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USGBC's audit of education provision

The last story covered the educational role of the USGBC and how it seemed to offer exclusively LEED accreditation courses, which are a revenue raiser for the Council. In an attempt to answer this criticism, the USGBC has made efforts to get green design on university agenda’s. The Green Building Council’s role is slowly moving towards placing environmental courses higher up the agenda. A key role of the GBC’s is to disseminate information and yet in the last ten years the USGBC has done very little, until a recent review which saw the setting up of an education committee, among other things. Karol Kaiser of the USGBC says, ‘In order to move these efforts to the next level, we have established a USGBC Formal Education Committee that will be looking at identifying excellence in green building education and showcasing these examples. We hope to have a forum at Greenbuild in Colorado in November to begin a dialogue…’ It was largely university lecturers turning up for USGBC chapter meetings that brought this about, not as you would expect canvassing on the part of USGBC staff.

Karol Kaiser goes on to explain that ‘USGBC has nearly 200 college and university members. Our membership is by organization and includes all full time staff. These staff members are LEED accredited educational professionals who teach how to complete audits for new buildings along USGBC guidelines’. She continues, ‘Greening the curriculum is high on our agenda along with campus sustainability efforts. There are many great examples already being implemented in colleges and universities in the U.S. and some requirements in place for institutional accreditation. There are also a few resources that have attempted to catalog these programs including a study by the AIA Committee on the Environment www.aia.org and a book called “Ecological Design and Building Schools”, written by Sandra Leibowitz Earley.’ So it seems that the USGBC is now recruiting educational professionals in the universities and colleges of America to green the curriculum.

The USGBC has realised that limiting its activities to LEED Rating Systems is a little narrow minded. There are also a number of campaigns to get university buildings to go green.

The lessons for the UKGBC are clear. Get involved in building courses and don’t limit themselves to paid for BREEAM courses. Many UK architectural courses do not include much in the way of sustainable design, despite growing interest and the UKGBC could expand its role to include making changes to architectural and building course programs. It would be disappointing if all the UKGBC did was sell places for its BREEAM Rating professionals.

The temptation is to follow the money. There is clearly a great deal of wealth to be had for these types of organizations, as they sell membership and courses, plus the building inspections they carry out. As the movement expands I believe it is vital not to forget the point of the GBC’s and that is to disseminate information to bring about wholesale changes in building practices. This cannot be limited to the generation of funds, which some GBC’s around the world have got very good at.

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