Greetings AEC Sustainability Leaders -
This is an update on where we stand with the BBB letter. In addition to posting this to the AEC SDL (Green Gurus) Forum, we are sending the same message to all current signatories by email to make sure everyone is notified. Apologies for putting two items in your inboxes!
First, please read to the end for action items!
Here is a [LINK] to the pdf of the letter sent to the White House on February 5th (it’s also attached to this message). We sent it directly to Gina McCarthy and David J. Hayes, and within a few minutes of sending, Chris received the following reply directly from Gina McCarthy:
“Chris – I wanted to thank you and your colleagues for all their great work and for taking the time to share your ideas. I know Ali, David and the rest of our team will take a close look!
Gina”
So we can all rest assured that our letter at least landed right where we wanted it to land! (A big thanks to Chris for getting the direct email addresses for both of our target addressees!)
Feel free to share the pdf within your organizations, but we ask that you wait to post to social media (or elsewhere) for just a few more days, because we are developing a public/social media roll-out for the letter that will be available late this week or early next (that will include instructions and sample text for posts) - we will then want all of your organizations to promote it with abandon!
(Note: the “Public” version of the letter will also include the firms that have signed on since the Feb 5th cut-off date, showing an even bigger signatory list.)
The public roll out is expressly intended to garner more signatories, lots more, and one way we want to do this by expanding the pool of organizations that can sign on.
(Note: we’re definitely still welcoming AEC signatories).
As we were getting close to the first deadline, we were approached by a number of organizations that weren’t design, engineering or construction firms, but are within the built-environment space, ranging from NGOs, to affordable housing CDCs, to the Bullitt Foundation. So we want all of these types of folks, and others that see themselves fitting under the built-environment umbrella to be able to sign, and we will categorize those signatures as they come in, keeping the AEC firms at the top. We’ll then collect signatories through March 10th, reformat the letter, and re-send to the Biden Administration to confirm, and punctuate, how ready our broad sector of businesses are for the actions we suggest in the letter.
For this next round of signature gathering, we have developed a Google Form to collect the signatures, organization categories, and a little bit of (anonymous and approximate) demographic data on the organizations that have signed, so we can add those statistics to the second sending.
So today we ask:
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All of you who have already signed, to please follow this [LINK] to the form and fill it out so we can collect the demographic data on all of your organizations in addition to those who will sign-on in the coming weeks.
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For those of you whose organizations haven’t signed yet, it’s not too late - use the 2 weeks ahead to get your firm to sign on and join this campaign!
We’ll get back to you soon with the Public Roll-out information as soon as it’s ready.
Thanks again to everyone!
Clark, Chris and Nadav
