At the Built Green Conference, 3/6/9, 3:15

Jon Alexander, Sunshine Construction LLC
Ben Kaufman, GreenWorks Realty
Terry Phelan, Living Shelter
Joanie Parsons, Parsons PR.

The tide has turned. For many years green building has grown slowly. Two years ago awareness of global warming reached a tipping point, and with that the interest in green building significantly increased. We in the green building field are now in the midst of an enormous opportunity to rapidly grow green building in a powerful and sustainable way.

This highly participatory workshop is designed to support breakthrough thinking and collective action to take advantage of this opportunity. This workshop will offer cresting wave information and provide a facilitated environment to support and enable the masters of green building to exchange ideas and strengthen their networks.

This is a "participatory workshop" so  I do not know how much reporting I will b able to do. Looks like there will be a small group. There are 5 concurretn sessions running right now and it is difficult to decide which one to go to. Well, not too hard for me – my boker is one of the panel members. –

We went around the room and each introduced ourselves – there are a lot of builders here. Also someone from the City of Seattle trying to make the Green Building Council work, someone from ecoHaus, ReStore, Friends of the Cedar River Watershed, and someone from Spokane who built the first 5 star home in Spokane under the Built green program.

West Coast Green web  site under Jon Alexander there are a ton of interviews of people who have been involved in green building. Over 400 years of combined green building experience in this group.

3/8/9 Update We broke into small groups and each had about 5 minutes to talk and explain any difficulties we faced in growing our businesses and suggested what might be next steps that we might take. Members in our group ,made additional suggestions. As a group we then decided on three major themes of challenges we faced, wrote them on a big sticky and then the entire session posted their issues and most all fell in three categories. Rather than reporting what I remember I will wait for the notes to be emailed to me from the panel and then will post a follow up with that information, since it was quite profound.