable, how do we invest those resources in our people and our communities? How do we measure the social value of our projects? What are other ways to measure their value, and if we used those measures, how would it change the way we approach our projects? How would it change our businesses?
 

KPIs to Measure Impact -- Planet

Stephanie Horowitz & Rachel White

When we joined Bottom Lines, we each committed to advance our planet bottom line. In this session, we will delve into how we define and measure our environmental impact. What are we  tracking and why? What are the barriers to tracking and how do we overcome these? How do we communicate about our planetary bottom line and how do these efforts influence our businesses? Whether you have been tracking planetary KPIs for a long time or are relatively new to it, we hope you’ll join us. 

Questions We’ll Address:

• How do people measure their environmental impact?
• What are the reasons to track?
• How do metrics influence decision making at project level, practice level and more broadly (advocacy, policy)?
• Spectrum from low hanging fruit to aspirational?
• Things that you do v. things that you track?
• How do you communicate about your planet KPIs? How does it fit into your identity and story? (internal, external)
• What are the barriers to tracking planet impacts and how do you overcome them?
   

Maximizing Employee Satisfaction, Retention, and Motivation

Matthew Broderick & Dan Kolbert

We will come together to share approaches for keeping our staff happy, motivated, and able to focus on making an impact through their work. How do we determine pay and benefits that provide people quality of life and discourage them from moving to a competitor? Where applicable, how can we make hybrid, remote, and flexible work a success? And what are techniques to build engagement and motivation in service to the company mission?
 

2:30pm-3:45pm: Afternoon Breakouts Block #2:
 

Selling Triple Bottom Lines Values

Evan Hardcastle & Chris Briley

In this session we will explore ways in which we have succeeded, and ways we still need to improve, in incorporating the Triple Bottom Line Principles during the sales process.  How do we sell Triple Bottom Lines buildings to the uninformed or uninterested?  How do we balance the 3 different BLs? Do we have lines we won’t cross in each?

• Some thought provoking questions:
• By being overt about our principles, are we losing the opportunity to build more homes using the 3BL?
• Is guilt a good tool in achieving the end goal of 3BL?
• How important is selling 3BL as a status symbol?
   

The Fourth Bottom Line: Finding Meaning in Your Work

Joe Carry & Phil Kaplan

How central to your work and your company is the question of meaningfulness?  If companies are a type of community, and sociologists characterize communities as achievements of common meaning, then it stands to reason that attention to the meaning of work ought to be a priority.  High-performing companies focus on and get really good at pursuing and maintaining that achievement of common meaning.  Is that an ornamental nicety or a functional necessity?  And how do they do it?

And what happens when the “common” in common meaning breakdowns or frays?  Do companies have reliable means and methods for repairing that break?  Similarly, that kind of breakdown can happen not just within a company but also between the company and the clients it serves or the collaborating teams on whom it depends.  How do successful companies navigate those tricky waters?

These are the questions at the center of this session.  After a brief introduction, participants will break out into groups to discuss the role of meaning in their work.  The group will reconvene and the presenters will introduce some tools for managing the processes of meaning-making (thinking) and meaning-sharing (communicating) with the goal of making them more effective, that is to say, more conducive to achieving the common meaning that is the hallmark of any successful company or collective endeavor.  Participants will then again break out into groups and use the provided tools (and any they may already be using) to examine and share their own processes for making and communicating meaning.  The group will reconvene at the end to share insights and ideas.

KPIs to Measure Our Impact on People

Michael Bruss & Adrienne Stauffer

The work we do impacts people—our employees, the community, the humans who occupy the spaces we create, and more. In this session we'll explore a framework for defining KPIs around those people so we can measure what matters.
 

Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in the Workplace 

Sara Cooper and Shelia Perkins

Is DEI as we have come to think of it obsolete? Join us for a discussion around the evolution of DEI, including what the future of diversity, equity, and inclusion in the workplace could hold. We will explore the history and current state of efforts around this topic, as well as brainstorm ways to create environments that are welcoming and provide belonging to all.
 

3:45pm: Break

4:00pm-5:00pm: Closing Session (Presidential Ballroom)

Picking Priorities: Identifying the big topics of the day, and how we’ll leverage our collective effort in the years ahead.

In this closing session, we will explore the hot spots in the topics of the day. What are our priorities within the triple Bottom Lines context? How will we, as individuals, businesses, and Bottom Lines groups, commit to making a resonant impact in our work over the next 10 years? Through digital data mapping and interactive breakouts, we’ll have an opportunity to address these questions and more.

5:00pm-6:00pm: Celebratory Reception (Presidential Garden)