A shot of the many people and organizations who participated in the REFBC “Accelerating Progress Towards a Sustainable Built Environment” event in Vancouver on Feb. 18, 2016.
I recently had the excellent opportunity to participate in a workshop hosted by the Real Estate Foundation of British Columbia (REFBC).
Called “Accelerating Progress Towards a Sustainable Built Environment,” the workshop was geared at figuring out which actions should be our united priorities when it comes making our communities more sustainable.
I’ve been to many other events that showcase sustainability innovations in various cities. The focus of these events usually seems to be on inviting folks to take those ideas back to their home communities to implement separately. This definitely has its place yet sometimes feels like we’re so many well-intentioned squirrels with nuts running back to our respective home trees.
What made the REFBC workshop different was that it wasn’t about idea dispersal but about strategizing on how to collectively make change happen on the larger scale together. (If you will, like inviting the squirrels to stop for a second and figure out which tree they would be better off shaking down together).
The workshop was also a call to action that collectively we need to do a better job in moving sustainability forward. As the meeting invite noted, “Despite significant effort and attention by many organizations over the last 20 to 30 years, BC’s built environment itself is generally not becoming more sustainable.”
The Sustainable Built Environment workshop drew people from around BC and from other places in the Cascadia region. It also reached across the many sectors that have been part of this REFBC project: “Housing,” “Transportation,” “Buildings, Energy and Infrastructure,” and all the various components of “Integrated Communities” (land use patterns, public space, urban form, etc.)
It was a varied and thoughtful collection of people and I believe this undertaking by the Real Estate Foundation is an important one and so I thought I would share it here.
Who is the Real Estate Foundation?
When I spoke to a few of my colleagues about this project, they thought I was heading off to a workshop put on by real estate agents. No, not quite. The Real Estate Foundation is something related but different.
Real Estate Foundation areas of focus (Source: REFBC)
REFBC is a philanthropic organization that derives its funding from interest from pooled real estate deposits held in trust by real estate brokerages. The Foundation was created in 1985 by the real estate industry in cooperation with the provincial government through the Real Estate Services Act (BC).
As described on its website, the Foundation’s overall aim is “to transform land use attitudes and practices, thus contributing to resilient, healthy communities and natural environments.” It has a number of grant, project, endowment and awards programs that support initiatives to further those goals. Since 1988, the organization has approved over $70 million in funding to projects and non-profit organizations to further its mission of transforming “land use attitudes and practices through innovation, stewardship and learning.”
State of the Built Environment in BC
I first became aware of the REFBC in May 2015 when I was asked to participate in the information gathering phase of their Sustainable Built Environment project. Led on behalf of REFBC by Modus Planning, Design and Engagement Inc., the Built Environment project seemed like both an intriguing one and a potentially very valuable undertaking. Pulling together literature reviews, interviews and research across the sectors noted above, it sought to identify “the current status, trends, drivers and barriers to built environment sustainability in BC.”
I found my participation in that first phase of the project energizing. To me it represented a chance to pop my head out of the trenches, talk with people from other organizations and take a long, hard 20,000 foot-high-view of the landscape in terms of what was working, what wasn’t and where efforts were perhaps best placed.
The results of all those conversations and data gathering were recently released in the report Towards a Sustainable Built Environment for British Columbia: Synthesis of Findings. If you work in the fields related to building more sustainable communities, I think this report is worth a look. It is well-written and is made more readable through its underlying sense of impatience and passion, qualities that those of us who write reports for public entities sometimes see “blanded out” through the review process but which are so integral to making people care.
In the Status and Trends section the report provides a clear-eyed health check on where we’re at in BC in terms of creating more sustainable communities and what is or isn’t working. It then provides recommendations on overarching priorities that should be considered across all sectors and the specific drivers, barriers and proposed priorities for action for each of the topic areas (Integrated Communities, Housing, Transportation, and “Buildings, Energy and Infrastructure”).
Following on the heels of the Sustainable Built Environment report, the Foundation also released the results of a related public opinion survey on attitudes towards components of the Sustainable Built Environment. The poll results are also pretty fascinating reading (see the summary or full findings), with the key take away that language matters when we talk about sustainability.
Highlights showing how language choice matters when talking about sustainability. (From “Public Views on Sustainability and the Built Environment” report and poll undertaken by REFBC and MacAllister Opinion Research.)
“Well, duh,” I can hear some of you say, “of course language choice matters.” However, I think this point about language is always worthwhile to keep in mind and what was interesting about the poll was that it actually tested which words and phrases resonate with the general public. For instance, the report notes that “people prefer ‘Smart growth’ to ‘Compact communities,’ and both (not surprisingly) are preferred over ‘High density.'”
Moving Forward
Discussing priority actions at the REFBC “Accelerating Progress Towards a Sustainable Built Environment” workshop on Feb. 18, 2016.
The tricky part of any strategic process is moving from strategy to action. It is always worthwhile to figure out what the overall broad brushstrokes should be to move an organization, or community (or province!) forward. However, what really becomes most valuable is turning these larger strategies into prioritized “to do” lists.
What are the actual actions that we are going to undertake together? Who is going to do what? What are we going to do first?
Pulling together people and organizations to answer these questions needs to be the next step and this seemed to be the underlying theme of the Feb. 18, 2016 REFBC “Accelerating Progress” workshop. It will be interesting to see where this goes from here.
I’m curious to continue on with this process with others to better define what those prioritized “to do” lists might look like and–most importantly–make them happen. On the small scale, those of us involved in creating more beautiful and resilient communities are achieving wins here and there and that definitely needs to be celebrated.
However, what’s even more tantalizing to think about is what we could achieve if collectively we got more organized together and made some truly big change happen. Cheers to my fellow squirrels: let’s set our sights on some bigger trees.