Joel Todd on understanding the whole and working synergistically

Design the Future

Joel Todd has been working in the green building field for more than 30 years, most recently as a USGBC Senior Fellow focused on social equity. Her career focused on green building methods and metrics development; she contributed significantly to LEED’s earliest versions and co-founded the LEED Society Equity Working Group (an effort for which she was recognized with USGBC's prestigious Malcolm Lewis Impact Award).

She describes how she came to work in this movement and how the people made her stay: “That’s really the key to finding your path, I think: Find people you respect and enjoy working with and then keep learning from them.”

Joel has a long view on the arc of progress and some pointed opinions about both the progress so far and what may be ahead. She notes, for example, that the deep knowledge in the industry has had some unintended consequences. She urges the community to “get out of our detailed, speciality comfort zones to have those conversations about the whole and how it all fits together. Otherwise, instead of working synergistically, things are going to start clashing.”