Justice and Equity

Everyone knows sustainable design is good for people and the planet—like spinach, it’s good for us, but not everyone wants a bite. This interactive session shows how to make sustainability irresistible by connecting it to what clients really care about: budget, performance, and social impact. Through real-world stories and hands-on scenarios, you’ll learn practical ways to reframe sustainability as smart business and great design—no greenwashing, no lectures, just results.

The building decarbonization conversation is shifting from one focused on emissions, energy use and cost, towards something more tangible: the air people breathe, the buildings they live and work in, and the systems that protect them from an increasingly unstable and unpredictable natural environment. This session will discuss “Holistic Value” frameworks for evaluating building design and construction, associated energy use, and human and environmental impacts.

As AI reshapes, well, everything, practitioners are asking: How can I use AI to expand my impact without compromising my values or professional judgment? This session presents complementary perspectives on AI adoption. Elizabeth Kelly shares how she transformed her decarbonization expertise into an AI-enabled workflow, to help a small consulting practice rapidly identify investment-ready retrofit opportunities while keeping human expertise and accountability centered.

This panel will highlight practical lessons and past experiences of designing energy efficiency and decarbonization programs and projects with communities in mind. We will focus on how involving communities, big or small, is essential to the execution of different sustainable initiatives, and argue that this method has the greatest potential for long-term benefits.

The member businesses of the Seed Collaborative pursue a common mission: to lock carbon into the walls of buildings through the use of straw structural insulated panels (S-SIPs). The bigger bet they are making, though, isn't about the material; it's about the model. This keynote goes inside a network of decentralized, bioregional manufacturers built around one cooperatively owned hub, with shared R&D, financing, purchasing, and training that no single small manufacturer could afford alone.