Alaska Chapter Merger Brings New
Green Building Opportunities Statewide

Expect to hear a lot more about green building in Alaska in the coming months. That’s because the Alaska Chapter of the U.S. Green Building Council has merged with the Cascadia Region Green Building Council. By aligning with a larger, more established organization, Alaskans can expect more professional development opportunities and increased efforts statewide in promoting environmentally sustainable building and green design.

The merger means that Alaska will have a part-time staff director position based in Anchorage, more educational opportunities and two seats on Cascadia’s board of directors. The Cascadia chapter is considered a leader among all USGBC chapters and will bring the support of an 11-member staff to work on the state’s behalf.
“What really makes this exciting is that we will have the capacity to start serving all areas of the state, even smaller communities and villages” said Lynn Barrett, chair of the former U.S. Green Building Council Alaska Chapter.

Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) is the nationally accepted benchmark for the design, construction and operation of high performance, green buildings. The LEED Green Building Rating System™ encourages adoption of sustainable green building and development practices through a universally understood and accepted tools and performance criteria. Architects, real estate professionals, facility managers, engineers, interior designers, landscape architects, construction managers, lenders and government officials all use LEED to help transform the built environment to sustainability. This becomes even more important as state and local governments across the country are adopting LEED for public-owned and public-funded buildings.
As a part of the Cascadia Region, Alaskans can expect to see more education, speakers, workshops and outreach about LEED. Other benefits are expected to include better marketing support, global working relationships with British Columbia, Washington and Oregon on sustainability efforts and growth in branch and satellite areas across the state.

For more information about this new, exciting opportunity for Alaska, visit the Alaska Chapter web site at http://chapters.usgbc.org/alaska and the Cascadia Region site at www.cascadiagbc.org/.