Over the past week, the BetterWorld team has been so fortunate to attend a number of events around the 2010 Sustainable Industries Economic Forums featuring Architecture for Humanity founder and CEO, Cameron Sinclair. Kudos to our partner and customer Sustainable Industries for continuing to lead the way in Sustainable media, with their newly redesigned website, magazine and pace-setting Economic Forum series, they are proving without a doubt that SI is a voice rising above the rest.
In a word, inspirational. We witnessed Cameron Sinclair bring down the house in both San Francisco and Seattle and were able to attend the SI sponsor event in Seattle, held at the downtown campus of the Bainbridge Graduate Institute, also BetterWorld customer and partner.
Here’s a great excerpt from the SI site reviewing the San Francisco event last week:
“Last time Cameron Sinclair was on a West Coast speaking tour was almost a decade ago. That time around, Sinclair dropped f-bombs about “starchitects” to university audiences.
On Thursday in San Francisco, the scene was considerably different, as the co-founder, executive director and Chief Eternal Optimist of Architecture for Humanity held forth for a hotel ballroom of sustainable business leaders at the Sustainable Industries Economic Forum, the first of four such events being held on the West Coast.
Sinclair had another bomb to drop, though: He’s been tapped by the Obama Administration to serve as an advisor to the U.S. Agency for International Development.
That means bringing the expertise and energy behind Architecture for Humanity—a network of 40,000 professionals that uses architecture and design to tackle humanitarian crises—to the federal agency that provides economic and humanitarian assistance around the world.
Sinclair said one key to his organization’s continued growth has been its system of centralized-to-distributed management and diversified funding, which have allowed it to cut through red tape and mobilize grassroots resources for projects including widespread rebuilding efforts in Haiti, sports facilities that double as public health resources in Africa, and a community center to preempt favela development in Brazil.
[ Check out this great video on AFH on PBS' Frontline – here }
Also indispensable is its army of architects, who he describes as “PhD MacGyvers,” who know when it’s time to “drop the pencil, pick up the blowtorch and build the damn thing.”
We look forward to supporting and hopefully partnering with Architecture for Humanity in the months and years to come, stay tuned!
Ready to serve,
Gina and Matt
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