Summary of "Exploring Green Buildings on Chicago Campuses" | 2009 Climate Leadership Summit workshop | August 12, 2009
Ashka Naik
Pre-conference workshop at the ACUPCC 2009 Climate Leadership Summit, August 12, 2009
Blogs on this green building workshop:
http://www.aashe.org/blog/exploring-green-buildings-chicago-campuses
http://blogs.nwf.org/campus/2009/08/facilities-and-the-educational-experience.html
On the afternoon of August 12th, we headed out with a group of about 30 attendees of the 2009 ACUPCC Climate Leadership Summit for a pre-conference workshop “Exploring Green Buildings on Chicago Campuses” to tour green buildings on two local college and university campuses in Chicago. Our group consisted of university chancellors, sustainability directors, chief financial officers, and representatives from engineering firms.
The first campus the group visited was St. Xavier University <http://greencampus.sxu.edu/> , an ACUPCC signatory, where they are “moving forward faster by building green!" Paul Matthews, Assistant VP for Facilities Management, and the staff at the office of sustainability led the group on tours of O'Brien Hall and Rubloff Hall - two LEED Gold certified residences. The second tour brought the group to the University of Illinois at Chicago <http://www.uic.edu/sustainability/> , also an ACUPCC signatory, where Jeffrey S. Lewis, architect of the green buildings greeted us and gave us a tour of Lincoln Hall - a classroom building under renovation aiming for LEED Silver certification. The campus also has a geothermal system that provides heating and cooling for this and three other buildings.
We wrapped up with a panel discussion at UIC’s Campus Cultural Center, where we heard from Suzanne Malec-McKenna, Commissioner for the City of Chicago Department of the Environment (which has developed the Chicago Climate Action Plan <http://www.chicagoclimateaction.org/> ), Cynthia Klein-Banai, Associate Chancellor for Sustainability at UIC, Marshall Eames, Director for the University Environmental Sustainability at Loyola University Chicago <http://www.luc.edu/cuerp/Sustain_Initiative.shtml#University%20Sustainability%20Director> , and Paul Mathews from St. Xavier. Each discussed their green building and sustainability efforts and fielded questions, and much of the conversations revolved around the idea of collaborating across departments and across sectors to effectively move large, complex groups towards the common goal of eliminating net greenhouse gas emissions.
The preconference workshop was developed by Second Nature's Advancing Green Building <http://secondnature.org/AGB.html> program, supported by the Kresge Foundation <http://www.kresge.org/> , with the goal of helping under-resourced higher education institutions construct and renovate campus buildings in ways that save money, reduce environmental and health impacts, and serve as educational tools.
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Many thanks,
A s h k a N a i k | LEED AP
Program Manager | Advancing Green Building Initiative
Second Nature, Inc. | 18 Tremont Street, Suite 308 | Boston, MA 02108
www.secondnature.org | 617 722 0036 Ext-209