Working on our selves, our communities,
and our places for massive change
A workshop on Saturday, March 28, 2020
10:30 a.m. – 4:30 p.m. EDT
Good News – we will hold this workshop online!
It will be fully interactive with discussions, conversations,
breakout rooms, Q&A and presentations by Bill and Jim.
In Western culture, we are trying to solve gigantic and existential issues with the same technically oriented mind that created them: working on fragmented problems, in silos of activities, addressing them in a generic way, and at an impossible-to-manage planetary scale.
We already have the living system understanding we need to heal the earth – right now. Poly-canopy farming, holistic management, and permaculture techniques can begin to bring back a healthy trajectory and harmony between humans and ‘nature’ in 18 months. The same principles can apply to human development and social systems change, as well. Living systems thinking applies to all of life. Perhaps it’s time to give it a try.
Gregory Bateson said, “The major problems of the world are the result of the difference between the way nature works and the way people think.”
Massive change requires us to both change who we are and how we understand the world and the natural systems that support us. The corollary is, understanding the way the world works is an invitation and opportunity to change ourselves. A virtuous cycle.
Architects and regenerative design innovators Bill Reed and Jim Newman will take us through a series of mental-model changing exercises and context-setting perspectives that are the basis for the practice of Regenerative Development and Design. Let us invite each other to create massive change through alignment between human-to-human and human-to-nature relationships.
Bill Reed is an internationally recognized practitioner, lecturer, and leading authority in sustainability and regenerative planning, design and implementation. Bill is a principal in Integrative Design, Inc. and Regenesis Group – organizations working to lift green building and community planning into full integration and evolution with living systems. His work centers on creating and implementing a whole and living-systems design process. The benefits of this process include higher efficiency, lower costs, reduced waste, faster time to market, and the realization of exponential value to the social, ecological, financial and human qualities of a project, the community and its ecosystem. Bill is an author of many technical articles and contributed to many books including co-author of the seminal work, “Integrative Design Guide to Green Building.” He is a founding Board of Director of the US Green Building Council and one of the co-founders of the LEED Green Building Rating System. In addition to being considered one of the leading thinkers in this field, Bill has also consulted on over two hundred green design commissions, the majority which are LEED Gold and Platinum and Living Building Challenge projects. He is also a keynote speaker at major building and design events as well as a guest lecturer to universities throughout Europe and North America including Harvard, MIT, Princeton and UPenn.
Jim Newman is the founder and Principal at Linnean Solutions, a mission-driven firm that helps local and state governments, institutions, projects, and communities reach resilience and sustainability goals. Jim’s twenty years of experience includes climate mitigation and adaptation planning; the development of sustainability and resilience frameworks, manuals, and certification programs; carbon and life cycle analyses for rethinking building construction and waste; resilience assessments at the building and urban scales; and stakeholder engagement processes to strengthen communities. As a Living Environments in Natural, Social, and Economic Systems (LENSES) Facilitator and Trainer, Jim regularly leads community planning workshops, and trains others in becoming effective facilitators. He is a member of the RELi/USGBC Steering Committee, where he has worked to bring a social equity lens to the development of the new certification standard for resilient buildings. Jim is a key author of several influential resilience reports and tools—including the Enterprise Community Partners’ Ready to Respond: Strategies for Multifamily Building Resilience manual. Previous to Linnean, Jim worked with BuildingGreen as the Director of Strategy, where he led the development and introduction of most of BuildingGreen’s online products including LEEDuser.com, BuildingGreen Suite, and the High Performance Buildings Database.