About - Build It Green

Our Mission and Vision

Every Californian deserves to live in a safe, affordable home in a resilient and thriving neighborhood. Build It Green’s mission is to help accomplish that by providing credible and accessible resources to develop regenerative communities. We envision, and are committed to creating, a healthy housing ecosystem that fosters the well-being of individuals, communities, and the natural world. We exist to support all those who share this commitment.

Why Our Work Matters

For multiple generations, how we have built our homes and neighborhoods in the United States has scarred both planet and people. Irreplaceable ecosystems have been paved over, watersheds decimated, and fragile natural balances that protect us from the likes of catastrophic fires and floods have been tipped. Today, climate change is an existential threat to the safety and prosperity of all people and natural systems. Addressing climate change requires us to fundamentally shift the way we design, build, and maintain our homes and communities.

At the same time, the places we live have been built on an historical foundation of structural and institutional bias and discrimination. Racist lending and land use practices have been commonplace. Failure to build affordable housing has left households with low incomes struggling to afford food, transportation, and other essentials. Black and brown neighborhoods with lower incomes have been burdened by pollution, underinvested in, and dissected by highways.

As we envision and enable new approaches to building our homes and communities, we must dismantle the structures and institutions that have generated these social and environmental injustices. When we do, we will have communities that are just, thriving, economically robust, and that exist in harmony with both the natural world and the places they are found.

Our Approach

Build It Green nurtures collaboration among those that see how homes and neighborhoods can advance the vitality of natural systems, social and environmental justice, and the ability for places to be resilient and evolve as the world changes.

We create resources to enable the network we serve to make practical progress, and to overcome institutional barriers standing in the way of homes and neighborhoods where everyone can thrive and take pride.

We elevate aspirations about what can be achieved by co-creating a shared sense of what’s possible through collaboration and new ways of thinking.

We offer professional training for those pursuing green building careers, as well as a credible and accessible residential green building rating system, GreenPoint Rated, for California and the nation.