Pioneers in the Green School Revolution

GREEN TECHNOLOGY MAGAZINE. FEB 14, 2008. 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.

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