1. Sign up now to attend Living Future 2023, and attend the Institute’s flagship event and our first in-person gathering since 2019! Join us in person May 3-5, 2023!
2. Early Bird rates expire December 31, 2022, at 11:59 PM PT. These are the best rates available for LF23! Act now before prices go up!
3. Secure your spot! Seating at our Washington D.C. venue, the Ronald Reagan Building and International Trade Center, is limited. Act now to ensure you are present for this unique gathering themed around Advocacy + Belonging.
4. Join with the world’s leading regenerative design professionals at Living Future 2023. Learn, connect, and be inspired by this transformational audience at the intersection of climate, health, and justice in the built environment.
5. Come for the mission, stay for the belonging! Come be welcomed to the Institute’s community, where you’ll have time to network and meet new friends. Join the movement to create a Living Future. You’ll be inspired all year long by the stories, projects, and participants you meet at LF23.
6. Choose-your-own-path sessions from our seven focus areas. You can craft your own event, and if you purchase our all-access ticket, you’ll also be able to access recordings from any sessions you may have missed.
7. Meet the manufacturers and organizations at the forefront of healthy, decarbonized products. LF23 showcases these leaders and their materials on the forefront of transformation to a thriving future for all. For more information on sponsoring or exhibiting, please visit our Sponsorship page or reach out to sponsorship@living-future.org for our prospectus.
8. The parties! With your conference ticket, you’ll receive access to Living Future’s famous after-hours afterparties. Put your hair up, let your hair down, have a quiet conversation, or sing and dance the night away. The choice is yours, and we support you in your quest for joy and scintillating conversation!
9. Keynotes! Living Future is known for its groundbreaking keynote speakers. We will be releasing our featured keynotes soon! Stay tuned for more info!
10. Use your membership discount to get 10% off on Living Future 2023 registration! HOT TIP, if you’re not a member yet, you should check it out because your cost of membership is covered by the discount you’ll receive on event registration. Sign up now for our lowest rates!

Proposal Submissions are now Closed

The Living Future 2023 conference is now accepting speaking proposals about Advocacy + Belonging as it relates to climate, health, and justice issues in the built environment. Here’s how you can submit your speaking ideas by October 1, 2022!

What is Living Future 2023 (LF23) and why should I attend?

Living Future is the signature event of the International Living Future Institute (the Institute), the creators of the Living Building Challenge, Declare, and Just labels and certifications. The Living Future 2023 (LF23) conference will assemble the world’s most ambitious and holistically-focused regenerative design experts, and create an in-person networking hub to gather industry leaders focused at the intersection of climate, health, and justice in the built environment. Advocacy + Belonging is the theme of 2023’s Living Future conference, now in its 17th year.

Taking place in Washington, D.C. from May 3-5, 2023 at the Ronald Reagan Building and International Trade Center, the Living Future conference will feature inspirational keynotes and unique breakout sessions showcasing cutting-edge building projects, case studies, and new products. We will host a forum to highlight justice work that promotes the well-being of our communities.

LF23 will also incorporate the Living Product Expo—a trade show showcasing revolutionary healthy building and design materials—that will allow specifiers and purchasers to directly connect with leading regenerative design manufacturers.

Who should submit a proposal to speak at LF23? What are the benefits of speaking at LF23?

Living Future 2023 is designed to inspire, educate, and elevate the built environment community, advance the regenerative design movement, and unite a key audience of holistic thinkers from aligned industries and disciplines. Anyone interested in showcasing their thought leadership in the following focus areas is encouraged to submit their speaking proposals:

• Justice and Belonging—Acknowledging and addressing that our climate emergency has differing social, economic, public health, and other adverse impacts on less-resourced populations. How do we address these inequities head-on through short-term action, long-term mitigation, and adaptation strategies? How do we transform our developments and organizations to foster a true sense of belonging within our communities to create communities that are just, affordable, and equitable for all?
• Impact Case Studies—Celebrating and learning from the successes of project teams, their achievements, and how these teams overcame barriers to create lasting impact.
• Health + Materials—How do we design spaces and products that optimize physical health and well-being? How do we expand our healthy materials economy around ecologically regenerative, transparent, and socially equitable products and develop advocacy for their use? Share the latest innovations, best practices, and how-tos. 
• Zero Carbon—How do we drive the creation and operation of zero embodied carbon buildings that rely solely on renewable forms of energy, while operating year-round in a safe, pollution-free, and resilient manner? How do we prioritize reductions and building efficiencies before turning to technological solutions, and minimize and offset carbon emissions that contribute to climate change? 
• Restoration + Resilience—How do we restore our relationship with nature by reconnecting our human-built environment to its natural ecosystems? How do we encourage the creation of buildings and communities focused on pedestrians, local food webs, watersheds, and our ecological habitats to promote resilience?  
• Beauty + Biophilia—Recognizing and creating compelling data and findings on the need for beauty and biophilia, which enrich our lives, improve our wellness, and honor local cultures, climes, and places.
• Advocacy + Innovation—How do we build our movement, discover and share resources, and use advocacy tools to build a Living Future for all? How are our leading practitioners and innovators pushing for better, healthier buildings and communities through engaging in policy and public sector action? 

What are the submission requirements and when is my submission due?

The submission requirements can be found here.  Don’t forget to submit your proposal through this portal by October 1, 2022 to be considered for a speaking opportunity at Living Future 2023.

How is the theme “Advocacy + Belonging” relevant to my work in the built environment?

We recognize that in our goal to create a Living Future, we must build momentum in our movement while transforming our individual members from bystanders to committed advocates. We will drive this transformation through our inclusive culture of belonging—where we allow all participants to have meaningful expression and the opportunity to participate in shared solutions through a design of radical inclusivity and idea exchange. Living Future 2023 represents a global shift in perspective, a gathering for bold thinkers and doers, and a unique gathering space for growing our collective advocacy and belonging to build our movement of transformative thinkers and impact at the epicenter of climate, health, and justice in the built environment.

LF23 will create networking spaces that will allow us to deeply engage with one another to focus on addressing and repairing intertwined and daunting global issues, including the damage to our ecological well-being and social health. Together, we will answer questions around how we will restore ecosystems, how we will dismantle systems of oppression, and how we will restore and make our communities and building systems whole. At LF23, we will affirm the dignity and inherent value of all people, impacted communities, and the rights of the natural world.

How is my proposal evaluated and when will I be notified if my proposal was accepted?

Living Future 2023 proposals will be evaluated by your community peers on the volunteer LF23 Review Committee, who have demonstrated experience and expertise in the areas in which they will rate and review. Selected proposals and their panel members will be notified in late October 2022.

Where can I learn more about sponsoring LF23?

As a non-profit organization, we cannot do our work at ILFI or produce events like Living Future 2023 without the incredible support of our sponsors. We encourage your organization to showcase and elevate its leadership in the regenerative design space at Living Future 2023. We ask that our LF23 audience take note of those sponsor leaders who create products and supply services that support the mission of the Institute and the growth of our movement. Please reach out to our team at sponsorship@living-future.org for more information on how to demonstrate your leadership and alignment at LF23. The LF23 sponsorship guide is also available for download here.

Want to get in touch with our LF23 team? You can reach them at LF@living-future.org.

Raj Patel is an award-winning writer. His works include the book Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System. His second book, The Value of Nothing, was a New York Times and international bestseller. His latest book, co-written with Jason W. Moore, is A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things. He is also working on a soon-to-be-released documentary film project, Generation Food.

An activist and academic, Raj studies the global food crisis and other big-picture issues facing humanity. He is a leading voice on the social and environmental challenges posed by industrial food production. Raj is a visionary and an advocate of paradigm-shifting ideas—around agroecology, food sovereignty, equality, patriarchy, late-state capitalism, and environmental justice. He distinctively tilts toward a premise of the regeneration of our living systems and the way in which we as a society operate in the context of creating a shared and just living future.

We had the opportunity to chat with Raj Patel about his vision for a just and healthy world and his hopes for the future. We are looking forward to hearing him speak at our upcoming Living Future unConference.

Julie Tonroy: What do you see as the biggest challenge(s) for future generations in order to live in a healthy, sustainable world?

Raj Patel: Our planet is undergoing a biospheric state-shift. The hardest part of living in the new world will be to live unencumbered by the bad ideas from the old one. Most humans think that nature and society are separate, that resources are here to be exploited, that we can economically grow our way out of the trouble we’re in at the moment. That kind of thinking isn’t just sloppy—it’s behind the destruction that has caused this state-shift in the first place. For future generations, there’s a lot to reinvent if they—and we—are to live sustainably within a new and different biosphere.

JT: Your political philosophy has been described as libertarian-socialist with anarchistic tendencies. Can you tell me what that means to you?

RP: “Libertarian-socialist with anarchistic tendencies” sounds seditious, but it just means that I think that we can do better than the world we’re in right now. And I suspect you do too. If you like entrepreneurialism and free exchange, as I do, you shouldn’t be a fan of capitalism. The exchange of two people buying and selling at a market or souk is utterly different from a system rigged for monopoly and coercion. If you care for sustainability, you oughtn’t to be a fan of a system that lets corporations exploit the natural world, workers, and their communities. I also suspect that you’re not a fan of a sprawling police state, keeping order, and doing the bidding of its billionaire owners. I’d peg you as a fan of democracy. I think you’d prefer more accountable government, with less money spent on war, more on healthcare, childcare, and programs to end poverty, hunger, and shifts toward agroecology and energy transformation. And if the only way for government to be more accountable is that you have to participate in it more than you do, I think you’d be up for that. Which might mean you’re a libertarian who wants as much freedom as possible, a socialist who wants equality and sustainable democratic control over the economy, and an anarchist who doesn’t particularly like being policed by the government. Turns out you may be a libertarian-socialist with anarchistic tendencies after all. Don’t worry. You’re not alone.

JT: Our mission at ILFI is to further the transformation of communities that are socially just, culturally rich, and ecologically restorative. What does that look like to you?

RP: Every ecology is different, and that’s why every community must be too. But there are patterns. The key word for me in ILFI’s mission is “restorative.” How is it that people in the Global North restore for the privilege that has come unearned to almost everyone living here? No one asked to be born to a society built on slavery, ecological destruction, colonialism and exploitation—but here we are. White people didn’t emerge from the womb asking to receive the dividends of white supremacy, men didn’t ask to be born with the dividends of patriarchy. But we live lives that sit upon a brutal history and that history’s continuation in the present. We appear to be at the beginning of a conversation about what restoration and reparation might look like—reparation for patriarchy, slavery, white supremacy, genocide, ecocide. Of course, these conversations are difficult. But who reading this wants a more sexist society, a more racist one, a more patriarchal one? The process of having these conversations is the very process for a more honest reckoning for how humans live with the rest of the planet. The future is one of conversation and of reckoning.

JT: In your book Stuffed and Starved, you talk about the nature of the world’s food systems. What do you believe is the most critical element that you feel is needed to transform the current system into one that is sustainable and equitable?

RP: There’s no single tilt that can fix a world that’s unequal on so many axes. But the idea of food sovereignty, invented by the 200-million-strong peasant movement, La Via Campesina in the 1990s, is an idea I like a great deal. It has a sprawling definition, but the upshot of it is that every community, region, nation, and biosphere needs to have its own conversations about how to common its resources so that no one goes hungry. Although it may seem like an abstract idea, this process has already had tangible results. Peasant communities that embark on this process have started to observe things like better levels of gender equality. Ecological restoration comes along too.

JT: What does equity mean to you?

RP: From each according to their ability, to each according to their need.

JT: We’re excited to have you as a keynote at Living Future 2018 in Portland, OR. Can you share a bit of what you hope to address with our audience?

RP: I’m very excited to share some new systems thinking from a new book called A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things, co-authored with Jason Moore, and to share some of the footage from a documentary that I’ve co-directed with Zak Piper and Steve James (of Hoop Dreams) fame, which shows a little about how to get from the system we’re in now to a better one.

JT: Tell me about the most exciting idea you’ve uncovered recently.

RP: I can’t stop thinking about the two millennia in which hunter-gatherer societies had domesticated grain, but in which grain had yet to domesticate humans. Most exciting: hunter-gatherer societies were ones where there was gender equality the likes of which we have never known. It’s exciting because it means our relationship to the biosphere isn’t destiny, and our social relationships aren’t either. Just because the crops need something doesn’t mean we have to give it in the way we have for the past few thousand years. We can reinvent. We can reimagine.

JT: What is the most pressing challenge related to the food industry?

RP: That it can’t be sustainable, no matter how hard it tries. It’s the quintessentially destructive industry. According to KPMG, the food industry can’t make enough revenue—not even profit but revenue—to cover its environmental footprint. The food industry knows this already. I learned about this from one of the VPs for sustainability at Nestlé. Better everyone knows now, so no one deceives themselves, or consumers, about “sustainable Big Food.”

JT: What are a few simple changes that people can make that can have a big impact?

RP: Wittgenstein liked to point out the difference between simple and easy. The changes with the biggest impacts are simple—just not easy. Simple is “fight for equality,” “organize for change,” “practice reparation.” Easy is to buy something organic, local, and fair-trade. I’m not saying don’t do easy. But I’m saying don’t delude yourself that it’s going to have a big impact.

JT: What are your hopes for the future?

RP: Despite the difficulties ahead, I’ve seen incredible change happen around the world, pushing back against the big food industry, ending hunger and patriarchy, beginning the conversation about reparations. It’d be wrong to pretend that our trajectory is one bending toward ecological and social sustainability. But it’d betray the many movements I’ve seen, from India to Oakland to Malawi to Peru, to ignore the fierce hope with which they fight to bend that arc toward justice.