Speaker: Rob Bennett, Executive Director, Portland Sustainability Institute

Topic: EcoDistricts - Scaling up Sustainability

Description:

Neighborhoods are the building blocks of cities — semi-autonomous areas where people build their lives and root their identities.  Neighborhoods are also the right scale to accelerate sustainability — small enough to innovate quickly and big enough to have a meaningful impact.  This link between people and scale makes neighborhoods the most critical “intervention points” within cities to identify and develop sustainability strategies. We call these EcoDistricts, innovative neighborhoods that provide the very ingredients needed in a resource-constrained world: the harvesting of water and energy, the production of food, the ability to move freely and affordably without a car, and careful stewardship and reprocessing of materials.

Rob Bennett is the founding Executive Director of the Portland Sustainability Institute. Founded in 2009 by Portland mayor Sam Adams, the Portland Sustainability Institute develops next-generation sustainability solutions for cities with two primary objectives:

-  Transitioning to a Low Carbon Economy
-  Greening the Built Environment

Speaker Bio:

Rob is the founding executive director of the Portland Sustainability Institute (PoSI), a non profit organization chartered in May 2009 to systematically brings together business, higher education, non-profit and municipal leaders to drive large-scale, next-generation urban sustainability initiatives in the Portland metro region.

Rob is recognized as a leader in the sustainable cities movement, with twelve years of experience shaping municipal sustainable development projects and policy while working for the Clinton Foundation and the cities of Portland and Vancouver, BC. Rob’s work focuses at the intersection of city planning, real estate development, economic development, and environmental policy. His projects include the founding of Portland’s award winning green building program (G/Rated); helping shape the green building and infrastructure strategies for catalytic development projects including the Brewery Blocks (Portland, OR), South Waterfront (Portland, OR), and 2010 Olympic Village (Vancouver BC); creating the EcoDistricts Initiative, and leading the development of a clean economy roadmap (Climate Prosperity Greenprint) for the Portland metro.

Rob was a founding board member of the Cascadia Green Building Council and sat on other non profit boards including REACH Community Development, one of the Pacific NW’s largest and most innovative non-profit affordable housing providers. Rob has lectured throughout the US and abroad on topics ranging from green economic development, sustainable municipal innovation, and green building policy. He is a graduate of the University of Massachusetts- Amherst School of Landscape Architecture and Regional Planning.

Date: March 24, 2011

Location: Whatcom Museum at the Lightcatcher, 250 Flora Street, Bellingham, WA 98225

Time: Doors open at 5 PM, Lecture begins at 5:30 PM

Cost: Free (RSVP MANDATORY)

Cascadia thanks the Whatcom Museum for sponsoring the venue.

The Transformational Lecture Series aims to inspire all building industry professionals to embrace their role in creating as sustainable built environment now, as well as ensuring that sustainability becomes integral to all development in the future. In an effort to both reduce cost and carbon emissions, and to inspire the local community, most speakers are notable local heroes and reside in the Pacific Northwest.