Scaling Resilience Through Community & Collaboration
We must create maximum positive climate and social impact as quickly as possible. This session explores a shared-services cooperative model (also called a producers’ cooperative) for scaling climate-restorative construction. The Seed Collaborative advances bio-based, structural straw panel manufacturing and design/build through collaboration, co-ownership, shared power, and standardized training. Sprouting from New Frameworks’ Seed (Training) Program, participating companies in the Collaborative join as equal members while retaining local autonomy. By sharing sales, marketing, design, R&D, workforce development, and policy efforts, the Collaborative accelerates regional capacity-building and collective impact, offering a replicable alternative to competitive, individualist industry norms.
Session Chairs
Session Speakers
Identify the core principles of cooperative and shared-services business models, and explain how these models differ from conventional competitive structures in the architecture, construction, and manufacturing sectors.
Describe the Seed Program’s standardized training approach for structural straw panel manufacturing, installation, and design, and evaluate how localized deployment of these methods supports regional capacity-building in bio-based construction.
Analyze the operational functions of the Seed Collaborative—including shared sales, marketing, workforce development, scheduling, SOPs, and R&D—and assess how shared resources can accelerate climate-restorative building practices at scale.
Apply lessons from the Seed Collaborative model to conceptualize new collaborative strategies within participants’ own organizations or projects, with the goal of challenging status-quo practices and advancing equitable, climate-focused industry transformation.
This session is pre-approved for 1.5 credit hours toward AIA (LU|HSW), MA CSL, and NARI certification. Those who attend a full day of the conference are additionally eligible for credit toward Phius and RESNET certification.