This message was sent by ILFI Board Chair Anthony Guerrero to the ILFI community over email on June 8, 2020. If you’d like to receive updates like this, sign up for our monthly newsletter, Inbox Inspiration. To learn more about Anthony, read his March 2020 Q&A here.

To our entire ILFI community,

ILFI stands in solidarity with the Black community at this time. We stand together in grief. And we stand together against the innumerable injustices, unspeakable violence, and centuries of oppression, racism, and white supremacy, most of it perpetrated by our fellow citizens, many of whom were sworn to protect our lives. George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery’s names are sadly just some of the most recent on a long list of lives cut too short.

This must stop now. Black Lives Matter.

Each of us needs to listen and lend our support. Look to the resources at the bottom of this message to guide your action. Beyond the broader movement, we also have an obligation to take action within our own organization and industry.

ILFI was founded on the vision of a Living Future that is inclusive, not exclusive. We have the most ambitious, rigorous, forward-thinking programs in the world for green buildings, healthy materials, transparent organizations, and more. We lead fearlessly, and we preach loudly. But we are not reaching everyone; our industry is still perpetuating racism.

While social justice is at the core of our mission, ILFI has immense work ahead of us. Expanding on the Equity Petal, ILFI launched the Just program in 2012 to promote socially just and equitable organizations. But we need to do more to address the structural inequity that is so pervasive in our society. ILFI needs to review every program, every piece of educational material, and every event we host. We need to evaluate the barriers that have kept the number of licensed Black architects in America to less than 2% of the total (AIA). And we, too, need to provide access to and lend our voice to leaders and experts from Black communities, the Indigenous, and People of Color communities–so that ideas are made stronger, more sustainable, and pursue a true Living Future.

Here are some of the concrete steps we have committed to take:

Within our organization

  • Broaden ILFI’s board, executive management and staff, and global network of Ambassadors and Collaboratives to better represent the world we live in.
  • Continue to examine our full suite of programs and initiatives to eliminate buried biases and add missing content that is critical to advancing equity in the built environment.
  • Ensure that our equity- and justice-specific work, such as the Equity Petal and Just program, fully incorporates anti-racism principles.

Within our industry

Achieving equity and racial justice demands standing in the literal and virtual front lines with our fellow Americans and global citizens, and saying “No More.” Be courageous in this moment. Be as courageous as you are when designing a living building or living community. Be committed in this moment. At a certain point, the protests will stop–the media will move on–but your voice will still be needed: to plan, to organize, to vote, and to support change.

Thank you for being part of the work we are doing to create a Living Future that is socially just, culturally rich, and ecologically restorative.

Anthony Guerrero
ILFI Board Chair

Want to ACT NOW? We suggest these four steps for making change in your organization now:

  1. Educate yourself on race, racism, and the racialized history of the built environment in the US.
  2. Undertake anti-racism training for your organization, looking to The People’s Institute for Survival and Beyond – Undoing Racism®, or here; People of Color in Environmental and Climate Justice. 
  3. Use a framework like Just to ensure organizational transparency and develop an engagement process for stakeholders in your community. 
  4. Make sure that the economic opportunities presented in your projects are shared in an inclusive way. As called for in the LBC Inclusion imperative, our collective work must include investing in minority-owned business and marginalized communities.

Photo by LOGAN WEAVER on Unsplash

Written By

Anthony Guerrero

Anthony is the current Board Chair at the International Living Future Institute. He also leads development of sustainability strategies for the core operations of Natural Resources Defense Council, focusing on the triple bottom line: social equity, sustaining the environment and financial viability. Anthony puts in to practice the principles of the Living Building Challenge to revamp the internal operations of NRDC and to demonstrate transformation in Operations Management. Under his leadership NRDC completed the world’s first tenant improvement Living Building Challenge Petal Certification in its Chicago office, Petal Certification for its Beijing office and is pursuing certification for its latest office build-outs in Chicago (expansion space) and San Francisco.