On behalf of the Cascadia Region Green Building Council, I welcome you to our Living Building Community. This is an important moment because we are asking you to become part of a Community that together will help solve some of the most vexing of the environmental problems related to the built environment that we face today. This is a leadership community – one that has the courage to seek solutions that redefine the relationship between the built and natural environments, and to pursue answers to the question of how we can reconcile humanity’s needs and wants with what the planet can sustain. The journey ahead is challenging and the sense of urgency is palpable. For those watching global environmental indicators, it is clear that we have very little time to significantly transform all aspects of our economy and culture. The rules have changed. Hard fought battles for incremental improvements are no longer enough. As a collective community it is time to leapfrog current paradigms and seek out solutions that provide us with a chance for a bountiful and sustainable future.

The Living Building Challenge and its related programs offer one way we can come together and provide clarity and vision for the journey ahead; to clearly describe the level of change that is needed and chart a roadmap for transformation. Cascadia has simply planted a seed with the Living Building Challenge, and only through an active, intelligent and sensitive community can this seed flower and reach its potential. No single organization has the capacity to change a market the size of the building industry by itself – but the right seeds planted in the right place and the right time, and receiving the right resources can be transformational.

 
We need your help. We view this Community as a key starting point for increased collaboration and sharing across disciplines and from competitor to competitor, what we call Inter-organizational Collaboration. The building industry and all its sectors need to move beyond the typical constraints imposed by ‘competitive secrets’ and competition – and find ways to educate each other, train each other, push each other. Put simply, we must share to thrive. Cascadia is here to facilitate this sharing through a collaborative effort in our Living Building Community.

 
Balanced with this desire to share freely, is our need to sustain our organization so that we can facilitate this collaboration and keep providing tools for all of you to use and respond to. We thank you for paying our Community ‘membership fee’; a fee that will give you one-year of access to all the resources that are created and placed on this site. Each year, the Community will get better and better. We invite you to share the information found within this site on a limited basis with your project teams and offices, but not to share your user name and password. We recommend that a project team pursuing the Living Building Challenge has several members, so that each can access and provide insights to the whole community from various viewpoints. A membership is a commitment to be active in your geographical community. More important than any single project is the spirit of helping a network of projects achieve Living Building status. Encourage others to join and participate, and help support the work we are doing collectively.

On this website you will find several key webpages and documents that can be downloaded. Perhaps most important is the first draft of the USER'S GUIDE. Inside the User’s Guide you will learn about the innovative ‘Petal’ process and the ‘Scale-Jumping’ protocol. Both of these are important developments within our program. You will also find direction on documentation and certification. The first version of the User’s Guide has some guidance information in it as well, but admittedly is a mere skeleton of what it needs to be. You will be immediately wishing that there was more in it and more guidance on a host of topics! We recognize that. And, over the course of this year and beyond we will be adding new content and tools to the Guide and to other sections of the site. Full time technical staff are being hired to create these very things. But again, it is only through an open-source sharing protocol that we will make this the best handbook imaginable.

The DIALOGUE is also a part of the Community – it is the primary forum for general discussion, feedback and constructive criticism. We urge you to participate. Ask questions and let’s help each other answer them.

The expertise we need cannot be found in a few individuals. We need your ideas, your feedback and your direct contributions. If you have a diagram that you did for a project that really helps illustrate a Prerequisite – please share it – your contribution will be noted accordingly. If you have created a new tool that could help an engineer or architect meet one of the requirements, please submit the document or share the link with the Community. There are no ideas too small. You will notice a link to the BRAIN TRUST that will help you understand how to contribute directly to the Community. Once a year, Cascadia will assemble the best of the resources from the Community and will publish a hard-bound User’s Guide. Hopefully, the online interface will reduce the need for individuals to print excessively. While this portion of the site is not yet active, it will be soon - by Fall 2009!

When you are ready to state your commitment publicly and enter the race to the Living Building Challenge you may REGISTER A PROJECT and let others know your intention. Or perhaps you have an existing project that has pushed the boundaries of sustainable building and you’d like to gain 'Petal' recognition. We’re anxious to see which existing project will earn the most ‘Petals’ and how sharing the knowledge about tested methods can accelerate rapid adoption.

Perhaps your interest goes beyond buildings to specific site and landscape elements or broader still to whole communities? Stay tuned; by the end of 2009, we we will release Living Building Challenge version 2.0 which will account for these applications of the Standard.

Ultimately this Community, like any other, will be what we make of it. Since we launched Living Building Challenge in November of 2006, the reaction has been amazing. People are responding to the power and simplicity of the idea and are rising to the challenge that sooner or later the whole building industry must tackle. This is the vision that we set forth: How can we transform our communities to be living communities and our buildings to be living buildings? How can we ensure that future generations remain as blessed as we were to inherit a planet so rich, so bountiful and so beautiful as the one we were born into? What work we have ahead of us!

Welcome my friends.

Jason F. McLennan

CEO, Cascadia Region Green Building Council