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Photo: CHPS |
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Pioneers in the Green
School Revolution
An Interview with Ted Bardacke of Global Green
USA
by Racquel Palmese
When a school district in
California
wants to build a green school or implement a green school program, they will
often call
Global Green USA, an organization, headquartered in
Los Angeles,
that is uniquely involved in the spiraling green schools movement.
Global Green describes itself as an organization that "establishes
collaborative partnerships with local governments, affordable housing
organizations and other public and private entities to facilitate the
development, adoption and implementation of sustainable policies, programs
and practices." It traces its roots to 1993, when Mikhail Gorbachev, the
former leader of the Soviet Union, and a man credited with helping to end
the Cold War, created Green Cross International (GCI), an environmental
organization. Global Green was established that same year, as the US
affiliate of GCI.
Ted Bardacke, Senior Program Associate with Global Green USA, spoke with Green
Technology Magazine about the organization's work with California's green
schools.
Would you give us some background on Global Green?
Global Green is a nonprofit environmental organization. We're a slightly unusual in
that we work along a continuum of projects. We do direct technical
assistance on green building and renewable energy projects, and work as
partners directly with and part of design teams. But we also do a lot of
education, outreach and policy advocacy on green building and renewable energy.
How long has Global Green been working specifically on green building
issues?
For more than a decade now, long before it was the hot thing. Particularly
we've been working on buildings in urban areas and within that, our real
niche was in affordable housing. The reason that we were involved in
affordable housing was that our overall mission and belief in the
environmental world is that we're not going to solve environmental problems without also solving issues of poverty and economic inequality.
We saw affordable housing as a way to address both the environmental
impact of buildings in the larger environment, but also the direct
environmental impact and economic impact of energy bills, toxic building
materials on low income families. As we started to expand our green
building work into other sectors, schools was a natural place to
expand to. That was about four years ago now.
How do you get involved?
In terms of what we actually do - we're working across a broad continuum
in a variety of ways. There's direct technical assistance, where we work
with districts, architects, mechanical engineers, educational programmers
on a specific school.
Right now one of the more exciting projects we're working on is in the
West Contra Costa USD, the cities of El Cerrito and Richmond, on a
renovation of an elementary school, Nystrom. It's a very interesting
project because it's a building that was built during World War II to
house children of women who were working in the shipyards of Richmond,
part of the whole
Rosie the Riveter National Historic Monument area. The underlying
structure of that school is quite gorgeous, but over time it's lost some
of its charm, and there's a need for additional facilities and
reconfiguration.
In that project we're advising the district and the design team on how to
implement CHPS [Collaborative
for High Performance Schools which sets standards for green schools in
California]. The district has a resolution passed by the board that
mandates CHPS on all its projects, and this is one of the more complicated
ones coming down the pike.
On this project, you're working with the district – what is the
process?
We started by doing pre-meetings with the architect and the district. Last
spring we facilitated an all-day green building design charrette. There
were people from the school board, staff from the district, the architect,
the mechanical engineer, the civil engineer, landscape architect,
acoustical consultant, and folks who are working on this larger
neighborhood greening plan, 15-20 of us in the room.
This is an all-day meeting that does two things: It states early and
upfront that it's going to be a green project, so everyone understands
that and attempts to find particular green design strategies that can be
pursued as a team. And then there are some specific goals and targets set
with regard to those strategies.
Second thing – the CHPS points - which points the project will be
pursuing, so that there are some technical criteria to back up the
performance goals. There are also some notional things that come out
of those meetings about what would be affordable and what's very costly, but
I think the point of the meeting is that it's the beginning, and then
there's a lot of research and follow up and cost estimating to do as the
design progresses.
On the program management side of things, a number of districts
around the state, and more every day, are passing district-wide policies
to implement green building as district policy. In California this is
typically centered around meeting CHPS standards, but elsewhere it could
be
LEED for Schools or a set of other criteria.
How many districts so far?
I think there are more than 20 districts in the state, including some of
the biggest, namely Los Angeles and San Diego, who now have CHPS as part
of district policy.
What are the implications of a school district passing a green schools
mandate?
When a district decides to go down that path, saying, "henceforth all our
building should be green," it's not a decision to be taken lightly. It
requires knowledge of how to implement that, requires some expertise that
isn't typically found in a school district's facilities department. That's
not to knock facilities departments, but those folks are often stretched very thin and are
new to the area of green design.
The big program that we've been working on is the
Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD), where we've been
assisting them with implementation of their CHPS policy. We're offering
strategic advice on particular issues, and we're also reviewing every new
school design. We're reviewing plans and specs four times during the
design process in order to assure the district that the schools are
meeting their own self imposed standards. So we're kind of like an
independent third party review.
Prior to this year, CHPS was an entirely self-certifying system. So we thought it was important to work
with LAUSD because they were
supposed to have so many schools designed to CHPS, and because the district had been working with a credibility deficit for
so long. We were a way to ensure that they were actually walking the walk.
In the absence of a CHPS verification mechanism, somebody had to come in
and fill that gap. Now CHPS has its own verification program. That's a
great step forward. LEED for schools is, by definition, a third party
review system, because all LEED projects get an independent review by
USGBC.
Are you paid by the districts for your time?
We're not paid by the district, and that's very important to the
relationship. If we were paid by them, we would not be independent. We've been doing
this with funding from the Annenberg Foundation in Southern California and
the East Bay Foundation up north. Foundation support can be
lumpy, so we've also been funding the work out of our general fundraising,
like events. I'm
pretty sure that we would not have it any other way. Now and again we
entertain the idea of working with on a particular project getting paid by
a district or a design team, because then we're actually members of the
design team providing our technical expertise. But on the program
implementation side of things we really want to maintain our independence.
Our role may change over time. I think one of the values of being a
nonprofit is we are out there providing services and expertise where there
is not yet a market. Once the market catches up, once somebody's in the
business of providing direct technical assistance on green schools
projects and districts understand the value and are willing to pay for it, I think it's time for us to move on. We've fulfilled our
function. Not to say we won't continue to work in the areas of schools,
but we'll look for what areas of green schools are not being covered by
the market or government or another nonprofit. Ultimately, we're looking
to try and form the market.
Do you think green school mandates are in our future?
The question is quite simple. Is the school building community ready for a
mandate? I don't know. We're in a period of rapid change with regard to
environmental awareness, political support for green building, the
increased knowledge within the design community, within the construction
community and codes being ratcheted up. To make a prediction of where
we'll be in two years would be rash. But we're just seeing rapid, rapid
change. In a positive direction.
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