Historic Green

Location; New Orleans, LA

Website : www.historicgreen.org

In 2007, several emerging young leaders of the U.S. Green Building Council’s volunteer network rallied the green building industry to commit more knowledge and resources to rebuilding New Orleans, which was still in recovery mode in the aftermath of the 2005 Hurricanes Katrina and Rita.

With more than 85% of its existing homes listed on the National Register of Historic Places, the need for environmentally responsible action was clear. So we started "Spring Greening", our annual greening event in the Lower 9th Ward.

We created an alliance with the Holy Cross Neighborhood Association in New Orleans’ Lower 9th Ward, who had set the objectives of carbon neutrality by 2020 and climate neutrality by 2030.

Our mission is to assist and lead in the transformation and restoration of under-resourced communities through education and service and with a focus on heritage conservation and sustainable design. All people are empowered to revitalize and sustain their communities, creating bright futures and celebrated pasts.

We do so by the following principles:

- Develop a healthy environment, sustainable living, equitable economic development and community empowerment, and conserve a community’s cultural uniqueness.

- Resource communities that have faced disaster or decline from natural and/or human causes such as social inequity, climate change and habitat loss. We help communities build civic and economic capacity through sustainable restoration of the built and natural environment.

- A community decides what is integral to its heritage and identity and needs to be restored and preserved. We educate our volunteers about the sense of place, and we value a community’s right to enjoy its natural surroundings and celebrate the local heritage.

- Share resources. We value collaboration, avoid competition and look for ways to become members, not merely volunteers, in the communities we serve.

- We respect the professional technical expertise of designers, builders, and tradesmen, and we treasure the deep local knowledge of community members and organizations. We engage professional design and construction experts who turn local values into the right ideas for the built and natural environments.

- We appreciate volunteer, partner and community member education. Community members, technical experts and volunteers all have valuable knowledge and skills to share, so we create many opportunities for learning.

- We help young, emerging talent become green restoration leaders.