Championing
Transformation
Our Consulting practice advocates and advances the progressive edge between a healthy & resilient built environment and a thriving, equitable world. We drive transformation, guiding professionals, firms, and manufacturers.
We inspire the critical thinking and collaboration that will move our industry toward a deeper focus on a healthy, resilient, and more equitable world.
We’ve helped thousands of design and construction professionals solve problems around poorly performing buildings, decide which green building innovations to adopt, and choose healthy and sustainable materials. And, we’ve guided manufacturers in improving their products and helped architecture teams integrate their design processes to better communicate key topics.
With our consulting practice, we facilitate dynamic conversations about integrated design, helping our clients to vet safe and sustainable materials. And, we are their trusted partners in supporting the continual evolution of education, learning, and development through in-depth workshops and facilitations.
Facilitation
What determines success of a project? It’s not the budget—great buildings are built on shoestrings, and well-endowed projects can find all kinds of ways to waste resources. It’s not the timeline—a tight schedule is an opportunity to quickly identify the best solution. It’s not the owner/architect/community.
Success happens when everything just comes together, and this doesn’t have to be an accident. BuildingGreen facilitators have the experience to help project teams pull everything into place and create extraordinary outcomes with whatever constraints they’ve been gifted.
Process facilitation with BuildingGreen focuses on:
- Correcting misalignment: When multiple stakeholders are not aligned around the “why,” they don’t know how to connect with each other around the “what.” Mistrust and inefficiency result. We facilitate a conversation that gets at core purpose and an understanding of each other’s motivations and agendas.
- Consistent engagement: First we help teams set inspiring goals that they’re aligned around, and then we help them re-engage with those goals through the project, reinforcing and elevating their alignment.
- Success momentum: You start off strong but lose steam. Or you’ve got plenty of steam but it’s carrying you in the wrong direction. BuildingGreen helps teams create specific, achievable objectives while setting aside the unachievable stuff that just stresses you out, generating momentum as you build on your progress.
See it in action:
How can we help you?
Architects: Get support for incorporating sustainability into your strategic planning, integrating your design process, achieving lofty goals on projects, and enhancing your productivity and profitability.
Owners: Embarking on a new project? Start off with alignment that can carry you through to award-winning completion.
Institutions: Help stakeholders be heard while keeping your work on track.
“Wow, what a couple of days! I heard so much about how invigorated people felt going through this process. Nadav's careful facilitation made all the difference”
Product and Material Screening
Systems like LEED and WELL provide rules for compliant products, so you’re all set, right? Not quite: the chasm between those rules and actually selecting the best products is vast enough to hold tens of thousands of competing products, mountains of greenwash, and forests of technical documentation.
Save your team thousands of hours with BuildingGreen’s expert help. With 20+ years of product research experience, we can vet products and materials against your custom criteria (e.g., Living Building Challenge or your own priorities), and provide a platform for you to manage your data. You’ll learn up close why BuildingGreen is the most trusted product information source in the industry.
How can we help you?
Owners, Property Managers: With our help, you can distinguish your workplace or tenant space with interiors that avoid toxic chemicals and support high levels of productivity.
Architects and Design Teams: Get support reconciling the many factors of product selection: potentially toxic ingredients, carbon footprint, aesthetics, cost, certification credit eligibility, and so on.
“Paula packages a complex and confusing topic into a set of understandable guidelines without oversimplifying or dumbing it down.”
Brent Ehrlich
Products & Materials Specialist
Nadav Malin
President
Paula Melton
Editorial Director
Resources
The Great Eight: High-Impact Material Choices for Green Building
How BuildingGreen evaluates products (1:30)
Public Speaking
Bring the expertise and passion of BuildingGreen to your next event! Our appearances are frequently noted as “best of” at large conventions like Greenbuild, Living Future, and the AIA Convention, and our speakers are sought after for leadership events organized by corporations, nonprofits, and trade associations.
We address topics related to:
- Health and sustainability in building strategies
- Green product selection
- Climate change
- Resilient design
- LEED and other green rating systems
- Teambuilding in the design and construction process
- Overcoming inertia in moving organizations forward
A focus on dynamic workshops
BuildingGreen’s speakers provide keynotes for regional industry conferences, but our main focus is professional gatherings where we offer an interactive workshop experience. No matter what size the audience, our speakers consistently inspire meaningful ongoing conversations.
You’ll get more than just a speech:
- Tap into our network: BuildingGreen can act as a media partner and co-promoter, alerting our extensive community of sustainability professionals to important events.
- A fresh perspective: You needn’t worry that your audience heard the same canned speech at a competing event. Our goal is to teach, inspire, and impart new tools, which means we don’t just recycle last year’s slides. Before every appearance, we work with organizers to understand who will be there and how we can customize the presentation to their needs.
- Going deeper: After the speech we love to stick around and work in small groups or focused workshops to help participants deepen their understanding and try out specific tools. Pre- or post-event webinars are another great way to build interest and add value.
- Added value: With our unrivaled library of in-depth articles, special reports, and study guides, we offer audiences take-home reading that reinforces their learning.
- Continuing education: As USGBC, AIA, and ILFI education partners, we are able to offer CEUs for our live events for key professional credentials.
Recent talks:
Alex Wilson: “Resilient Design Charrette: Applying the LEED Pilot Credits”
Brent Ehrlich: “Top 10 Products to Transform the Building Industry”
Nadav Malin: “Blinded By Transparency”
Paula Melton: “Simpler, Faster Product Selection for LEED v4”
Training and Education
Benjamin Franklin said, “Tell me and I forget. Teach me and I remember. Involve me and I learn.”
BuildingGreen is the most trusted source in the green building industry because of our entire ecosystem of information services:
- Our membership base of tens of thousands of professionals supports deep research on topics that few others have the resources to support.
- As we publish news analysis, feature articles, and case studies every month on the industry’s hottest, topics we distill the practical wisdom of the leading practitioners.
- Our trainings translate everything we’ve learned into hands-on lessons that professionals (including emerging professionals) can use to solve problems right away, and provide us immediate feedback on what’s working in sustainable design and construction.
Designers, manufacturers, professional associations, nonprofits, and universities come to us for training on these topics, among others:
- New and rapidly changing expectations and frameworks for transparency as well as health and ecological impacts of products.
- We can’t all be toxicologists or building scientists, nor is that the job of the design architect. But we can apply key lessons from these professions and others to improve the scientific basis of your day-to-day work.
- Resilient design: How to make it practical for any building project, and create synergies with other green building measures.
- Green building rating systems: we lead workshops on LEED v4 (including product selection), WELL, LEED vs. Green Globes, and LEED AP and Green Associate exam prep.
In all cases, BuildingGreen tailors training for your company with a focus on well-organized, practical presentation materials; the best resources for follow-up and making it practical; and answering that one burning question you have, but have been reluctant to ask.
Nadav Malin
President
Brent Ehrlich
Products & Materials Specialist
Technical Writing
Your members, customers, or stakeholders are demanding educational content. You’re envisioning a series of white papers or an interactive website that’s highly readable, attractive, and meets the highest standards of technical rigor and accuracy. Just one hitch: you lack the expertise or internal resources to deliver it.
For 30+ years we’ve been getting this call at BuildingGreen, from trade associations, manufacturers, governmental agencies, and overextended publishers.
Tens of thousands of professionals turn to us for expertise in the sustainable design and construction industry—and we turn to them. When we don’t have the answer in-house, we have the most developed network of leaders and experts in all domains to call on for interviews, insight, and know-how on all green topics. Our editorial team also has the know-how to tailor the content to the audience, find the most compelling angle for your story, and reliably meet deadlines.
We’re also distinguished by our approach: we like to begin by carefully assessing your needs. This can lead to making changes at the outset (when doing so is easiest) like crafting an interactive website instead of a PDF. We then tap our internal resources and our broad network to assemble the research and know-how you need.
We enjoy back and forth with our clients: you get to see the project go from idea, to rough draft, to the final polishing. Because you’re involved from the beginning, you can adjust course and spin off additional resources like explainer videos, quick-look references, and webinars that meet specific needs.
Trade associations: BuildingGreen adds rigor, reputation, and know-how in publishing to your white papers, articles, or interactive websites.
Companies: We’re experienced working with companies of any size on technical manuals, white papers, and educational materials on your products and materials.
“I was very excited to find and work with BuildingGreen. We were very impressed with their knowledge and involvement in the industry. They are a group of professionals who can assume a neutral position. We had them produce a very targeted white paper for our industry as well as an engaging workshop.”
Paula Melton
Editorial Director
Nadav Malin
President
Alex Wilson
Founder
Examples
AIA Sustainability White Paper:
Materials Transparency & Risk for Architects