2025-2027 Strategic Plan

A Note From CEO Lindsay Baker

When we ask ourselves how we are doing, we must start with a realistic gauge of climate action progress and remind ourselves that we are still tragically barrelling into an era of extinction, heartbreaking climate-induced migration, and resource depletion. We have transgressed 6 of the 9 planetary boundaries and we are feeling the effects of these transgressions more and more every day. As these intersecting crises become more present in our lives, there is a growing and strengthening community of people dedicated to transforming the building industry.

At Living Future, we hold a vision and a commitment to this transformation that is so deeply and urgently needed. We believe that it is critical to clearly articulate and inspire people towards our ultimate goals. We are proud to have created tools and resources that are actionable, accessible and evolving to support the growth of our movement as we make these ambitious shifts. As industry leaders, the community of Living Future practitioners and champions have a key role to play and we are here to support you in this work, but this takes all of us, using our unique voices in our unique communities, to really achieve the transformation we need in the next decade.

We aim to have regenerative, resilient solutions adopted as the common practice for everyone creating and maintaining buildings by 2030. To accomplish this, we have ambitious goals in every area of our current work and are embarking on several areas of new growth to provide the inspiration, support, and community to expedite the journey towards a regenerative building sector. We will be pushing for ambitious goals and measuring our industry’s progress towards them. We hope you will join us.

A Summary of Our Tactics & Goals

Our Buildings Work

The Living Building Challenge, issued 18 years ago, remains the north star for defining what regenerative impact (health, environmental and social) looks like in the architecture, engineering, design, and construction (AEC) industry. Once seen as an impossible challenge, Living Future building programs are now utilized by the largest AEC firms, multiple Fortune 500 companies, major global universities and developers, many municipalities, schools and community centers. These clients are building corporate offices, laboratories, multi-family residences including affordable housing, retail spaces, warehouses- some of the most innovative projects around the world. Firms and owners are committing to multiple projects and aligning their design and development practices with Living Future standards. We have always and will continue to be recognized as the most advanced standard in regenerative design as we keep refining with our community’s feedback.

1.1 Inspiration

• Leverage our 35 certified Living Buildings globally to impact their communities and others around the world by partnering with the stewards of these buildings to tell their stories, share lessons learned, and leverage their work in policymaking and regulation.
• Emphasize and improve the educational imperatives of achieving Living Building Certification in the next version of the Living Building Challenge
• Facilitate 15 million visitors to buildings certified under our buildings programs
• Reach 300,000 people with stories of Living Buildings through support and attendance at industry events.
• Engage with 50 professional organizations globally to increase our influence in the building industry.

1.2 Support for Those on the Path to Regenerative Buildings and Systems

• Provide clearer guidance and better support for those pursuing the Living Building Challenge via robust technical guidance for different building types and better tools and resources
• Bring the affordable housing sector further into our work by by providing training and tools for healthier material selection, curated education resources, case studies, and events
• Expand our Critical Buildings program to include K-12 public school buildings
• Support 35 million square feet of projects in our building programs on their path to certification and register a further 50 million square feet of projects 
• Increase the diversity of registered project types, with a focus on supporting community resiliency-centered projects.   

1.3 Refining Pathways to Regeneration 

• Establish more pathways, clarity, and visionary aspirations to Living Buildings with a holistic revision to the Living Building Challenge (LBC 5.0), emphasizing clarity of process and metrics,  community centered design, impact beyond the building footprint, and inspiring the community.
• Define transformational equity and justice frameworks for the building industry within the Living Building Challenge as part of the Equity in the Built Environment initiative.

Our Products-Related Work

Today, the building products industry contributes significantly to global resource depletion, greenhouse gas emissions, social inequalities, biodiversity loss, and ecosystem health around the world. At Living Future, we inspire and support a positive tomorrow: shifting from mitigating negative impacts to creating positive outcomes through regenerative product design and manufacturing practices. Through Declare, we work with hundreds of manufacturers each year to boldly disclose ingredient information, help eliminate the use of LBC Red List chemicals, and simplify the selection and procurement of healthier products for architects, builders, designers, and end-users. Declare acts as a first step for many manufacturers towards identifying and mitigating undesirable ingredients and environmental and social impacts, leading to the creation of goods, and ultimately the creation of certified Living Products under the Living Product Challenge (LPC).

2.1 Scaling the Regenerative Materials Economy

• Increase our outreach efforts by convening industry professionals, gathering Market Advisory Groups, improving and expanding branding and marketing, and more 
• Double the number of participating manufacturers in our materials programs from 375 to 750.

2.2 Supporting Manufacturers on the Regenerative Journey

• Build up a toolbox of support for manufacturers who are innovating the products of tomorrow through direct technical assistance, opportunities for peer networking and learning, and streamlining tools to connect regenerative products with the AEC community
• Increase the total number of published labels by 50% from 1,500 to 2,250 
• Encourage adoption of multiple labels per product, with 20% of products achieving two or more labels 

2.3 A New Structure for Our Products-Related Work

• Set a new North Star of of what good looks like for manufactured products with a new version of LPC that is organized around three pillars—Health, Environment, and Equity—deepening our current Declare program and introducing two new transparency labels focused on Climate Health, Ecosystem Health, and Circular Economy and on Social Health and Equity
• Focus on alignment of data reporting to help maximize the investments being required of manufacturers.
• Answer the market need for inspiration, scaling, rigor, affordability, and alignment

Our Organizational Equity Work

Initially introduced in 2014, Just is a disclosure tool and framework for reflection, evaluation, and continuous improvement that helps organizations address social justice and equity throughout all aspects of their policies, practices, and culture. Just uplifts the understanding that it is people who make up businesses and communities and that people are the core of creating a Living Future. We launched Just 3.0 in 2024 after a robust research and development process and over the next three years we intend to focus our energies on enhancing the Just community. 

• Enhance the Just community, creating opportunities for organizations to connect, share, and learn
• Do outreach in the construction industry, where a commitment to the principles in Just is especially impactful to a large community of workers who have been historically marginalized
• Triple the employees represented by participating Just organizations, contributing to a positive work environment and benefits for 165,000 or more people, and drive a 50% increase in published labels by supporting 400 or more organizations through the process

Building Community, Advocating For Change

Through joining our member community, participating in our programs, attending events and more, Living Future helps regenerative building practitioners and advocates make a positive and wide-scale impact on the built environment by connecting them with a network of innovative peers, exclusive resources, and cutting-edge learning opportunities. Convening and creating community is a critical part of our theory of change, because this field is still relatively new and small. We serve as a convening force to help regenerative building enthusiasts learn and become more skilled practitioners in the field, and then to help people find technical solutions, collaborators and strategies to grow their businesses into regenerative work.  

4.1 Living Future Membership

• Grow our membership base to 7,500 total members
• Build on our lessons learned to facilitate thriving local groups within the growing movement for regenerative buildings 
• Invest in new technology to allow members to connect more seamlessly and engage in more peer-to-peer opportunities 

4.2 Education and our Living Future Accreditation (LFA) Program

• Grow our catalog of inspirational and advanced courses with the goal of equipping leaders with the competencies, confidence, and connections to transform the way we shape our world and close the knowledge and skills gaps needed to meet our ambitious goals for the AEC industry
• Develop courses focusing specifically on materials, LPC, and Declare 
• Enroll 14,500 new learners 

4.3 Our New Advocacy Work

• With the goal of ensuring the Living Future community can become a strong and ambitious force for public policy advancement in the field of buildings and their climate, health and justice impacts, develop a complete Policy Platform by the end of 2025, with funding secured for staff to build momentum on that platform in 2026 and beyond.

4.4 Our International Community

• Continue to support our Living Future International Affiliates, the Living Future Institute of Australia and Living Future Europe
• Being mindful of the US-Canadian-centric context of our programs, ensure that the philosophy and the spirit of our work can spread around the world through our educational and membership programs, our social media, our publications, and our presence in global networks
• Develop a ladder of engagement approach that outlines defined paths for international engagement, including a process for creating new affiliate organizations.

4.5 Ecotone and Long-Form Publishing

• Publish 5-7 new books featuring innovative design and construction stories
• Produce 3+ new whitepapers or industry reports  
• Use our previously published books to develop short format content that can be used across channels to share those stories more broadly in coordination with our Education and Marketing efforts

Operational Plans

Growing our voice

• Improve our storytelling to leverage the compelling successes of Living Future to attract new audiences, nurturing them through compelling narratives that inspire action and align with our mission
• Publish 35 new Trim Tab blog posts annually, acting as a leading voice on key topics such as regenerative buildings, the Living Building Challenge, zero carbon buildings, the Red List, and Living Future’s Declare and Just programs
• Gain 21,000 new followers across all social media platforms and 7,500 new newsletter subscribers

Operational goals: 

• Improve financial resilience by growing an operating surplus, growing earned revenue by 20% year-over-year, and securing approximately 20-25% of our annual revenue from philanthropic sources.
• Increase staff compensation by achieving a level 3 on our Just Living Wage indicator and follow through on our J.E.D.I. (Justice, Equity, Diversity and Inclusion) Framework operational commitments 
• Invest in our technology infrastructure to revamp our data infrastructure and streamline internal work.