Originally published in Rolling Stone

It’s obvious how this should end. You’ve got the richest industry on earth, fossil fuel, up against some college kids, some professors, a few environmentalists, a few brave scientists.

And it’s worse than that. The college students want their universities to divest from fossil fuel – to sell off their stock in Exxon and Shell and the rest in an effort to combat global warming. But those universities, and their boards, have deep ties to the one percent: combined, their endowments are worth $400 billion, and at Harvard, say, the five folks who run the portfolio make as much money as the entire faculty combined.

Oh, and remember – this is supposed to be an apathetic college generation. The veteran leader Ralph Nader, in a speech in Boston last year, said kids today were more passive than any he’d seen in 45 years. “Nothing changes if you don’t have fire in your belly,” he said. “You are a generation without even embers in your belly.”

But here’s my bet: the kids are going to win, and when they do, it’s going to matter. In fact, with Washington blocked, campuses are suddenly a front line in the climate fight – a place to stand up to a status quo that is wrecking the planet. The campaign to demand divestment from fossil fuel stock emerged from nowhere in late fall to suddenly become the largest student movement in decades. Already it’s drawing widespread media attention; already churches and city governments are joining students in the fight.  It’s where the action all of a sudden is.

I had a front row seat to watch this explosion – actually, I was up on stage, on a nationwide tour that sold out concert halls across the country early this winter. With a bevy of progressive heroes (author Naomi Klein, indigenous activist Winona LaDuke, filmmaker Josh Fox, Hip Hop Caucus founder Lennox Yearwood) and with Rolling Stone as a media sponsor, we took our biodiesel tour bus from Seattle to Atlanta, Maine to Utah, trying to spark a new front in the climate fight. Unknowingly, we’d timed this DoTheMath tour pretty well: Post-Sandy, as the hottest year in American history was drawing to a close, we had no trouble finding allies. In fact, we were serving less as a virus then as a vector, letting activists glimpse their emerging strength. Every night, kids from a dozen local colleges would shout out their resolve, and then gather in “Aftermath” parties to get down to organizing.

By the time we finally finished, in December in Salt Lake City, 192 college campuses had active divestment fights underway, a number that’s since grown to 256. And people were noticing. On the Senate floor, Rhode Island’s Sheldon Whitehouse told his colleagues that “as Congress sleepwalks, Americans actually are taking action on their own. These students are imploring their schools to weigh the real cost of climate change against the drive for more financial returns, and divest from the polluters.” The New York Times, in what became the week’s most e-mailed story in the paper of record, said the campaign could “force climate change back on to the nation’s political agenda.” A few days later, Time magazine ended its account of the mushrooming movement like this: “University presidents who don’t fall in line should get used to hearing protests outside their offices. Just like their forerunners in the apartheid battles of the 1980s, these climate activists won’t stop until they win.”

We even had some early victories. Three colleges – Unity in Maine, Hampshire in Massachusetts and Sterling College in Vermont – purged their portfolios of fossil fuel stocks. Three days before Christmas, Seattle mayor Mike McGinn announced city funds would no longer be invested in fossil fuel companies, and asked the heads of the city’s pension fund to follow his lead. Citing the rising sea levels that threatened city’s neighborhoods, he said, “I believe that Seattle ought to discourage these companies from extracting that fossil fuel, and divesting the pension fund from these companies is one way we can do that.”

The logic of divestment couldn’t be simpler: if it’s wrong to wreck the climate, it’s wrong to profit from that wreckage. The fossil fuel industry, as I showed in Rolling Stone last summer, has five times as much carbon in its reserves as even the most conservative governments on earth say is safe to burn – but on the current course, it will be burned, tanking the planet. The hope is that divestment is one way to weaken those companies – financially, but even more politically. If institutions like colleges and churches turn them into pariahs, their two-decade old chokehold on politics in DC and other capitals will start to slip. Think about, for instance, the waning influence of the tobacco lobby – or the fact that the firm making Bushmaster rifles shut down within days of the Newtown massacre, after the California Teachers Pension Fund demanded the change. “Many of America’s leading institutions are dozing on the issue of climate,” says Robert Massie, head of the New Economics Institute. “The fossil fuel divestment campaign must become the early morning trumpet call that summons us all to our feet.”

It won’t be an easy fight in most places, of course. At Harvard, say, 72 percent of the student body voted to demand divestment, only to have the university respond in the most patronizing possible fashion two days later: “We always appreciate hearing from students about their viewpoints, but Harvard is not considering divesting from companies related to fossil fuels.” But one of the Harvard student organizers responded with just the right mix of pepper and politeness: “The president is going to have to change her mind, because we’re not changing ours,” sophomore Alli Welton said. “Climate change is a matter of life or death for millions and millions of people.”

And it’s that simple truth that, over the next few semesters, will help students overwhelm boards of trustees and reluctant presidents. This movement didn’t come out of nowhere, after all – despite Nader’s pessimism, if you knew where to look, you could see the pot boiling for several years. On hundreds of campuses, students had persuaded their administrations to build green buildings and bike paths; tens of thousands of students had traveled to Washington for giant Powershift conventions to learn how to lobby on global warming. And since there’s no longer anything theoretical about climate change, this movement’s not going to dissipate – with each new storm and drought, it will gain tragic power.

In fact, if you sit down and game out the future, you start to realize that students, faculty, and engaged alumni have a surprisingly good hand. Trustees and presidents may resist at first – they are, almost by definition, pillars of the status quo. But universities, in the end, are one of the few places in our civilization where reason still stands a good chance of prevailing over power (especially since students are establishing some power of their own as they organize). And here’s where reason inevitably leads:

1) Universities need to lead because they are where we first found out about climate change. It was in physics labs and on university supercomputers that the realization we were in trouble first dawned a generation ago. By this point the proverbial man in the street can see their predictions coming sadly true: It wasn’t just Sandy, though there’s no doubt that the image of the cold Atlantic pouring into the New York subways had imprinted the new fragility of western civilization on many minds. (If that radical rag Business Week used the headline “It’s Global Warming, Stupid,” then you knew the message was getting through.) But everywhere we went across the nation on our tour, people had their own stories. In the Pacific Northwest, where we began, ocean acidification is so advanced that oyster farmers are in despair; in Nebraska, the week we arrived, scientists determined that exactly 100 percent of the state was now in “severe drought.” Hell, we got to Colorado in early December, and the night we arrived a raging wildfire high in the Rockies forced the evacuation of 500 homes. In December. In the Rockies.

All this means that climate is no longer a fringe concern. Seventy-four percent of Americans said global warming was affecting the weather.  On campus, opinion is near-unanimous. “For one of my classes I just did a poll,” says Stanford freshman Sophie Harrison, a leader in the divestment fight. “Out of 200 people I only found three who didn’t believe in climate change.”

Meanwhile, the scientists keep pushing their research forward. Twenty-five years ago, they were predicting the trouble we’re seeing now; when they look forward another quarter century, things get truly scary – and academics get much less academic. In the past, just a lonely few, like NASA’s James Hansen, were willing to go to jail, but in November, the premier scientific journal, Nature, published a commentary urging all climate scientists to “be arrested if necessary” because “this is not only the crisis of your lives – it is also the crisis of our species’ existence.” In December, at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union where most of the year’s cutting-edge climate studies are released, one panel examined the question “Is Earth Fucked?” The scientist leading the session finished by saying probably – but “if a global environmental movement develops that is strong enough, that has the potential to have a bigger impact in a timely manner.” Make of it what you will: The American scientist who has spent the most time on the melting ice of Greenland, Ohio State’s Jason Box, took to the stage at our Columbus tour stop to demand OSU and other colleges divest.

So when, for instance, Harvard president Drew Gilpin Faust says “our most effective impact on climate change” will come from “what we do with our teaching, our research. . . the students who may be the heads of the EPA or all kinds of organizations,” it’s partly true – that scholarship is important. But it’s also clearly not doing the job alone, since the temperature keeps going up.

Universities have in fact already gone well beyond scholarship in the climate fight. As veteran student organizer Maura Cowley points out, 738 colleges from Adams State to Yeshiva University have already signed the “President’s Climate Commitment,” pledging that their campuses will go carbon-neutral because they are “deeply concerned about the unprecedented scale and speed of global warming.” The commitment is more than rhetorical – open up almost any college web page and you’ll find a tab for “sustainability,” with the PR office lauding the latest effort to install solar panels or convert to a pedestrian campus. “You can’t walk 20 steps on the Stanford campus without seeing a recycling station,” says Harrison. “I’ve been very impressed with all of that, which is why it seems so illogical they’re invested in fossil fuel.” Exactly – if you’re committed to greening your campus, why wouldn’t you be committed to greening your portfolio, too? Why is the heating system for the new arts center a proper target for environmental concern, but not the $50 million sitting in Peabody Coal, where it helps support climate-denying think tanks and reality-denying Congressmen?

Hence divestment. Sometimes, colleges can exert influence without selling stock – on many issues, like sweatshop labor, they may have been smarter to keep their stock, so they could use their position as shareholders to influence corporate decision-making. “But when we were talking about sweatshops, it wasn’t because we were opposed to t-shirts. We just needed some changes in how companies operated,” says Klein. Adds Dan Apfel, who as head of the Responsible Endowments Coalition has coordinated much of the emerging divestment furor, “If you’re Apple, we want you to produce your computers in ways that are good. But we like computers. The fossil fuel industry, though – its existence is fundamentally against our existence. We can’t change them by investing in them, because they’re not going to write off reserves. There’s no way they can be made sustainable, in the same way tobacco can’t be made healthy.”

2) Universities understand math, and in this case the math about who’s to blame is Q.E.D. clear. It points straight at the fossil fuel companies.

By now, most activists know the three numbers I outlined in this magazine last summer, in a piece that immediately went viral: If we’re to hold planetary warming to the two degrees that the world’s governments have said is the absolute red line, we can only burn 565 more gigatons of carbon – but the fossil fuel companies, private and state-owned, have 2795 gigatons of carbon in their reserves. That is, they have five times the coal and oil and gas needed to roast the earth, and they fully intend to burn it – in fact, a company like Exxon boasts about spending a hundred million dollars a day looking for more hydrocarbons, all the fracking gas and Arctic oil and tar sands crude they can find. “The math is so irrefutable,” says Klein, the veteran anti-corporate activist who’s been helping lead the fight. “The fossil fuel companies haven’t even bothered to dispute it. And coming to the issue with numbers like that, putting them in an academic context, that’s radical. It makes it hard for the boards of trustees – who after all are supposed to be numbers people – to deal with. Suddenly it’s the students who are the number crunchers, and the idealistic fantasists are the bank presidents on the board who don’t want to deal with the reality staring them in the face.”

It’s not as if all of us who use fossil fuel aren’t implicated – flying to Florida for spring break fills the sky with carbon. But it’s only the fossil fuel industry that lobbies round the clock to make sure nothing ever changes. “We’ve figured out the root of the problem by this point,” says Maura Cowley, who as head of the Energy Action Coalition has been coordinating student environmental efforts for years. Individual action matters, but systemic change – things like a serious price on carbon that the industry has blocked for years – is all that can really turn the tide in the short window the science of climate still leaves open. “Going after them directly feels seriously good,” says Cowley.

3) Faced with this kind of irrefutable evidence, colleges have led in the past, conceding that their endowments, in extreme cases, can’t seek merely to maximize returns.

In the 1980s, 156 colleges divested from companies that did business in apartheid South Africa, a stand that Nelson Mandela credited with providing a great boost to the liberation struggle. “I remember those days well,” says James Powell, who served as president of Oberlin, Franklin and Marshall, and Reed College. “Trustees at first said our only job was to maximize returns, that we don’t do anything else.  They had to be persuaded there were some practices colleges simply shouldn’t be associated with, things that involved the oppression of people.” Since then, colleges have taken stances with their endowments on issues from Sudan to sweatshops. When Harvard divested from tobacco stocks in 1990, then-president Derek Bok said the university did not want “to be associated with companies whose products create a substantial and unjustifiable risk of harm to other human beings.” Given that the most recent data indicates fossil fuel pollution could kill 100 million by 2030, the coal, oil and gas industry would seem to pass that test pretty easily; it’s also on the edge of setting off the 6th great extinction crisis, so everyone over in the biology lab studying non-human beings has a stake too. Here’s how Desmond Tutu, Mandela’s partner in the liberation of South Africa, put it in a video he made for the DotheMath tour: “The corporations understood the logic of money even when they weren’t swayed by the dictates of morality,” the Nobel Peace Prize-winner explained. “Climate change is a deeply moral issue, too, of course. Here in Africa, we see the dreadful suffering of people from worsening drought, from rising food prices, from floods, even though they’ve done nothing to cause the situation. Once again, we can join together as a world and put pressure where it counts.” Or, you know, not.

4) And it’s not just people at a distance who are in trouble here, though so far they’ve borne the brunt – young people, the kind of people you mostly find on campuses, are the next chief victims of climate change.

Let’s assume the average age of a college trustee is 60, meaning he or she has another two decades on this planet; they may shuffle off to the great class reunion in the sky before climate change becomes unbearable to well-off First Worlders. But your average student has six decades ahead – and scientists say that at our current pace of unrestricted warming, we could see the planet’s temperature rise 6 degrees Celsius in that stretch, with consequences best described as science fiction. “By the time we’re ready to have kids, buy a home – it’s already a radically different world if we don’t put the brakes on as quickly as possible,” says Cowley, the national student organizer. “It’s difficult to plan your life as a young person right now – by the time we get to 2050, we don’t even know where we’re going to get our food.”

It’s not like administrators, faced with global warming, are deciding for themselves. Carbon dioxide molecules stay in the atmosphere a century on average, which means, according to the modeling team at Climate Interactive, that “by the time a 55-year-old college president who insists today that a portfolio requires fossil fuel investment reaches the age of retirement, only 11 percent of the CO2 released during the class of 2016′s education will have left the atmosphere.” In fact, says former college president Powell, such an analysis suggests trustees have a quasi-legal duty to do all they can about climate change: “The board is supposed to make sure that the endowment allows for intergenerational equity, that the students who are going to Oberlin in 2075 get as much benefit from it as those there now. But with global warming, you’re guaranteeing a diminution of quality of life decades out.”

At the very least, it feels bad – like the opposite of what college trustees are supposed to be doing. “I see this generation being betrayed on every front,” says Klein. “Youth without a future – that’s how they feel about the economy. And they when they understand that thanks to climate change they may literally be facing no future, it makes them really, really angry, as well it should.” The good news is, lots of people are already reaching across those generational lines. “Sometimes it’s dangerous to separate it by generations,” says Alex Leff, a freshman at Hampshire College, which effectively divested this spring.  “My family always said, ‘You kids have to do something about this.’ I really reject that – what if we dismiss it too, and say it’s a job for our kids?  Youth can’t be the only ones driving this – it helps a lot to see our elders doing their part too.” So at college after college, professors (many of whom were in college during past divestment fights) are signing petitions and joining marches. Alumni are starting to pitch in too – these are early days, but campuses report letters arriving from donors asking if they’re planning to do the right thing.

5) And in this case, they can do the right thing without great cost.

College trustees, of course, are thinking about their endowments. They worry that they’ll lose money if they do divest – that if they can’t park their money in Exxon et al., their yields may dwindle.

The fear is almost certainly overstated – energy stocks have outperformed the market index the last few years, but lag if you take the last 30 as a whole. Stephen Mulkey is president of Unity College in Maine, which became the first college in the nation to officially divest its fossil fuel holdings. He stood up to give the news in front of the thousands that crowded into Portland’s State Theater for that stop on our roadshow, an electric moment that brought the throng to its feet. “You don’t have to do it overnight,” he pointed out – indeed, campaign organizers have asked only that colleges pledge to sell their shares, and then spend the next five years winding down their positions so they don’t have to sell in a fire sale. “There’s abundant academic literature showing that social screening such as this, given the most likely market conditions in the near future, will not result in poor performance. You’re not divesting and then just forgoing those profits – you divest from BP and invest in something else. You reanalyze your portfolio.” In fact, there’s been one academic study of the effects of divesting, and it shows the “theoretical return penalty” at 0.0034 percent, which is the same as “almost none.”

At some schools, some of the money can be re-invested in the college itself – in making the kind of green improvements that save substantial sums. Mark Orlowski, head of the Sustainable Endowments Institute, just published a report showing that the average annual return on investment for a thousand efficiency projects at campuses across the country was just under 30 percent, which makes the stock market look anemic. “College trustees often think of a new lighting system as an ‘expense,’ not an investment, but it’s not,” he says. “If you invest a million and can expect to clear $2.8 million over the next decade, that’s the definition of fiduciary soundness.” At colleges – and elsewhere – the potential for significant reinvestment is large: the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, for instance, is considering urging its pension fund to divest a billion dollars. That could do some serious re-greening.

It’s also possible that the insights into the future supplied by aroused student activists might actually make for savvy investing advice. As hedge fund founder Tom Steyer, who has advised trustees to divest their stock, put it, “From a selfish point of view, it’s very good for colleges that they know something about the future that others don’t. Because investing is not about what’s happened in the past – all prices are really anticipations of what’s going to happen in the future. As soon as the trouble we face is really common knowledge it’s going to be reflected in the price. But it’s not reflected in the price yet.”

Steyer’s a good investor – his net worth puts him on the Fortune 400 list, meaning he’s worth far more than most college endowments. What he’s saying is: Colleges are lucky to have physics departments not just because physics is a good thing. In a sense, universities have insider information – they know how bad global warming is going to be, and hence can get the hell out of fossil fuel stocks before, not after, governments intervene to make them keep their reserves underground. “Once the scientific research filters into the minds of investors around the world, the price won’t stand,” he says. But since the average investor relies on, say, the Wall Street Journal, which has served as an unending mouthpiece for climate denial, colleges have the advantage.  “The only way you gain an investing advantage over the rest of the world is when you have an edge.” As for those who think they’ll wait until the last minute, just before the carbon bubble bursts, “That’s one of the stupidest things I’ve ever heard. No one ever gets out at the top. It’s worth missing another couple of good years of Exxon to avoid what’s coming.”

In the face of logic like that, an increasing number of colleges seem determined to at least engage the debate. For instance, my employer, Vermont’s Middlebury College, which always ranks in the top five liberal arts colleges in the country, has held a series of panel discussions and open debates this month and its trustees expect to make a decision in the spring. And since Middlebury was the first college in the country with an environmental studies department, its student body, faculty and ranks of alumni are filled with people who recognize the potential power of the gesture. Similar discussions are underway at Bates, Bowdoin, Bryn Mawr, Earlham, Pitzer. But it’s not just small liberal arts schools. Students at the University of New Hampshire delivered a thousand signatures to the president before Christmas demanding divestment; at the neighboring University of Vermont, state legislators have begun pressing for action, at the urging of a big student campaign. At Cal, the student senate has backed divestment by a wide margin; UNC students outdid their Harvard counterparts, voting 77 percent for divestment.

So let’s imagine for a moment that students and their allies are able to convince many colleges and universities to do the right thing. Especially for those who sign on fairly quickly, and with a minimum of rancor, there could be real advantages. “After we divested,” said Mulkey of Unity College, “we started receiving donations online. We’re seen an uptick in our inquiries from students. I think that will transform into an improvement in enrollment. That’s not why we did it, but it’s a fact.” Powell, recalling the moment when Oberlin divested its apartheid stock, says, “I definitely feel it rallies people behind their alma mater.  Whenever there’s change – abolishing fraternities, going co-ed – there’s always the worry the alumni won’t like change. We see over and over again that these claims are false – you may take a hit for a year or two, but in the end you’re changing with the world.” Some alumni, says Klein, “may be resentful. But for many more, it will be exciting. Suddenly the university they came from is not just a site of nostalgia, but a place where they can have an influence on the future.”

That influence could be decisive, too. Less in financial terms, though the $400 billion in American college endowments is no small sum, than in political and cultural ones. A college is where a society thinks about itself, after all; if suddenly those collections of knowledge denounce the fossil fuel industry for what it is, a rogue force outlaw against the laws of physics, it will make a difference. Fossil fuel companies care a lot about image, after all – it’s what makes it easy for them to exert their political control. It’s why they run those back-to-back-to-back TV ads about “clean coal,” those endless commercials with the polar bears and the drilling rigs. Colleges could strip them of their social license, and if they lead, others will follow. “The speed at which this campaign has spread is causing ripples in the investment community,” said Andy Behar, the CEO of As You Sow, a campaign partner that promotes environmental and social corporate responsibility through shareholder advocacy. “We anticipate more ‘carbon free’ investment options coming onto the market over the coming months for endowments, foundations, and other institutional investors who want to move investment dollars to build a clean energy future.” Already, at least two major Christian denominations have announced they’ll consider resolutions to withdraw their money. One could imagine the fossil fuel industry as the new tobacco, humbled enough that it actually has to come to the bargaining table in D.C. and a dozen other crucial capitals.

On other campuses, it will go less smoothly; in some places, doubtless, colleges will go to war with themselves, with trustees hunkered down against the increasingly strident demands of students and faculty. But even in those cases, the fight will be valuable, educating each new incoming class about the culprits behind climate change. It’s hard to imagine that it’s all just a short-lived fad. “Global warming is not going away in anyone’s lifetime,” says Powell – and from now on, each superstorm, each megadrought will become a moral challenge to the university brand, a reminder that one’s education or one’s salary is being paid for with the not-so-gradual extinction of the planet’s possibilities. Students, I think, are determined to believe in the colleges they love – but they’re also up to the fight. At Pennsylvania’s Swarthmore, for instance, they’ve been demanding divestment for more than a year without luck. “Particularly at small liberal arts schools, students are conditioned to believe that college boards and administrators will always do what’s right – that if we just dialogue with administrators enough, they’ll come around,” says Hannah Jones, who graduated from Swarthmore last spring. But in fact, even at a school like Swarthmore with a deep Quaker tradition, “the administration and the board are part of an institutional hierarchy designed to support the status quo,” so “it’s up to students, faculty, and alumni to build power and to apply pressure in a way that demands bold, swift action.” And as students learn to build those campaigns, knowledge spreads quickly. Swarthmore students, for instance, are hosting a ‘convergence’ this week for activists from many campuses; for those who can’t make the trip, gofossilfree.org has become a kind of clearinghouse for videos, manifestos, essays, updates.

It’s not perhaps a militant generation – maybe that was what struck Nader, more used to the uprisings of the 1960s with their broad themes of cultural liberation. But in the wake of Occupy, many young people are drawing connections. “We want to make sure we don’t just get divestment, but that we build real political power across wide coalitions,” says Jones. And if you’re a college administrator, you should probably fear folks who know how to use YouTube, Twitter and Facebook better than you do; “militant” sounds good, but “persistent,” “organized” and “committed” are probably a deeper threat to the status quo. And you can prove it by watching the same students running divestment campaigns quickly joining the larger environmental movement: all of a sudden, they’re helping run the opposition to the Keystone Pipeline, or working hard with their Appalachian allies in the fight against mountaintop removal coal mining.

The fossil fuel industry may be dominant in the larger world, but on campus, it’s coming up against some of its first effective opposition. Global warming has become a key topic in every discipline from theology to psychology to accounting, from engineering and anthropology to political science. It’s the greatest intellectual and moral problem in human history – which, if you think about it, is precisely the reason we have colleges and universities.

Why do African American families use less energy than white households, but pay more for it—literally and figuratively? It’s true. The average African American family emits 20% less carbon dioxide than the average white household does, yet we are more susceptible to increases in energy and water costs that result from climate change. As extreme weather events like blizzards, droughts, and heat waves become almost routine, more and more black families can’t afford to heat and cool their homes. Communities of color also pay more of the hidden costs of our fossil-fuel based economy. Climate change has an outsized impact on the health and economic security of African American families, who are far more likely to breathe polluted air and live next to sources of pollution like coal plants.

But today, a revolution in clean energy gives us the chance to correct this injustice and level the playing field for communities of color. For decades, renewable energy was out of reach for most Americans. Only the wealthiest could afford innovations like solar panels and electric cars. Not anymore. Now clean energy sources like solar and wind are not only economical—they’re huge cost-savers for businesses and families alike.

In less than a decade, the United States has multiplied its production of wind power threefold, and solar power more than twentyfold. In many places, clean energy is already cheaper than conventional power. Further, consumers have more choice and more control over how much energy they use through smartphone apps and new technology. But we still have a long way to go.

Every American deserves access to clean, affordable energy. If we transition to an economy that’s fueled by 50% clean energy by 2030, electric bills in the United States will be reduced by more than $40 billion. Subsequently, families would see their disposable income increase by as much as $650 annually. The biggest beneficiaries would be low-income families, who spend a much greater share of their income on electricity than higher income households do. Just imagine: millions of Americans would no longer be at the mercy of their utility bills. Black families in particular would have a brighter and more secure energy story to tell.

Investing in clean energy does more than save money on bills—it also creates jobs that communities of color sorely need. Last year the solar industry added jobs 12 times faster than the overall economy. More than twice as many Americans now work in the solar industry than in coal mining—and a quarter of workers in the solar industry are people of color. When these clean energy jobs are created—which they absolutely must be—we have an opportunity to make sure that these are good-paying jobs and that they are available to communities of color.

In the Washington, DC, area, Mark Davis created WDC Solar to provide low-income citizens of Washington, DC, with a solar program. Since 2012, WDC has installed more than 125 solar systems in DC through tax credits and private funds, at no cost to low-income homeowners with good credit. Through his partnership with DC Sustainable Energy Utility, Mark started a program that has funded solar panel installation provided funding to install panels on more than 300 homes. And once the panels are installed, the extra power results in a profit every month—money going back into the community he’s working to transform. Mark is just getting started; this year he plans on launching programs in New York, Pennsylvania, and Georgia.

While Mark is training a new solar work force and bringing solar to the DC community, Wahleah Johns is working to bring clean energy to places that often times don’t even have electricity. Wahleah, a member of the Navajo (Dine) tribe and the community of Forest Lake atop Black Mesa, Arizona, has been advocating for native communities to diversify to renewable energy for the last decade. As a tribal member of the Navajo Nation, she’s watched resources from tribal homelands provides cheap electricity for California, Nevada, and Arizona, while her people are left to deal with pollution and dwindling water.

Working with the Black Mesa Water Coalition and Navajo Green Economy Coalition, Wahleah helped win legislative victories protecting groundwater, expanding green jobs, and advancing environmental justice. As vice chair of the Navajo Green Economy Commission, Wahleah develops economic opportunities in clean energy and traditional economic practices on the Navajo reservation.

Wahleah’s community education efforts helped establish a Just Transition Fund through the California Public Utilities Commission. This fund provides $4 million to renewable energy development on tribal lands. Wahleah helps bring solar to reservation schools and communities, and is developing a residential solar program for the 50% of Navajo Nation residents who don’t have access to electricity.

The clean energy revolution is an incredible opportunity to give African Americans a better, more just seat at the table in our new economy. Now more than ever we must seize the opportunity to reverse energy injustice and shift power to the very communities that have historically been left out.

At Green For All we see a number of ways in which we can drive this investment. There is a tremendous opportunity held within the Environmental Protection Agency’s recent clean power plan implementation at the state level. States will be developing and implementing plans to bring down carbon in the coming months and years. We must ensure that as we look at curbing carbon, we do so in a way that drives growth across green sectors, and focuses investments in the communities most impacted by carbon and pollution. We also believe strongly that polluting industries should pay for the privilege of dumping carbon into the atmosphere. In California, the value collected from the cap-and-trade system has created a fund that has been used for everything from free solar panels for low-income families, to free bus passes for youth and seniors, to millions of dollars for new affordable housing. We must cap carbon (and make sure there are environmental protections for all communities in those programs), and we can’t give away that value; we must invest in our communities.

The clean power movement is gaining steam—now is the time for us to make our voices heard. Investing in clean energy will lower our energy bills, improve the health of black communities, and create more, better-paying jobs for people of color. Now that’s real power. Throughout our network, we see individuals, businesses and organizations committed to people and the planet. We need to re-up our investment in these people and follow their lead to a future that is truly green for all.

The floods that struck São Paulo in early 2015 quickly overwhelmed urban infrastructure, transforming roads into rivers and washing cars away. The region as a whole, however, suffered from severe drought. São Paulo, whose 12 million inhabitants make it the largest city in the Southern Hemisphere, was watching its reservoirs dry up. When the storm abided, the reservoirs were still dry—and the drought continued for months.

Climate change is increasing the frequency and severity of weather events in São Paulo, and many municipalities lack the resources to stave off the worst effects. Moreover, marginalized communities are often hit the hardest: São Paulo’s slums (also known as favelas), neglected by the government for decades, witness a disproportionate amount of destruction when flooding hits. Already lacking infrastructure for water and waste, favelas face increased threats with the accumulation of standing water. Across Brazil, particularly strong storms have displaced entire communities. For millions of citizens in the Global South, the effective mitigation of climate change is a necessity for everyday life.

At the University of São Paulo, a group of architecture students is combatting climate change head-on. Led by Professor Lara Leite Barbosa at the College of Architecture and Urbanism, the students hope to alleviate the effects of flooding by providing stations where citizens can escape high water. Since levees break and river diversion causes untold ecological damage, the students work directly with people where they live rather than modify the landscape. Their solution? Portable bathrooms designed to ship across Brazil when flooding strikes.

Photo Credit: Apis Project

The bathroom scheme, titled Project Apis, is named after the Latin word for bees. “The Apis Project bears this name because its biggest goal is to promote a boon for society that’s carried out in a collaborative way, from its conception to its construction,” says Dr. Barbosa. Her architecture students are not just sitting in classrooms mulling over blueprints, but are venturing out to communities affected by the flooding and assessing human need.

“The inspiration for this project came from my doctoral thesis,” explains Dr. Barbosa. “I studied the relationship between nomadism and sustainability, analyzing projects that combined mobility with thoughtful use of material and energy resources.” She points out that when floods strike, getting people out of flooded areas and into shelter is essential. But shelters quickly become unsanitary if there aren’t bathroom facilities for everyone. Shelters are also difficult to move, and of little use in the face of sudden, sporadic floods. This is where the students’ designs come in.

Dr. Barbosa challenges her students to think outside the box of single-location structures, and simultaneously pushes them to use local materials. Twenty-first-century disaster response in Brazil may yet incorporate ecological, human-centric design—in fact, these elements are necessary to bolster resilience against climate change.

Most government relief programs rely on citizens getting themselves to shelter. In the favelas, though, poor road and nonexistent transportation leave many residents stranded. “The bathrooms can function independently of the existing urban infrastructure,” says Marina Lima Medeiros, a student working on Project Apis. In concept, the bathrooms can be deployed anywhere there is need, circumventing established relief routes and directly reaching citizens.

Each bathroom contains single-sex showers, sinks, toilets, and dressing rooms. Designed to serve around 60 people per day, a single bathroom functions as an independent unit and eliminates the need to connect to municipal water or sewage systems. Therefore, says Dr. Barbosa, the bathrooms “reduce the spread of infectious diseases and other health problems due to lack of public health accommodations.”

Portability is key to the project’s success, so the bathrooms are designed to be compact, fitting into shipping containers for easy transportation. They use built-in hydraulic and electric systems in order to operate away from the grid, so rooftop solar panels heat water and produce electricity. (Energy generators provide backup power.) An “ultrafiltration system” collects water from the flooded area, then cleans the water to make it suitable for use in the showers and toilets.

Producing the bathrooms provides a windfall for the local economy, the students insist. Many materials inside the bathrooms are locally sourced: the partitions between the bathroom stalls are made of banana fiber, as is the exterior paneling. Banana fiber is abundant in São Paulo. “From a sustainability perspective,” explains Dr. Barbosa, “the use of local resources both diminishes the environmental impact of [the bathrooms] and facilitates the acceptance of banana fiber as a building material because it is culturally familiar.” Dr. Barbosa hopes that the more people see structures made of banana fiber, the more they’ll latch on to local, homegrown construction—and demand for the fiber will grow.

The São Paulo students have partnered with several businesses to transform their designs into a functioning reality.  Contain[it], a construction company, builds the shipping containers for the bathrooms, while Imperveg—a company that produces polymers—donates leftover resin for the project, which is mixed with the banana fiber for construction purposes. Sociedade do Sol (Society of the Sun) is a local company that donated the solar panels, and another company, Sansuy, helped develop the flexible reservoirs for blackwater and graywater in the bathrooms. A company called Caldeplás, meanwhile, produced the reservoirs for cold water and hot water. If one thing is certain, building bathrooms is a dynamic process that engages whole communities.

Students are working directly with the community of Eldorado, a São Paulo municipality with a population of 15,000. According to The Economist, Eldorado is one of the poorest and most violent of São Paulo’s slums—and the area has been hit by successive flooding year after year. “Despite the fact that these floods have occurred periodically for many years now, it is still very difficult for the government to organize response teams in the aftermath of natural disasters,” notes Dr. Barbosa. “Each time we get a new mayor, we also get new officials, and that brings problems for the continuity of actions in the long term.” The team at Project Apis hopes that once their working models are complete, they can turn over the bathrooms to the Ministry of Civil Defense, which can roll out the emergency units when storms strike urban areas of Brazil.

Project Apis holds profound lessons for community engagement as well as the human response to climate change. When human need is made the central goal of design, architecture becomes a means of service. As these students demonstrate, architects themselves can respond to disaster while regenerating places and communities.

“Architects need to organize together with affected communities to collaborate in multidisciplinary teams,” says Ms. Medeiros. “First and foremost, architects need to listen to the people who are suffering from natural disasters, because many times the local people suggest solutions that are most efficient and appropriate for the areas where these storm events occur, since they live there and know the risk areas very well.”

By listening to local residents, architects’ work becomes more like that of bees: a communal process wherein each individual lends a hand to shape the built environment. Structures, when they emulate hives, provide ample resources for all individuals—not just a select few.

A career in photojournalism has rendered New Zealand native Robin Hammond a seasoned global traveler. Several projects have entailed extended travel in sub-Saharan Africa, and others have required stays in Europe and Asia. With a slate of philanthropic projects that showcase some of the world’s most flagrant and underreported human rights issues, Hammond’s dedication to his career reveals a refreshing sense of empathy and a genuine compassion for the betterment of humanity. The moments captured within each frame are vivid and sometimes haunting, but through this stark imagery, he turns any preconceived disparities between cultures inside out. The more you focus on the differences between yourself and the people in his photos, the more you can see how similar we all are—our smiles, our tears, our hopes, our struggles.

The reality of global inequality is irrefutable—a staggering portion of humanity is undernourished and lacks clean drinking water, and many more don’t have simple liberties such as a safe place to lay their head at night or the freedom to give and receive love. Broad gaps in access are pervasive, and they reach far beyond the borders of the developing world. Even so, it is too easy to take any level of affluence for granted, too easy to turn a blind eye to the global human rights violations that rear their ugly heads in plain sight. Hammond’s photos urge you not only to notice these atrocities, but to take action. The images demand that the observers not hide behind their privilege; injustice in any form, be it abject poverty or bigotry, will not disappear if we close our eyes. As Nobel Prize winner and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel noted in his classic novel, Night, “Wherever men or women are persecuted because of their race, religion, or political views, that place must—at that moment—become the center of the universe.” Robin Hammond’s work  conveys the immediacy that Wiesel knew so well.

As a photojournalist the spotlight of Hammond’s work is in front of the lens. However, in his case, the adjacency of subject and artist poses an unequivocal metaphor of the artist’s intention. He has melded the role of activist with that of photographer in a precise formula to create an effective provision for positive change. Hammond has widened the lens of his work from photojournalist to activist and change maker. In June of 2015, he launched a not-for-profit organization called Witness Change, which advocates for and realizes tangible improvements in the lives of the people whose stories he’s been telling for the last 15 years. In the following interview, Robin shares details about a few of his projects and provides some behind-the-scenes insight into his career.

Krista Elvey: After years of documenting human rights abuse, you helped to start Witness Change, a nonprofit that uses storytelling as a vehicle to effect change through education, advocacy and policy reform. You said, “I realized that if making a difference is my goal, to witness and hope is not enough; change must be at the center of what I do.” 

Robin Hammond: Witness Change is about documenting and recording stories from survivors of seldom-addressed human rights issues. I began working as a photographer to create positive change through my images, but it took me a long time to discover that raising awareness through a magazine or newspaper does not mean that change is sure to follow. Witness Change is a nonprofit that formed with a bunch of really dedicated volunteers who believe in the power of storytelling, but also recognize that a story is not enough—people need a way to take action. We address issues that the media doesn’t cover because we feel that we can have the greatest impact on underreported issues. Witness Change seeks to engage with people who have the power to make a significant difference on those issues.

A posed portrait of 40 year old drag performer and human rights advocate Shelah!!! at home in Kuala Lumpur. Photo Robin Hammond/Panos for Witness Change

KE: Where Love is Illegal began as a photo project, and has become a powerful campaign with a resounding message: “Human rights are universal; persecution based on sexuality or gender identity must end.” Can you share more about the evolution of the project?

RH: Despite some amazing progress, the majority of the world is still far behind on the issue of equal rights for all genders and sexualities. I work in Africa often, but I didn’t meet anyone who was openly gay for nearly 10 years. When I met a gay man in Northern Nigeria, he’d just been released from prison and was facing the death penalty for committing gay acts. When I heard his story, statistics of homophobia and transphobia became very real for me, very human. I saw the power in those personal stories to shift the narrative. The Nigerian man’s experience is the result of homophobic laws and beliefs, and the result of homophobia is—it’s killing people.

Many people grow up in societies where being gay is considered evil, unholy, abnormal or unnatural. When you’re completely surrounded by that message, you also believe it. Where Love is Illegal seeks to let people know that they’re not alone. Through the project, people from some of the most homophobic countries in the world are reaching out to share their story, demonstrating that people everywhere experience homophobia. So many people are reaching out to tell others that they aren’t alone.

When I was taking portraits for the project, I was averaging one per day. The rest of that day was sitting with people, explaining the project, hearing their story, working with them to tell that story, and then eventually taking a picture. I was always working with local grassroots LGBTI groups that helped me find the people, and gain trust from the people I was working with.

Many of the stories are about people who’ve been attacked, imprisoned, or tortured. The more insidious aspect is that in many parts of the world, people in the LGBTI community are desperately poor because they’re thrown out of school, lose their jobs, or are rejected by their families—they are forced to live on the margins of society.

A posed portrait of ‘B’, a 32 year old gay man from Kenya. Photo: Robin Hammond/Panos for Witness Change

I was deeply impacted by a young man who we called B. He eventually died because bigotry made him too poor to access medical care when he needed it. Our intervention came too late to save him. People must know that inaction means that stories like B’s will happen every day. If we believe in a global human community, then we have to take responsibility for one another. We have to take responsibility for what happened to B. I really feel that because I met him, and my work is about connecting people so they can see others like B, read their stories and see him the way that I saw him. B’s friend asked, “There’s not much left to remember B by. Please tell his story so that we have something to remember him, even if it’s a sad memory.”

KE: What was your first human rights project, and how did that experience influence your career?

RH: I covered a story in Turkana, Kenya, about some of the first people impacted by climate change, people who have been scant of resources for hundreds of years, and now will be the ones who are the most impacted. Documenting underreported injustices has always given me purpose in my work; the sense of outrage really motivates me, and also serves as a reminder. When I’m out there on the ground, the little things that many of us worry about disappear. I know every morning why I’m getting up and what I’m doing, and that feels good.

KE: Could you share an anecdote of the day in the life of a photojournalist?

RH: The most important point to make is that there isn’t a typical day. Our world is so diverse. I work a lot in Africa, and a lot of people treat Africa as a single country and a single race of people. Africa contains 54 countries; the continent is hugely diverse. I like working there partly for that reason, but I never ever think that I know a place. I’m there to learn from the people. I come with my prejudices and my stereotypes, but it’s really important for me to stay there for long enough to challenge those ideas.

In general, when I go to a country I will set up meetings with field experts in advance, and spend the first couple of days talking to people and trying to understand the scenario. I’ll start shooting pretty quickly because photographs are a photojournalist’s notebook. It’s crucial to meet the experts, or the people who have the interest in these fields. If I’m documenting human rights issues, I’ll meet with the people who are the survivors of that abuse. It’s also vital that I see the situation for myself because people have good intentions, but often they have their own agendas, too, in terms of how they want their cause to be perceived by the outside world.

There are logistical issues—getting around, translating—but it always depends on the place and what I’m doing. I almost always begin working before sunrise. The best light is usually in the morning, and that’s often the safest time to be shooting as well. When I was in Eastern Ukraine a couple months ago, I was working very closely with Doctors Without Borders. Movement was restricted because they were shelling at different times of the day. It was quite structured, actually; they began shelling promptly at 5:00 p.m. We had to be outside when it was very restricted, and we had to make sure that we weren’t putting anyone at risk.

I spent three weeks working on the Condemned project in Nigeria, and photographed for maybe two hours in total because I was trying either to gain access to certain facilities or to find people who were imprisoned because of their mental illness. In two cases (at least), I was there without the permission from the authorities because they wouldn’t let me photograph. I was able to shoot these so-called psychiatric hospitals, which were effectively prisons. I was in and out within 10 minutes. To have hardly any time to cover an issue is always a struggle because the camera is my notebook, and the more notes taken, the more information absorbed, and the better I can tell the story.

RH: I saw mentally ill people who were incarcerated or left outside chained to a tree for months, in the countries where it can be really cold at night and there are mosquitos and torrential downpours. I was outraged— if they were in prison because of their religion or political stance, there would be an international outcry. But because they have a mental illness, somehow it was justified. However, you have to take this in the context of the place. The project is called Condemned Mental Health in African Countries in Crisis. I went to refugee camps and places that were post-conflict, where there was mass displacement or corruption.

Condemned unofficially began in South Sudan, but I didn’t go there to document mental health. In fact, I went there to work on the South Sudanese referendum for independence. I went into a prison where people with mental health problems were chained to the floor or locked in small cells. I was horrified.

There came a turning point where I was photographing people who were in very vulnerable place, whose rights were denied by the prison and by society. Some of them couldn’t give me their consent to take their picture because they didn’t have the capacity to communicate with me. My first thought was, “This is human rights abuse. I’m here to gather evidence, and it’s the most important thing. That’s why I’m here, and why I must document this.”

I recognized that these are individuals whose rights were already egregiously denied.  Was I further denying their rights by taking a photograph? If they were my relative, father, brother, or son, would I be okay with their image appearing on the front page of a newspaper? I came to the conclusion that the only way that the images were justifiable is if they were taken to make a difference in the lives of vulnerable people like them.

That was a big shift for me. I went from covering 30 to 40 stories a year for newspapers and magazines to covering one issue—mental health. At that point, I’d been working in Africa for five years and I hadn’t seen this issue, even after working with a number of aid agencies. I realized that I could either say, “It’s not my job…I’m a photographer, not an aid worker or a politician,” or I could say, “I have to take responsibility for being a decent human, and do whatever I can with my abilities.”

Native Doctor Lekwe Deezia claims to heal mental illness through the power of prayer and traditional herbal medicines. Photo: Robin Hammond/WitnessChange.org

KE: What are some effective first steps that we could all take to address the global lack of mental health care?

RH: There are many reasons for the lack of empathy, but it comes down to the stigma surrounding mental health. The stigma is not restricted to Africa—this is a global problem. The stigma is the biggest barrier to care. The stigma also removes the ability for people with mental health problems to advocate for their own rights. It’s not that they aren’t capable of advocating for their rights, it’s because when they do, they’re dismissed as “crazy.”

Aid agencies often don’t receive funding to support mental health issues. It’s much easier to receive funding for work around other issues like HIV, tuberculosis, malaria—they’re all really important, but funders want to know if they put in $100,000 that they’ll have x result by x time. With many other diseases, it’s easier to show progress quickly, but it’s not as simple with mental health. Beyond funders, mental health is simply not a sexy topic. Government assistance for people with mental health problems is infrequent. Family members are often the primary caretakers, but they usually don’t have a clear understanding their relative’s illness.

One in four people in the world, 25%, will have some kind of mental health issue in their lifetime. Mental health is the biggest disabling factor in the world. It takes more years off of lives than cardiac disease or cancer. People don’t recognize the reality because it’s complicated, and people think it’s happening to someone else. And when it’s happening to them, they feel alone; that’s a part of my job, and a part of the media’s job—to contribute to how the world is seen, which often dictates how people interact with it. There needs to be a lot more coverage around mental health in the media. We need to create a larger conversation.

KE: Do you often or ever feel paralyzed by the scale of human rights issues that exist today? And if so, how do you deal with those emotions?

RH: I’m an optimist. Otherwise, I wouldn’t be doing this work. I would fall into a depression if I thought that nothing could be done. When I share my work, I see that people are connected to the people in my stories. That gives me hope. We don’t have to passively watch disasters unfold in front of us. A big part of my job is to remove barriers of distance, race, religion and gender. Personal stories and photographs have that ability to break down barriers, even if it’s only for a fraction of a second. Humans have the capacity for great empathy.

In my opinion, helping others who are less fortunate is a moral obligation. I’ll give you an analogy; If you saw a child drowning in a swimming pool, and you were the only one there, you would jump in and save them. If there were other people standing around and nobody jumped in, you would still feel a moral obligation to jump in and save them. Now, if you were wearing a gold watch and it would cost $500 because it’s an expensive watch, you’d still jump in and save them. It’s not a matter of money. Now, what’s the difference between if that child is in front of you or 1,000 miles away? There is no difference. But because we can’t see it, we don’t act. My job is to have people see it.

If you’re a morally upstanding person, you don’t have another choice but to try to help people less fortunate than you. And there’s millions of different ways that we can do that. If everyone did something, the world could change overnight. We all have to actually stand up. None of these atrocities and abuses need to
happen. We absolutely have the resources to stop them if we wanted to. But, people need to want to.

KE: Oil Rich, Dirt Poor shows stark disparity of extreme wealth and abject poverty in Angola. Can you provide some commentary on that project? 

RH: We live in a terribly unequal world. It’s really easy to illustrate in countries [like Angola] that are resource rich but the government feels very little obligation to support all people through social policies. Inequality is one of the greatest injustices.

There are people obviously out there who have immense wealth, way more than they need, and people who are desperately poor. People die because of that.

But this is a global problem as well; it’s really clear to see it even in [the United States]. There have been many studies to show that more equal societies are happier, and their economies are more prosperous, and they have less crime. But, you have to convince the people at the top that they have to give something up, and that can be a tough argument to have because those people are, not by coincidence, the people with the power.

KE: As an optimist, do you think it’s possible to achieve basic human rights for everyone on earth, as defined by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights? And if so, how do we begin?

RH: There has to be recognition that we’re all in this together—none of us are truly free until we’re all free. That dream may be unlikely, but that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t strive for equality. I really believe that storytelling can contribute toward bringing us closer together if we feel like we know and understand people, and if we started looking for what connects us rather than what divides us.

I’ve had the great fortune of seeing the connections all of the time when I travel. You go to a new place assuming that it will be different, but then you realize that the important things are the same. People speak different languages and enjoy different foods, but they have love for family, a desire for companionship and friendship. Do we pray on Friday or a Sunday, or do we have a beard or wear a skullcap? Those are small differences. The basic human elements are way more common than our separations.

Photo: Robin Hammond. Angola. December 2009/January 2010.

New Years Eve Party at Miami Beach Night club owned by the daughter of the president of Angola. Photo: Robin Hammond. Angola. December 2009/January 2010.

All photos courtesy of Robin Hammond | All photo captions and sidebar content courtesy of robinhammond.co.uk and whereloveisillegal.com

It is no surprise that the standard development model in the United States is deeply flawed. The narrow maximization of economic profit that drives much development often results in the broad diminishment of human, environmental, and aesthetic values. This pattern of extracting value from people and the land is not new; even ancient Rome was known to have slumlords. Yet, there is a distinctly American version of development fueled by the myth of the frontier, migration, real-estate speculation, and creative building technologies that have all converged into a wildly efficient extractive development model, which is not a good long-term strategy for anyone, and often results in the displacement of people who live in the development sites. It does not have to be this way.

The area around Seattle’s First Hill neighborhood illustrates this extractive model in a particular context. For the past year, a team led by the Institute and including many community partners has been working to create a Living Community vision for the neighborhood. This vision reverses the trend of degradation and displacement and creates a people-centered model that adds value to the many ecosystem services that are vital to building healthy, resilient and inclusive communities. Through this process, we have found that there are various opportunities to realize environmental and social equity goals using the Living Community Challenge as a framework. The lessons learned through the work in Seattle are not unique to this place and can be replicated elsewhere in support of truly sustainable communities around the globe.

A LEGACY OF DISPLACEMENT

Shortly after landing in the present day Pioneer Square neighborhood of Seattle, early settlers set up a sawmill to process the lumber dragged down the densely forested hills. The first of the hills to be logged, First Hill, became the premier high-end residential neighborhood in the burgeoning city. Just south of this hill was the path used to drag the logs to the mill, which became known as “Skid Road” and is now known as Yesler Way.  In the mid-1800s, Seattle was a remote outpost, and along its skid road grew public houses, hotels, places of worship, businesses of all varieties, and even the City Hall—all catering to the swelling numbers of loggers, trappers, and families that were enticed by the opportunity in the region. This neighborhood became a dense and vibrant settlement with people from a variety of backgrounds living and working together. By the early 20th century, the people native to the place had largely been forced off of their land and into reservations, though the Duwamish people continued to use the tidal flats of Elliot Bay as their traditional fishing and gathering grounds. In 1901, the hill under Skid Road was substantially regraded, by as much as 85 feet in some places, to allow for infrastructure development. This regrade displaced many of the people who had built their lives along the road. It also filled in the tidal flats of the bay, a fatal blow to the way of life for the remainder of the Duwamish who were subsisting on this land.

The regrading of Seattle destabilized and displaced people while dramatically altering the land as well. Newly regraded land slid, resulting in decreased land values immediately above and below the slides while land values increased in the flatter areas with newly installed municipal infrastructure. One such area that lost market value due to these slides was later developed as Washington State’s first public housing development, known as Yesler Terrace. Since its inception, Yesler Terrace has been a place where low-income and working-class people from a variety of backgrounds could find affordable housing. Different resident groups have moved in and out of the Yesler Terrace  community over the years, but it remains diverse and vibrant to this day.

PRESENT-DAY GROWTH

Development pressures again threaten to displace people who have called the area home. Builders and developers are buying property in the First Hill neighborhood at an alarming rate, replacing housing long filled by people of color and people with low incomes with new, prohibitively expensive development. Yesler Terrace itself is in the midst of a major redesign, which is intended to transform the site into a mixed-use and mixed-income neighborhood while expanding the number of affordable units on site.

In previous eras of development in the community, people without political power and voice were repeatedly displaced as the city grew and changed. As the neighborhood again faces what appears to be another significant period of redevelopment, it is crucially important to avoid the pitfalls of injustice, displacement, and ecological destruction that have been the pattern thus far.

A VISION FOR VALUE-DRIVEN DEVELOPMENT

The Living Community Challenge offers ideas to break this pattern. In Seattle, we have worked alongside community leaders to apply this framework to achieve regenerative, resilient communities. Below are the highlights of these ideas presented according to the structure of the Challenge. A full selection of the equity implications of this Living Community vision can be found in the recently released report Toward a Living Community: A Vision for Seattle’s First Hill and Central District (Nov 2015).

FOOD

The vision calls for significant food production in the right-of-way, parks, institutional campuses, private lots, and rooftops to produce an estimated 2.7 million pounds of food, enough to feed more than 1,800 people per year.

THE FACTS:

• Access to fresh, healthy food is often worst in areas of low-income residents.
• There is only one grocery store that sells fresh food within the community boundaries.
• Wild and cultivated edible plants provide essential beauty and greenery while giving people a means to provide for themselves and their families.
• This vision creates job opportunities for cultivation, harvest, preparation, storage, and distribution of locally grown produce.
• Opportunities abound to distribute food that is harvested in the community and provide greater food security for the benefit of the entire City.

ACCESS + MOBILITY

The vision calls for a radical repurposing of the right-of-way to include more space for people, food production, water collection and infiltration, energy generation, green space, and habitat, and less land for large, single occupancy vehicle circulation and storage.

THE FACTS:

• Traffic fatalities disproportionately impact pedestrians and cyclists, especially vulnerable users and minorities.
• Streets are paid for by all of society but produce disproportionate benefits for vehicle owners and operators.
• On-street parking subsidizes vehicular ownership by reducing or eliminating the cost to store a vehicle.
• Streets are the largest portion of publicly owned land in the city and should be designed to meet the needs of all people, not just car owners/users.

WATER

The vision calls for a net positive water management approach that prioritizes equitable and resilient water provision and treatment. These systems help the City prepare for emergency events. Net positive water systems can also provide basic sanitary and potable water to those most in need; new community rainwater collection and filtration kiosks could provide clean drinking water to anyone who needs access to a safe water source at that moment. As the number of people experiencing homelessness in Seattle continues to increase, it is essential that our community infrastructure is designed for all.

THE FACTS:

• The State of Washington experienced a statewide drought emergency in 2015, and preparations are now underway for a second year of drought as record low snowpack is forecast in 2016.
• Recent events in California and Detroit demonstrate that climate change and failing municipal infrastructure disproportionately impact minorities and people with low incomes.
• An interconnected web of decentralized systems supports community resiliency since they cannot be shut off or taken down by a single event, such as extreme weather or natural disaster.
• Decentralized water infrastructure can act as a neighborhood amenity, providing open space to areas with little access.
• A net positive water model allows individuals and communities to freely access those resources that come naturally to their site. As technology develops, costs for potable filtration and black water processing continue to decrease.
• Since they do not require construction and maintenance of extensive pipe networks, which are essential components of larger centralized systems, net positive water services can be extended more easily to various housing options.

ENERGY

The vision calls for a net positive energy model implemented over the next decade through building code updates, collective purchase agreements, and renewable energy generation on most rooftops. Net positive and net zero energy buildings provide significant opportunities to reduce or eliminate energy bills, which can aid in affordability for low-income residents. They also serve the greater good by acting as a network of safe locations for people to shelter in times of service disruption and emergency.

THE FACTS:

• A net positive energy model reduces the negative impacts and externalities such as heavy transmission lines and distribution stations, which tend to be located in low-income neighborhoods.
• Renewably generated energy does not need to be tied to the grid. This provides an opportunity to extend energy service to populations in need without heavy infrastructure investment.
• A distributed energy system is more resilient, which most benefits those who cannot leave the neighborhood in an emergency event.

BIOPHILIC NEIGHBORHOODS

The vision calls for more equitable distribution of nature and natual systems throughout the community. Simply by converting excess street width to habitat corridors we can provide more access to open spaces and natural systems.

THE FACTS:

• The least wealthy are often the least mobile. Many within this area (and the surrounding city) lack the means to leave their neighborhood and thus to enjoy the benefits of nature. Bringing nature to the city and this community helps to restore this balance.
• The natural world is beautiful. Distributing nature throughout the neighborhood makes the city more beautiful for all people.
• Nature provides the benefits of quiet and clean air, which are often critically needed in low-income communities.

The broken development model of maximizing economic profit at the expense creating real value is  not inevitable. In communities around the globe, the Living Community Challenge offers a framework for achieving value-driven development. The work in First Hill demonstrates that it is possible to leverage development to provide for people and the land rather than to merely displace and degrade.

In Seattle, the Institute will continue our work to expand our vision and methodology into surrounding neighborhoods and develop replicable models for Living Communities. Wherever we call home, we can all support a new era of development that encourages holistic growth and resiliency. The lessons learned in Seattle can be tailored to many development contexts in order to build highly valued, thriving places for all.

“The broken development model of maximizing economic profit at the expense creating real value is not inevitable.”

Yesler Terrace Rendering by Adam Amrhein

King County is the economic engine of the Pacific Northwest. Some of the world’s most prosperous companies, abundant natural beauty and influential hubs of creativity and entrepreneurship lie within the county’s borders. King County encompasses booming places like Seattle and Bellevue, and the county’s cities and towns are among the most diverse and populous in the state of Washington.

But for all of the prosperity within the region, the county is experiencing a homelessness crisis. In 2015 alone, nearly 10,000 people are experiencing homelessness on any given day (up from about 8,000 people in 2005), and nearly 40% of those people are unsheltered. On average, people are homeless for more than 100 days, and they return to homelessness after being housed almost 20% of the time.

Racial disparities are stark, with Native Americans seven times more likely to experience homelessness than whites, and African Americans five times more likely. These disheartening statistics help us to quantify the size of the problem, but what shouldn’t be lost is the human component of the crisis. These people are our neighbors, our families, our youth, our veterans—and they deserve better. We can and we must do better.

What are some of the root causes behind this increase in homelessness? Regional and national issues of housing affordability, growing economic inequality, a diminishing state and federal safety net, and even population growth, have vastly expanded the problem. A recent national study showed that in urban areas like Seattle, every $100 increase in average monthly rents raises the homeless population by 15% in urban areas, and 39% in suburban and rural areas. With rents skyrocketing locally in recent years, about 5,000 people become newly homeless in King County every year.

However, significant steps have been taken to combat homelessness in King County. Ten years ago, All Home (formerly the Committee to End Homelessness [CEH]), along with other stakeholders, came together to alleviate homelessness. Since then nearly 40,000 people have moved into stable housing, with 85% of those remaining housed for at least two years. All Home created 6,300 homes for the homeless; Seattle and King County now rank among the best cities and counties in the country for number of housing units dedicated for the homeless.

But despite these efforts, the problem persists. There are even more people on the streets than there were 10 years ago. That is why All Home embarked on a nearly yearlong period of re-evaluating and refocusing the work, mission and brand of this unprecedented coalition. They’ve taken stock of the lessons learned over the last decade, considered the changes at the local and national levels in proven effective strategies, and used new methods of data collection to develop a four-year strategic plan that is dedicated to an ambitious but attainable goal: making the experience of homelessness in King County rare, brief, and one-time.

All Home—as CEH is now called—has redoubled their commitment to forging a community-wide partnership that brings together:

local governments;

religious institutions;

non-profits;

philanthropic organizations;

shelter and housing providers;

the private sector;

and engaged citizens, all in a coordinated effort that both responds to the immediate crisis of homeless individuals and addresses the root causes of the problem..

The good news is that the homelessness crisis is solvable. After years of effort, we know the solutions, and we can make a real difference if we adopt the proven strategies outlined in the All Home plan. Housing is a much smarter investment than the alternatives—emergency room visits, jail stays, emergency shelter. A focus on individualized approaches and implementation of a robust housing-first strategy can make homelessness a brief and one-time experience.

Through a focus on homelessness prevention and a commitment to creating more permanent supportive housing for the disabled, and other data-driven strategies, we can make homelessness rare. The smartest approach is to stop homelessness before it starts. Providing housing assistance to those who are at greatest risk for entering homelessness before the crisis occurs makes a huge difference in keeping people from spiraling into the type of housing catastrophe that leads to homelessness. All Home is working closely with community initiatives to target their investments toward those communities where the need—and the opportunity—is the greatest.

All Home is also engaging in advocacy to drive a community-wide effort to push for federal, state and local policies and funding to increase the affordable housing stock for very low-income households. Because of King County’s incredibly competitive housing market, we need to do more to help the formerly homeless obtain and retain homes. All Home’s innovative OneHome campaign, launched earlier this year, is a groundbreaking alliance with landlords who have agreed to open up units to prospective tenants with rental barriers who might normally be passed over in the screening process in exchange for certain incentives, such as covering the cost of an eviction, to landlords.

The faster we can get homeless people into housing, the better, for them and for the taxpayer. The traumatic experience of homelessness makes a person’s other problems—like mental illness or substance abuse—worse. That’s why strategies like rapid rehousing are so important: they dramatically shorten each individual’s experience of homelessness and reduce the chance that the person will return to homelessness after being housed. Rapid rehousing approaches are being used effectively all across the country, and the model has shown impressive outcomes. In King County, All Home’s program is designed to quickly transition individuals and families experiencing homelessness into permanent housing by offering housing search and stabilization services, short term rental and move-in assistance, and individualized employment assistance. Solidifying the rationale for this approach is that it has been shown over and over that housing people experiencing homeless is actually less expensive than not housing them, due to decreased emergency room, police, and jail costs.

The thread that binds all of this work together is that homelessness is not somebody else’s problem. It’s everyone’s problem. One of the key lessons learned over the last decade is that tackling the problem of homelessness must be a community-wide effort. There are many things you can do to help, whether that is volunteering at a local shelter or homeless service organization, using web development skills or other professional expertise to support a nonprofit, or Just Saying Hello to those living outside. The more people who believe that all people should have a home, the more likely it will become a reality. All Home is an inclusive movement that seeks to activate, engage and connect people in compassionate and thoughtful action, in ways both large and small, all of which will make a difference in addressing the crisis of homelessness.

Homelessness is solvable, and by acting together as a community, all people can have a home.

***

To learn more about the strategies included in All Home’s new plan, please visit www.allhomekc.org.

Social justice and equity in the workplace are high on the agenda in an array of important platforms, ranging from the media, political landscapes, to both non- and for profit boardrooms. President Obama has been a strong advocate for gender pay equity and for an increase in the federal minimum wage. Pope Francis has made the issue of income and wealth inequality one of his central concerns.

While the U.S. economy continues to see steady economic growth and expansion, wages have been flat or falling for much of the labor force. This dynamic has spurred the most significant wave of action to raise the minimum wage in fifty years, with momentum for considerable increases at the federal, state and local levels. The growing momentum for raising the minimum wage has been fuelled by social movements such as Occupy Wall Street, social justice advocates, union organizations and front line employees.

In the United States, the minimum wage was established in 1938 as part of the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA). In addition to mandating the 40-hour workweek, the FLSA established the federal minimum wage to help ensure that all work would be fairly rewarded and that regular employment would provide a decent quality of life. Moreover, regular increases in the minimum wage were meant to ensure that even the lowest-paid workers benefited from broader improvements in wages and living standards.

Due to decades of infrequent and inadequate adjustments, the federal minimum wage no longer serves as an adequate wage floor. Every year that the minimum wage is left unchanged, rising prices slowly erode its buying power. In 2015, the federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour is worth 10% less than when it was last raised in 2009, after adjusting for inflation. In fact, the real inflation adjusted value of the federal minimum wage in 2015 was 25% below its peak value in 1968. In practice, this means that lifting the current federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour to $10.10 per hour, as championed by some elected officials throughout the United States, would only give low-wage workers the same purchasing power available to them some 50 years ago.

Over that time, the United States has achieved tremendous improvements in labor productivity that could have allowed workers at all pay levels to enjoy a significantly improved quality of life. Instead, because of policymakers’ failure to improve and enhance the Fair Labor Standards Act, a worker earning the current minimum wage does not earn enough through full-time work to be above the federal poverty line.

In the past few years, thousands of workers have taken to the streets to protest low wages, with fast food workers now being joined by retail, home health care and other professionals in their fight for a liveable minimum wage.  Spurred by this growing and vocal movement, more than 40 states, cities and counties have passed minimum wage increases via legislation or ballot.

As a result, 29 states plus the District of Columbia now have a minimum wage above the current federal minimum of $7.25. By 2017, 13 states and the District of Columbia—representing nearly one-third of the U.S. workforce—will have a minimum wage of $9 or more, and seven states will be above the $10 mark. At the local level, Seattle, Los Angeles, Emeryville and San Francisco have passed laws that will phase in a $15 minimum wage. Cities such as Chicago, Kansas City and Richmond will phase in a $13 minimum wage by 2020.

Professor Zeynep Ton, at MIT’s Sloan School of Business, notes that “Highly successful retail chains—such as QuikTrip convenience stores, Trader Joe’s supermarkets and Costco wholesale clubs—not only invest heavily in employees with higher wages but also have the lowest prices in their industries, solid financial performance and better customer service than their competitors. These companies have demonstrated that, even in the lowest-price segment of the retail sector, minimum wage jobs are not a cost driven necessity but a choice.”

When looking at the overall issue of equity in the workplace, it remains important to spotlight the issue of gender pay equity. In 1963, Congress passed the Equal Pay Act, which requires employers to give men and women employees “equal pay for equal work.” A year later, in 1964, the Civil Rights Act was passed. Title VII of that act bars all discrimination in employment, including discrimination in hiring, firing, promotion and wages on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. Yet these legal protections have not ensured equal pay for women and men.

In 2014, women working full time in the United States were paid just 79 percent of what men were paid, a gap of 21%. The gap has narrowed since the 1960s, due largely to women’s progress in education and workforce participation and to men’s wages rising at a slower rate. Based on the progress in reducing the pay gap over the past 50 years, researchers were projecting that we would see pay equity in the year 2058. But progress has stalled in the last decade and the pay gap is not projected to close until the year 2139 based on extrapolation of the data from 2003-2013.

The pay gap affects women from all backgrounds, at all ages, and of all levels of educational achievement, although earnings and the size of the gap vary depending on a woman’s individual situation. Using a single benchmark provides a more informative picture of income disparities when it comes to women from various racial and ethnic groups. Because non-Hispanic white men are the largest demographic group in the labor force, they are often used for this benchmarking purpose.

Compared with salary information for white male workers, Asian American women’s salaries show the smallest gender pay gap, at 90 percent of white men’s earnings. The median earnings of African American women were at 63% of white men’s earnings. The gap was largest for Hispanic and Latina women, who were paid only 54% of what white men were paid in 2014.

When we explore other significant issues related to equity in the workplace, the availability of paid family leave is high on the list. The United States is one of only three countries left in the world that does not guarantee paid maternity leave. The others are Papua New Guinea and Suriname.

In 1993, Congress authorized the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA), which allows covered employees to take 12 weeks of unpaid, job-protected leave for specific family and medical reasons. Taking time off from work to care for a newborn child or caring for an adopted child falls under this category. FMLA only covers 59% of US workers. The 12 weeks of unpaid family leave offered by this program is for women who have worked 1,250 hours during a year for a company that employs 50 or more people. Two in five women do not qualify for leave under FMLA, according to the Center for Economic and Policy Research. That’s at any level of job—low-wage or high.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, only 12% of Americans have access to paid parental leave, which is considered a benefit by employers. Only 5% of low-wage earners receive paid maternity leave. Unless employees happen to live in five states that offer some form of paid family leave, paid parental leave policies remain up to individual employers.

According to a 2011 study by California’s Center for Economic and Policy Research after the state implemented paid leave, 91% of businesses said it had either a positive effect on profitability or no effect at all—that is, it didn’t show any disadvantages whatsoever. Research also shows that women who have access to paid maternity leave have a higher chance of returning to work. This, in turn, reduces employer’s overall cost to recruit and train new employees.

Companies that are showcasing their leadership in this realm are finding positive results in their progressive policies. Google’s evolving policy on paid parental leave provides compelling evidence that this practice is both good for the employer and the employee. In 2007, Google increased paid maternity leave from 12 weeks to 18 weeks, and as a result, the rate at which new moms left Google fell by 50%. Google also increased paternity leave to 12 weeks.

Over the past year, a number of prominent businesses have improved or enhanced their paid family leave programs. Microsoft expanded their paid maternity leave program from 12 weeks to 20 weeks. New parents at Facebook can take up to 16 paid weeks. New moms at Apple can take 14 weeks of paid maternity leave, and their partners can take 6 weeks of paid leave. Amazon is the latest prominent business to expand family leave benefits by offering 20 weeks of paid leave to new moms, and new dads can take 6 weeks of paid leave.

No conversation about equity in the workplace would be complete without a closer look at the huge discrepancies in employee compensation that relate to the traditional overvaluation of work performed by senior executives and the undervaluation of work performed by employees in the lowest job classifications.

CEO compensation grew strongly throughout the 1980s but exploded in the 1990s and peaked in 2000 at around $20 million, an increase of more than 200% just from 1995 and 1,271% from 1978. This latter increase even exceeded the rapid growth of the stock market—513% for the S&P 500 and 439% for the Dow. In stark contrast to both the stock market and CEO compensation, average private-sector worker compensation increased just 1.4% over the same period.

Using a comprehensive measure of pay that includes base salary, bonuses and the value of stock options exercised in a given year, average CEO compensation for the top 350 U.S. firms ranked by revenue was $16.3 million in 2014. Based on research developed by the Economic Policy Institute, the CEO-to-average-worker compensation ratio, which was 20-to-1 in 1965, peaked at 376-to-1 in 2000 and was 303-to-1 in 2014.

Creating an equitable workplace that fosters fairness, diversity and safety is an important endeavour and a key responsibility for companies to undertake. Extensive research suggests that organizations who excel in creating an equitable and inclusive workplace are able to attract top talent and retain high-performing, long-term employees. In an increasingly competitive global business landscape, the ability to recruit and retain engaged, happy and productive employees will serve as a significant competitive differentiator.

Every generation has a tendency to consider its way of living to be normal—the way it always was, how it will continue and how it should be. We are self-centered that way, which makes some sense because our patterns of behavior make up our entire direct context. History lessons sometimes seem abstract, and the future hasn’t happened yet. We know that things have changed greatly in the last few centuries—especially in the last few several decades with regards to. This is particularly true when we consider the human habitat—the environment we have created to provide ourselves with security and shelter.

In the span of just a handful of generations, we humans have radically altered our surroundings. We’ve transitioned out of the natural habitat where we spent our first 200,000 years and hurled ourselves into one that is increasingly artificial, and there’s no way that the pace of natural human evolution can keep up with the environmental changes we’ve created. In our relentless march forward, we haven’t stopped long enough to consider how the radical change in our homes, offices and cities are affecting us. It’s time for us to ask what short- and long-term effects our new habitat is imposing on our species and the environment.

FROM OUTSIDE TO INSIDE

Think about the vast difference between how people live in the industrialized world today versus where the majority of their ancestors dwelled; “creature comforts” are almost exclusively focused on the interior of buildings and homes, while not-so-distant predecessors lived the majority of life outside. This is a simple observation loaded with profound implications. What are the biological implications of transitioning a species that evolved under the stars for over two million years to one that rarely ever sees a star?

Places such as Shanghai, Tokyo and Mexico City offer extreme examples of densely urbanized megacities, human communities that have literally become unnatural in an alarmingly short period of time, with more concrete than trees. Too many people are crowded into overbuilt, artificial landscapes that have cropped up in just the past two centuries with the majority of the population growth happening since 1945. Modern-day humans in these habitats have too few opportunities to interact with the natural environment as they go about their days; many children never have the opportunity to climb a tree or experience true, untouched nature. With light pollution, dark skies are a thing of the past.

Will this rapid variation in human habitat unleash rapid evolutionary change, and is that change already underway? Will we experience a type of punctuated equilibrium similar to the sudden modifications seen in species that are abruptly isolated by natural phenomena? Will the humans of tomorrow begin to develop different attributes in response to a separation from the natural world? Will our new manufactured environments weaken us in some critical way?

We’ll begin with the understanding that modern humans are at least 200,000 years old; however, given the drastic changes introduced by industrialization and technology, it is not an exaggeration to say that our species created wholesale changes to our environment only within the last 100 years, or 1/2000 of our history—a mere blip. Factoring in archaic humans (that share 99% of our DNA) dating back two million years, our “new habitat” represents only 1/20,000 of our current environmental context.

For several million years, our humanoid ancestors lived almost completely outdoors, using only caves, trees and crude shelters for respite from the elements. Humans rose with the sun and slept when it was dark. They were guided by moonlight and starlight and, later, by firelight. They breathed pristine air that was free of chemicals (except perhaps in caves with fire). They drank only water and ate an omnivore’s diet of nuts, grubs, vegetables, fruit, meat and fish. The normal routine provided constant exercise, since following the herds and moving with the seasons meant that everyone walked an estimated average of five to nine miles each day. There were short periods of intense stress (adrenaline flowed when large carnivores were approaching, for example) and longer periods of idle time as hunter-gatherers, likely without the chronic long-term stress that we know today. They stood, squatted or sat on hard objects for much of the time, and ate dirt and bugs while coexisting intimately with other organisms—that sometimes tormented them and sometimes shaped how long they lived in a particular place. They adapted to varying degrees of temperature fluctuations, and relied on all five of the senses for survival. I could go on, but the picture is clear.

Now consider current conditions for affluent humans in the developed world—most people in this segment spend about 90% of their time indoors. They breathe air that contains a veritable soup of chemicals and pollutants (especially in crowded cities), and those who are smokers intentionally inhale approximately 7,000 toxic chemicals. During those hours indoors, where the temperature is often set at a constantly comfortable 72 degrees Fahrenheit, they typically sit in chairs or lie in beds—few stand for long periods anymore. There is habituated sedation, which led to a lack of sufficient exercise and an obesity epidemic.

Their diets don’t serve them well either. Most people in industrialized nations consume copious quantities of foods that are high in sugar, fat and salt. They ingest an overabundance of calories and multiple chemical preservatives with every meal. They drink far too little water, usually replacing it with beverages laden again with chemicals, sugar and often alcohol. On average, they do not get enough natural light during the day but instead bathe themselves in too much artificial light at night—something researchers are finding is terrible for the circadian system that regulates the digestive and immune systems. Their bodies and indoor environments are sterilized, destroying the beneficial microbial communities that have evolved with the species. Many work and live in a state of constant background stress due to the pace of life and the work environment. And they stare at computer screens for hours (which is hardly natural), but spend only minutes looking at trees and other life beyond their pets.

The developed world has unconsciously dotted the built landscape with natural placeholders to sate a missing desire: hanging images of nature on interior walls; building parks into cities’ plans; caging animals in zoos to observe them from a safe distance. In so doing, we have trapped ourselves in a cage of our own making. All of these attempts to surround ourselves with stand-ins for the natural world stem from a collective sense of loss.

The urban living trend is driving the new normal for human habitats, and unleashing a grand experiment on the human condition. What happens when you completely change the environment of the majority of a species? Many modern cities do not provide humans with the elements necessary to thrive in the natural manner with which they evolved, yet migration to urban dwellings is rapidly increasing. While approximately half of the global population lives in cities today, a much larger percentage of humans will flock to urban areas by the turn of the next century. This urbanization of our habitat becomes an experiment on a majority of our kind. It is important to note that even our “rural” environments bear little resemblance to the way humans used to live.

When Everything We Want is the Opposite of What We Need I want to be very clear that I don’t pine for the “way things were” or romanticize our hunter-gatherer past. Pre-modern life was not always idyllic, and current ways of life are not always apocalyptic. On the contrary, life for our ancestors was short and brutish. Technological advancements in the developed world have delivered some undeniable benefits to humanity. It’s hard to deny progress on so many fronts, but there needs to be a limit, beyond which too much separation begins to lead us down a path of regression. I’m afraid we’ve passed that point.

As with anything, there is an ideal balance—a place where things are in harmony and optimal conditions are achieved; a sweet spot between the pre-industrial past and over-industrialized present; an internal “Boundary of Disconnect” that we cross at our peril. (For more on the Boundary of Disconnect concept, refer to the January 2013 issue of Trim Tab.) Of course, this theoretical boundary is never static. There has always been a dynamic interplay of forces. We are a durable and adaptable species, and many of our innovations have helped us immensely. But that doesn’t discount the need for reflection and analysis.

There has to be a human-created environment where humanity is truly at its best and healthiest. Surely there is a set of conditions that best supports human wellness, culture, safety and life expectancy. Instead of spending so much money and time on technological and mechanized efficiencies, we need to focus resources on a much more critical analysis, one that examines the causes of many of the chronic problems that compromise human health, community and culture.

What would the ideal human environment look like? Let’s consider the key elements of the pre-industrial past (pre-agricultural age), the present affluent, developed world, and the ideal future. How far from ideal are we in each category?

Returning to all of the ways of the past is clearly not an option nor would it be desirable, but nor can we allow certain current conditions to remain unchanged. The direction we are headed towards even greater separation with the natural world is disconcerting. We have to temper our desire to control and tame nature, and choose instead to live in concert with it. We have to go back to seeing ourselves as an important part of the natural world, not separate from or superior to it. There are ways to apply our acquired knowledge that will benefit us, and our environment. We have to use technology as a tool—with discernment—to get our cities, our homes and our bodies back on the right track—to build communities that have a net positive impact on the world.

The habitat we crave is the one we need. We evolved in natural, biophilic settings, and it is incumbent upon us to recapture and preserve those same qualities within our modern habitat. Surrounding ourselves with life, spending considerable time outdoors and sharing our spaces with living things nurtures our kinship with nature.

Our love of life is what makes us human. So let’s allow ourselves to get a little wilder and, where smart, to readjust our scales in the right direction.

Robert Jones once lived on the streets, struggling with substance abuse, mental illness and a criminal background. But Robert is no a longer a statistic—he now lives in one of A Community of Friends’ (ACOF) supportive affordable housing communities in South Los Angeles. Since moving into his new home, he has found employment and been reunited with family.

Robert feels very fortunate, and for good reason—Los Angeles, CA, is in the midst of a housing crisis. Each night, more than 40,000 people sleep on the street, in a car or tent, or without a permanent roof over their head. Many people struggling with access to permanent housing also suffer from some form of mental illness, which is often a major barrier to maintaining a stable and safe life. The situation does not seem to be improving. Homelessness is up 12% from just two years prior—a figure so staggering that the mayor of Los Angeles, Eric Garcetti, recently announced that the city would declare a state of emergency due to the homeless crisis.

Providing affordable rental housing in conjunction with supportive services is one of the most effective ways to keep people off of the street. For more than 27 years, ACOF, a non-profit affordable housing developer based in Los Angeles, has been working to provide housing to underserved populations. Today, the organization owns and operates 39 properties that provide homes to more than 2,000 people throughout Los Angeles and Orange Counties. ACOF’s work is fueled by a powerful mission: to end homelessness through the provision of quality permanent supportive housing for people with mental illness. ACOF goes beyond providing homes by including the necessary on-site support services to help residents to maintain stability and lead productive lives.

ACOF’s Vibrant Living program is one avenue used to create a healthy environment in every building. The program focuses on creating healthy habits through exercise, nutrition, creative expression and gardening. Resident health is a primary focus for ACOF buildings, as people who have been homeless or living in other substandard situations often have health issues. Sustainable design is an integral component of this health-minded philosophy because healthy environments help to achieve improved health outcomes and allow tenants to thrive. Design principles that promote indoor air quality, urban agriculture, and energy and water efficiency provide a direct benefit for both tenants and building owners. For owners, lower operating costs result in more money that is reallocated into services programming, and in buildings where tenants pay rent, the efficient units allow for lower costs of living.

ACOF seeks to reduce their buildings’ carbon footprints through renewable energy, and to respond to the severe California drought by implementing more aggressive sustainability strategies. Several of ACOF’s projects are LEED Platinum Certified, but the Living Building Challenge philosophy piqued their interest as a likely next step. The Challenge encompasses a holistic ideology that goes beyond projected outcomes for energy and water, and includes Equity, Beauty, Health & Happiness, and Place—issues that are paramount to ACOF’s mission. The tenants are the greatest consideration for ACOF because tenants are most directly impacted by the decisions that are made. ACOF recognizes that beyond creating residences, they are establishing the foundations for healthy homes.

Cedar Springs Apartments – In Pursuit of Petal Certification

ACOF’s first foray into the Living Building Challenge is Cedar Springs Apartments—a 36-unit integrated project for homeless, transitional-aged youth and low-income families. The project is being developed in partnership with David & Margaret Youth and Family Services—an organization serving foster and orphaned youth for more than 100 years in La Verne, CA.

The team of designers, engineers, contractors and consultants were initially tasked with exploring the steps necessary to reach full Living Building Certification, a process that involved extensive technical conversation, particularly around the feasibility of achieving net positive energy and water. However, the project was nearly ready to break ground, and the cost of implementing many of the material changes necessary to achieve full Living Certification surpassed the project’s limited financial resources. Instead, the team focused its attention on achieving Petal Certification. The Energy Petal presented numerous challenges, including the allocation of adequate space for photovoltaics without exceeding the limited budget; however, after a number of amendments, the project is on track to satisfy requirements. In addition, the team chose to pursue the Health and Equity Petals, which were well suited for ACOF’s organizational mission and core values of dignity, excellence and community.

The Equity Petal for LBC version 2.1 (an earlier iteration of the Challenge), incorporates three Imperatives: Human Scale + Humane Places, Democracy + Social Justice, and Rights to Nature. These broad Imperatives have relatively minimal requirements for implementation compared to other Petals, and most of the team felt that these were readily attainable. Few physical design changes were needed to meet the requirements for this Petal, and they did not impact the overall cost, scope or work involved. The project was already fairly well situated at a density and location where the buildings would not block access to light or views for any surrounding buildings, and the open, campus-style layout provided access to nature and created gathering opportunities for tenants and visitors—both requirements of the Petal.
Perhaps the greatest impact the Equity Petal has had on this project, and on ACOF’s work, resulted from the decision to apply Universal Design standards to all units, not just the required minimums for codes and funding, in response to the Democracy + Social Justice Imperative. In addition to overall Universal Design, all ground-floor units are designed to be adaptable to become fully accessible, should the need arise. The customizable nature of design provides a level of housing security for tenants to age in place and to accommodate disabilities during their tenancy. The seemingly simple philosophy—accessible housing for all—is now embedded into the scope of all of ACOF’s projects. Although ensuring that the requirements of Universal Design are met in all units presents an added challenge to architects, but this extra initiative provides a sense of security for ACOF’s residents.  For tenants like Robert Jones, who is in his sixties, aging in place will be key to remaining stably housed in the home he calls his “sanctuary.”

Liberty Lane – Living Building Challenge Framework for Affordable Housing Pilot Project

In August, ACOF’s Liberty Lane project was accepted into the Pilot Program for Affordable Housing (LBC version 3.0). The project will include 80 units of one- and two-bedroom apartments for homeless and low-income veterans. Through a partnership with U.S. VETS, an organization serving at-risk and homeless veterans across the country, tenants will have access to services within easy reach, eliminating the barrier of distance and increasing the opportunity for success.

The collaboration with U.S. VETS has also informed the design decisions and amenities going into Liberty Lane Apartments. In addition to on-site case management services and universally designed units, the project will incorporate many features that specifically address the needs of homeless and disabled veterans, including:

• A community garden with meditation area;
• A community room with a kitchen spacious enough for teaching cooking classes;
• Fitness facilities (one of the biggest requests from the veterans served by U.S. VETS);
• A quarter-mile outdoor walking path.

Acceptance into the Pilot Program will provide additional resources for ACOF to explore new ways to
incorporate the Equity Petal. Currently, ACOF is exploring some important new questions:

• Does providing ADA-accessible, quality affordable housing mean that ACOF provides equitable housing?
• Or does it mean they have to look beyond the scope of the project, to consider other community benefits that their housing can bring?
• Might commercial components be included such as childcare, gardens or fitness areas that are open to the community, cleaning up blighted properties, providing community gathering places, or even providing a public art piece for others to enjoy?

As ACOF begins to view projects in this new light, they are able to reflect on the project’s impact and its relationship to the surrounding community: Liberty Lane is not merely a stand-alone project, but a part of the larger public realm. Carving out the time to have these discussions of connectivity is often difficult for developers, but within the framework of the Pilot Program, they are able to devote a portion of their focus to important discussions.

The concept of Equity extends beyond physical components of the project. In pursuit of the Challenge with Liberty Lane Apartments, ACOF will consider their role as an equitable and just employer using the JUST Employer Imperative in version 3.0 of the Challenge, which requires at least one member of the project team to be JUST Certified. They are still in the nascent stage of investigating this requirement, but the process has already caused them to consider  their own roles and responsibilities to the community—not just with the end product and future tenants, but for all of those involved in the production of a building. If the end result is achieved at the expense of the laborers, contractors and staff, is the process equitable?

Net Positive Equity

Affordable housing units are not inherently equitable. Good intentions and inclusive processes do not negate the responsibility to examine the contribution to a more equitable and just society. ACOF is a building industry practitioner, and the language of water, energy and materials—the “big three” of the Challenge—are familiar. Some technologies for net positive energy and water are new for ACOF, but they still fit within the current system of building. Equity, on the other hand, is not a topic typically introduced in a construction meeting or design charrette. Rarely, if ever, is there an expert on equitable development present. Achieving equity is not as simple as decreasing energy use; a comparable framework does not exist.

In order to examine equity in development, it is essential to consider how projects can contribute to a more equitable world. This evaluation challenges the concept of equity in the same way that the Challenge approaches water or energy—not solely minimizing negative impact, but striving to achieve regenerative, positive systems. With that mindset, we ask, what does Net Positive Equity looks like? The environmental cause, after all, is also humanitarian. If we want to be champions of sustainability, we must also include the social environment in the same conversation as the built environment. We must consider the Equity Petal with the same rigor as Energy, Water and Materials—maybe then we will truly be working toward a future that is “socially just, culturally rich and ecologically restorative.”

*A special thanks to Gina Ciganik, Sunshine Mathon, Hilary Noll, Tim Kohut and Travis Michael Sage for their work, insight, and contributions to the discussion of the Equity Petal in affordable housing.

Surrounded by the majestic mountains of Appalachia, the area of Welch, West Virginia, located in McDowell County, was once a bustling working-class town completely dependent on the extraction economy of coal. Deeply connected to the dirty energy, Welch was the world’s largest producer of coal. As a child, my mother-in-law would wave goodbye to her father each day as he went into the mines. He earned only a meager daily wage to support his growing family. Miners like him took collective action to secure improved living and working conditions through union strikes, but were nevertheless unable to eliminate the dangers of their profession. Some dangers of the job presented themselves daily, as explosions and mine collapses took life and limb. The more insidious dangers presented themselves only over time, as seasoned miners succumbed to a variety of respiratory ailments commonly known as black lung. Workers and their families were universally aware of these hazards, but every morning men entered the mines. Even if they were to reemerge at day’s end, they were trapped in the mines, not by rockfall, but by an economic dependency on this polluting resource.

Coal mining has left a legacy of inescapable poverty; entire regions are bereft of anything resembling a healthy economy. Having exhausted many of the more accessible veins to the dirty wealth, coal companies have resorted to mountaintop removal; a process that literally tears open the earth with violent and irreparable blasts to expose the coal within. This cheaper model of extraction pollutes streams, poisons air, shatters culture and renders the once beautiful ecosystem into a bleak moonscape. When the coal companies have extracted the last bits of their wealth, they move to a new area, leaving a trail of poverty and pollution in their wake. The level of distress suffered by the population, alongside the vast wealth that continues to be extracted, stand as testament to the string of negative impacts by the coal companies on local communities like McDowell County—today, the county ranks among the poorest in the country.

The coal industry is just one tier of the fossil fuel industry empire, which has developed more methods of extraction since my mother-in-law was a child, such as culling crude oil from bituminous sand and sending fractures deep into the earth to harvest natural gas deposits. While methods of extraction have evolved over the past several decades, some things haven’t changed: as the industry extracts from the earth, it also extracts from nearby communities. From mountaintop coal removal in West Virginia to the tar sands in Alberta, the communities in the wake of this extraction model are exposed to negative and toxic health impacts while the environmental conditions of the place continue to erode. Far too often the people most adversely affected are low-income communities of color battling the health impacts of the fossil fuel industry’s looting; respiratory issues are common and cancers are epidemic. The numbers are sobering: 71% of black Americans live in counties in violation of federal air pollution standards, compared to 58% of white Americans. My mother-in-law continues to battle with asthma after living in Welch for the majority of her life.

The tar sands of Alberta, Canada have become a destination for oil companies. This extremely dirty and energy-intensive model destroys every living system in its path. Each barrel of oil produced from the tar sands takes from 110 to 350 gallons of water (or two to six barrels) of water, and the resulting greenhouse gas emissions are 3.2 to 4.5 times as intensive per barrel than conventional crude oil. But the First Nations people that are deeply impacted by this ravenous natural resource extraction model are standing in resistance and fighting for their cultural heritage, rights to their land and its ecosystems, and the health of their communities. The people mostly affected are fighting back and making progress. The rejection of the Keystone XL pipeline expansion was a major success in this epic battle between good and evil.

The negative ecological and economic impacts that are imposed at the source of extraction are also mirrored at the terminus where the oil is refined. Manchester, Texas is a community just outside of Houston that is at the mercy of the extraction economy—many crude oil refineries are located in the area. Processing crude oil from tar sands is especially dirty, causing more environmental damage and very real health impacts on the people of Manchester. According to a study by the City of Houston, children living within the area are 56% more likely to develop acute lymphocytic leukemia, and air quality tests positive for at least eight different carcinogens. This negative downstream effect further disenfranchises the community and the rich oil companies are not held accountable.

Just as the First Nations communities in Alberta are working together to save their community, the people of Manchester, TX, are uniting to fight against extractors like Vallero, a company that has committed to refine as much as 75% of the tar sands from Alberta. In the form of protests, educational “toxic tours” of East Houston, and the Tar Sands Blockade, the residents and activists of Manchester are engaging in the fight of their lives.

Inequality continues to morph in other forms throughout the world, where impacts of climate change adversely affect vulnerable communities. Communities that lack the most resources tend to be the greatest affected. Many Pacific Islands are facing the real impacts of climate change where projections of sea level rise are dire, and leaders are being forced to contemplate what to do if their nation disappears. In 2009, in an effort to bring attention to this urgent matter and send a message to world leaders, the president of the Maldives, Mohammed Nasheed, held a government cabinet meeting underwater. As the Maldives government signed a document calling on all countries to cut emissions, they also showcased the very real threat that climate change poses to their people and the world.

At present, the region of Oceania is bearing the brunt of the effects of climate change. Due to frequent floods and the doomsday forecast of their sinking nation, many people in the Marshall Islands have already made the painful decision to leave their country and community. Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner, Civil Society Representative from the Marshall Islands, said in a compelling speech at the United Nation’s Climate Summit in New York City, “We’ve seen waves crashing into our homes and our breadfruit trees wither from salt and droughts. We look at our children and wonder how they will know themselves or their culture should they lose our islands.”  She also called “for a radical change of course” in the fight against climate change. Climate change isn’t a future problem for just a few vulnerable people—it is today’s problem, and it is everyone’s problem.

Vulnerable communities are on the frontlines in this colossal fight against human induced climate change. Climate change disproportionately affects people of color and low-income communities, and the mainstream environmental movement needs to broaden its current scope. Many demographic studies show that employees in mainstream environmental organizations are mostly white people from middle-class upbringings. The lack of diversity in the environmental movement stunts its capability and adroitness to help vulnerable communities. How can a homogenous group that is sheltered from many impacts of climate change possibly decide the needs of the people most impacted?

There needs to be a paradigm shift toward inclusiveness within the green community and environmental movement so that voices from the most affected communities are sought and heard. And resources from the mainstream need to be shared. The people who are the most affected are frequently from disenfranchised, low-income, minority communities that lack sufficient resources to fight back. These people are the very real human face of the environmental movement. We all must stand in solidarity, and environmental organizations need to first recognize the frontline activists’ sacrifices and then use their broad platform and resources to tell the activists’ stories.

I can’t help but wonder if the impacts that low-income communities of color are facing should have been the canary in the coal mine several decades ago of the current extraction model and reliance on fossil fuels. Are we facing a future that all communities are stricken by extractive natural resource models where air quality is poor, rivers are poisoned and the very health and livelihood of the people are compromised?

With the most intense El Niño year ever observed brewing in the Pacific, and projections indicating that 2015 will be the warmest year on record by a large margin, the environmental movement needs everyone. Without the inclusion of everyone, the movement simply won’t progress and the negative effects of climate change will continue to unfold. We must abandon exploitative resource extraction altogether. Every community must be represented, heard and respected. The defining challenge of our time is to overcome divisiveness, to be united by our humanity; to stand as one in order to support a brighter future for us all.

In the last 20 years, the green building movement has gone mainstream. The pace of change is extraordinary: at the International Living Future Institute we are pushing boundaries we couldn’t have even imagined a decade ago. Setting a high bar, one that many thought unachievable, has proven to be a catalyst for transformative change. And it’s time to do it again.

As I begin my transition to CEO, my staff and I are exploring new strategies that will help us bolster the fullness of our mission: to create a future that is socially just, culturally rich and ecologically restorative. We must devote our collective attention to what might be the biggest challenge of all—to create a future that embraces and empowers everyone. To create a future that is inclusive and robust for all: #OurLivingFuture. If we are to succeed, it’s critical that we have your participation.

With this in mind, we recently hosted a new event, the Equity Drafting Table, held in cooperation with the Seattle Design Festival. Our aim was to begin a dialogue about what it means to design a fair and just place for everyone to live. When we first imagined this event, we knew we needed to include everyone at the table, all ages, abilities and backgrounds. We quickly realized that we won’t get there overnight: first, we have to foster a culture of inclusivity. We designed an interactive installation, a maze of difficult questions that prompted a response from each participant. We rallied a number of eager partner organizations in the community, and were delighted by an excellent turnout. Residents from all aspects of Seattle’s rich tapestry were in attendance and provided their input.

This event was a promising launching pad, but it was just the beginning.

The good news is that we already have some momentum behind #OurLivingFuture. Each of our programs has an equity component that has resulted in measurable impacts (Just^TM, the Equity Petal in each of our Challenges, Living Building Challenge Framework for Affordable Housing). But it’s not enough.

Over the next few years, we will seek to answer this question more fully: What does it take to make communities inclusive and robust for everyone? The question is one that everyone can reflect upon, and the answers will look different from one community to the next.

A Living Future looks different for every person. It is not just a place for the wealthy or privileged; instead, it is a diverse collection of habitats that operate in tandem with the natural world and without friction with one another; it is a place where everyone belongs and a place that belongs to everyone.

What will you do to make your community inclusive and robust for everyone? Please join us in conversation around #OurLivingFuture, at our events and online. We want to hear your voice. The future is not just yours or mine, it’s ours.

Pittsburgh’s Hazelwood neighborhood has suffered in recent decades as American manufacturers have sent operations overseas and shuttered their U.S. factories. Pittsburgh, once known for its steel production, has transformed itself in the 21st century into a mecca for technology companies, with Google, Intel, Apple, and IBM siting facilities in the city—but by and large, Hazelwood has been left behind by the boom. As jobs burgeoned in wealthier, whiter areas of the city, jobs in Hazelwood—where 45% of residents are black and one in every four people lives in poverty—have trickled out. Pittsburgh’s last steel mill, based in Hazelwood, shut its doors in 1998.

Dr. Nina Baird, Assistant Professor of Architecture at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) entered into the setting several years ago. Baird has been studying neighborhoods like Hazelwood and trying to understand their plights from a variety of perspectives: racial segregation, urban blight and gentrification among them. Over time, and after some stumbling, she has developed a relationship with the community; enough to visit Hazelwood with her students to discuss neighborhood issues and hopes as the residents see them. The Hazelwood community is now helping Dr. Baird and her students create a case study for collaborative redevelopment. The students are learning how to listen to the community first, and then using an amalgamation of sustainable architecture, affordable housing, gatherings and workshops, they recommend design solutions to meet the resident’s needs. Baird is hopeful that the fusion of her students’ passion with that of the residents of Hazelwood will yield positive results for the community.

The Carnegie Mellon crew, though, quickly learned that supporting residents in their efforts to revive their neighborhood would be no small undertaking. Hazelwood’s last grocery store folded in early 2009, and the community quickly became a food desert. In recent years, food deserts have become emblematic of the injustice of America’s food economy: as grocery stores and markets vacate a neighborhood, the only food left is processed food found in convenience stores. Hazelwood residents travel miles from home to purchase lower-priced groceries, and residents with little mobility seldom get fresh food. Food deserts often hit minority communities the hardest.

What’s more, aging industrial zones (termed “brownfields”)—such as those where steel mills were once located—are often heavily polluted. The coke ovens, furnaces and rail yards of Hazelwood were never clean operations, and even abandoned, may still threaten public health.

In 2013, when Dr. Baird received an Alcoa Foundation Pillars of Sustainable Education grant, CMU students began sitting down with Hazelwood residents and learning the neighborhood’s story. What struggles do people face? What memories of the community did they hold dear? What do they want to see in the future? Racial divides in the neighborhood are still prominent, and residents are frustrated with many nonprofits that come into the neighborhood to help without consulting the residents first. Regardless of good intention, those who cannot relate to the community demographics will not be able to grasp the neighborhood’s plight.

That same year, for the first class Dr. Baird taught about Hazelwood, students advised ACTION Housing, Inc., a local affordable housing group, in the sustainable renovation of several buildings. “There’s a learning curve regarding U.S. building methods and sustainable renovation,” said Dr. Baird, explaining that most CMU graduate students come from rapidly developing countries where renovating buildings is rare—old buildings are likelier to be razed to make way for new, larger ones. In Hazelwood, students got first-hand experience evaluating old and, in places, dilapidated buildings: ACTION Housing will redevelop an old grocery as well as the Spahr Building, a former variety store, for the benefit of the community. The students’ role was to advise ACTION about more sustainable materials and methods on such factors as insulation, windows, lighting and appliances. In the process, says Dr. Baird, they learned a lot about renovating old masonry and about certain stores’ specific needs. Today, a bakery is slated to move into the old grocery store, while the Spahr building will become home to Pittsburgh Community Kitchen, an organization that prepares food and trains food service workers, and will offer sit-down dining in Hazelwood. ACTION is also courting tenants for the upper floors of the building.

One of the first lessons of working in Hazelwood has been the understanding that the community’s largest concerns aren’t necessarily what Baird had on her agenda when she first began volunteering in the community. Prior to receiving the Pillars of Sustainability grant, Baird had led workshops in various cities on weatherizing one’s home for monthly utility savings. Those workshops were successful, she said, but in Hazelwood she soon realized that home renovation was the least of residents’ concerns. “People are trying to make ends meet,” explains Dr. Baird; their priorities center around putting food on the table and paying next month’s rent. Any up-front costs associated with weatherization would be cost prohibitive. Residents are also tired of outside groups coming into the community to help without consulting residents about community needs.

So Dr. Baird and her students set about talking to Hazelwood residents and getting to know the local landscape. What arose were collaborations with locals instead of impositions upon them—a lesson, surely, for all architects interested in sustainable design. The CMU crew offered classes on how to use the Internet, equipping residents with marketable online skills. They also taught Geographic Information System (GIS) software to teens, as software is used in many professional environments, and offered map-reading classes for children. CMU students also offered a bike repair workshop for residents and local police donated bikes for repair and use. The bike workshop was so successful that it will occur again in 2016. More recently, CMU students have offered their own version of Operation Better Block—a community gathering to clean up debris, plant trees, bushes and flowers, repair concrete foundations and sidewalks, and reroute storm water.  In November, Hazelwood hosted the debut of CMU’s  digital fabrication trailer, providing the community with information about technology and jobs in building design and construction and working alongside a group of veterans providing construction skills for neighborhood projects.

Today, Hazelwood residents are expressing concerns over the rate at which old houses are being demolished. The CMU architecture crew doesn’t see their job as pushing for new development, but rather as safeguarding the structures and community that already exist. The renovation of the old grocery and the Spahr building, in line with such a sustainability plan, are scheduled for completion in mid-2016.

“It’s a work in progress,” admits Baird. But similar to almost all work in collaborative community redevelopment, “good work builds on itself and can inspire more hope and creativity. My own hope is that everyone involved in these projects, the students and the residents, recognizes his or her ability to be a change maker and to help shape a better future.”

The work presented in this article is part of the Pillars of Sustainable Education program that funds universities to support the realization of community-based projects to explore innovative uses of sustainable materials and design. More information about the program – made possible by Alcoa Foundation – can be found at pillarssustainableeducation.org