Green Plants for Green Buildings

Based on research evidence gathered over the last 50 years, a design ethic called biophilic design is emerging on a global scale. Biophilic design aims to restore natural stimuli in the built environment so that building occupants’ physiological, cognitive and psychological connections to the natural world are maintained, restored, and enhanced.

Research on organizations spanning a variety of sectors including workplaces, healthcare, retail stores, schools, and communities is providing powerful evidence that incorporating biophilic design features into urban environments mitigates diseases and dysfunction related to stress. Stress is a known cause of both mental health disorders and cardiovascular diseases, two diseases that according to the World Health Organization, are expected to be the top two global disease burdens by 2020, next year.

GPGB’s goals are:
To accelerate the broad adoption of biophilic design in practice and into the urban planning process;

To include the specification of living indoor nature in the point rating systems of wellness building standards, including Fitwel, WELL Building Standard and Living Building Challenge;

Additionally, to advocate that these rating systems be performance-based so that the biophilic design elements are maintained throughout the buildings’ lifetime;

To create a broad grass-roots demand for biophilic design among the general public and especially the occupants of office buildings, schools and hospitals, industrial and commercial buildings, and multi-family dwellings;

To provide building and human resource professionals with information they will use to advocate for biophilic design within their organizations.

GPGB is using multiple strategies to accomplish these goals.
We write continuing education curriculum (CE) for building professionals on biophilic design topics and submit these one-hour programs for certification by the leading associations representing building professionals (American Institute of Architects, American Society of Interior Designers, Building Owners and Managers Association, International Facilities Managers Association, US Green Building Council).

We present information on the economic benefits of biophilic design at the national conferences of building professionals.

We train and provide the CE curriculum to Registered Trainers who present educational sessions at the offices of architectural and design firms.

We curate and maintain a growing library of downloadable peer-reviewed research and white papers which communicate the benefits biophilic design has on human wellbeing.

We conduct a vibrant social media campaign on major social media channels (Twitter, Instagram, Facebook) fueling an informed and widespread demand for biophilic design.

We compose two monthly digital publications; Nature in the News curates biophilic design articles found on social media and contains a Call-to-Action to repost/retweet the information to the readers’ own social channels. Giving Nature a Voice curates and distributes stories and research information designed to help readers communicate the value of investing in biophilic design.

Working with an award-winning filmmaker we’ve produced three short, humorous videos communicating the benefits of plants in the workplace. We’ve submitted these for screening in appropriate film festivals in the US and France.

We produce print materials like the Alive! brochure with gorgeous photography and compelling testimonials from architects and designers that express the value of plants in the built environment.

Our strongest assets are our people. As an organization supported by donations, we are also donor-driven and benefit from the active volunteerism of board leadership and an engaged community of supporters. Our capabilities are enhanced by board members representing a diversity of ages, genders, professions, industries, and skills.

Our engaged community of supporters is willing to mobilize around specific projects, for example, volunteering to present our CE courses at national and international conferences. They are active in other organizations and identify collaboration opportunities for GPGB. They are a geographically diverse community, and this allows our organization’s footprint to be somewhat large for a small organization. We gather information, make friends, and have influence across and beyond the United States.

We work with an experienced association management company whose founder has a background in donor development and a 26-year track record of growing association cohesiveness, identity, and membership.

We have an executive team engaged in overseeing the financial health of our organization.
Over half of our supporters give via automatically recurring donations.

Our other capabilities for accomplishing our mission are include our ability to create and maintain a website (GPGB.org) that provides constantly updated research, white papers and other information about biophilic design; a of directory of biophilic design practitioners; the capacity to write, and deliver informative and visually attractive broadcast newsletters to our internal and external communities; to create collateral materials for booth and tradeshow exhibits and place spokespeople in those booths; to create accredited continuing education (CE) materials for building professionals so that they may keep their professional licenses current; our team of Registered Trainers who present CE courses in to architecture and design firms; to place biophilic design speakers into the conference programs of building professionals; to collaborate with other organizations and provide them biophilic design speakers for their webinars and podcasts; and to collaborate with private companies who provide CE courses to architects and designers.

Below is an incomplete list of what we have accomplished.
At the onset of COVID-19 shelter-in-place restrictions, we coordinated the creation and distribution of #StayPlanted campaign materials (a video, several infographics, blog posts), encouraging people to shelter-in-place and use the biophilic affect of plants to ease their stress levels. This campaign picked up national and international media coverage and expanded to include giving thank you plants to essential health care workers during the crisis.

We have published and made available for free download “The Economics of Biophilic Design” training materials.

We have uploaded to the website 103 peer-reviewed research papers, available for free download.

Presented “Biophilic Design – Indoor Design Strategies for Beauty, Wellness and Productivity” at the Biophilic Design Symposium hosted by Green Roofs for Healthy Cities.

In each of the months of June 2020 and July 2020, the website received over 10,400 visits from unique IP addresses. The people were downloading research papers and training materials from our resource pages.

We have written and received continuing education certification for seven one-hour courses communicating the benefits of nature in the built environment.

Our three short videos promoting the positive effects of nature in the workplace on employee wellbeing, productivity, and retention are being screened at indie film festivals and have been viewed over 35,000 times.

We maintain a robust social media presence with links to articles and research results and economic statistics. Our number of followers and engagements on these platforms is tracked and is steadily increasing. These statistics are reported twice a year at board meetings.

In 2019 we reached 1029 of building professionals with our CE courses. This is an 25% increase over the number of building professionals we spoke with in 2018.

On our website, GPGB.org, publish a gallery of professionally designed, installed and maintained projects that illustrate the biophilic design elements of access to nature and indoor nature. This gallery provides us an accessible way to communicate visually with architects, designers and contractors when we’re at tradeshows and conferences. It will facilitate the sharing of concepts and answering of questions.
What’s next:
Survey the professional communities of architects, designers and building owners and managers on the barriers they experiencing to specifying nature in their buildings.

We have engaged Cantilever Instructional Design to create a proof-of-concept video which will be used as a model to convert our seven continuing education courses to a SCORM compliant format for the Learning Management Systems of collaborating organizations. This will overcome the geographic barriers inherent with conferences and other face-to-face events;