Oct 29, 2026 · 59 min · 12 segments
As market demands and climate goals rapidly accelerate, true leadership requires a shift from mitigation to restoration. Jaime Van Mourik, Vice President of Market Transformation at Living Future…
Aaron SmithHostAnd our mission is to provide the tools and support needed to drive transformation towards a more regenerative, resilient, and just building industry.
And we do this by focusing on three levers, buildings, products, and organizations, or really the people within the organizations.
We operate three building certification programs, the Living Building Challenge, Zero Carbon Certification, and Zero Energy Certification, as well as a product certification, the Living Product Challenge, and a product transparency label called Declare.
Our vision, simply stated, is for a future that is socially just, culturally rich, and ecologically restorative.
So this has been the question being asked for decades now, and a place that I spent a lot of time in, how do we do less harm to the environment, to communities, and to people? And it's really the starting point for sustainability efforts.
At Living Future, we strive to reorient ourselves in our programs around this question.
What does good look like? Not what's the minimum we can do, but what's the best we can envision? Not just less bad, not just neutral, but work that yields truly positive impacts.
We believe this is a powerful and important paradigm shift for us as individuals and for the industry as a whole.
It pushes us out of code compliance territory beyond green or high performance or sustainable thinking and into a regenerative design approach where we can aim for truly positive buildings and materials and organizations that don't just minimize harm, but that actually heal damage.
So I'm going to spend the rest of our time talking first about the building certification programs that Living Future offers, along with a brief overview of our Materials program and the Just program, in addition to walking you through resources to support your work.
To date, over 1,000 projects have registered under one or more of Living Futures building programs.
They range in size from tiny homes to over a million square feet and span commercial, educational, government, healthcare, residential, retail, and other typologies.
And our mission is to provide the tools and support needed to drive transformation towards a more regenerative, resilient, and just building industry.
And we do this by focusing on three levers, buildings, products, and organizations, or really the people within the organizations.
We operate three building certification programs, the Living Building Challenge, Zero Carbon Certification, and Zero Energy Certification, as well as a product certification, the Living Product Challenge, and a product transparency label called Declare.
Our vision, simply stated, is for a future that is socially just, culturally rich, and ecologically restorative.
So this has been the question being asked for decades now, and a place that I spent a lot of time in, how do we do less harm to the environment, to communities, and to people? And it's really the starting point for sustainability efforts.
At Living Future, we strive to reorient ourselves in our programs around this question.
What does good look like? Not what's the minimum we can do, but what's the best we can envision? Not just less bad, not just neutral, but work that yields truly positive impacts.
We believe this is a powerful and important paradigm shift for us as individuals and for the industry as a whole.
It pushes us out of code compliance territory beyond green or high performance or sustainable thinking and into a regenerative design approach where we can aim for truly positive buildings and materials and organizations that don't just minimize harm, but that actually heal damage.
So I'm going to spend the rest of our time talking first about the building certification programs that Living Future offers, along with a brief overview of our Materials program and the Just program, in addition to walking you through resources to support your work.
To date, over 1,000 projects have registered under one or more of Living Futures building programs.
They range in size from tiny homes to over a million square feet and span commercial, educational, government, healthcare, residential, retail, and other typologies.
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