Ellen Mitchell-Kozack, AIA, LEED BD+C, WELL AP, SEED, has joined LEO A DALY as vice president, chief sustainability officer. She leads strategic initiatives in sustainable design worldwide, including Environmental Social & Governance, alignment with the UN Global Compact and Sustainable Development Goals, carbon footprint assessment and social impact. 

Mitchell-Kozack is a nationally recognized voice in sustainability and public interest design. As senior vice president, director of sustainability at HKS, she led the firm’s DesignGreen studio and founded Citizen HKS, an impact initiative focused on leveraging sustainable design to address growing humanitarian needs of communities around the world. She has managed certification of more than 60 LEED projects worldwide, totaling $2.8 billion in construction.

Mitchell-Kozack is co-chair of the American Institute of Architects’ Large Firm Roundtable Sustainability Group. She was named one of several “Heroes and Mavericks” by Boutique Designin 2018, a BD+C 40 Under 40 winner in 2015 and has won Emerging Leader Awards from AIA Dallas (2012) and the Design Futures Council (2013). Her work has been featured in Dezeen, Fast Company, Architectural Digest and Designboom. She is an accomplished public speaker with previous engagements at Greenbuild (2018), NeoCon (2018), AIA National Convention (2017) and SXSW Eco (2015).

Ellen Joins Sustainable Nation to Discuss:

• The impact of the built environment on climate change, and areas for growth

• The connection between climate change and social inequity

• Advice and recommendations for sustainability leaders

Ellen's Final Five Question Responses:

What is one piece of advice you would give other sustainability professionals that might help them in their careers?

It's not just sustainability professionals. It's anybody who is sensitive to what's going on with climate change and the environment, it's very easy for us to feel this sense of alarm. That's inevitable. But what happens sometimes is that sense of alarm translates into call to action and a passion, which is great. But if not approached with the spirit of generosity and patience, that passion and drive can often come across as a little bit sanctimonious. When that happens, we channel our enthusiasm into a level of judgment that can turn people off and actually work against us. So the advice that I have is that we have to look at the long game. We have to meet people where they are. We have to realize that if we're too far ahead, then nobody's going to follow us. It's really hard when you just see incremental progress happen project after project after project. But what I've learned is that sometimes that has to be enough. We can't let perfect be the enemy of good. This is a marathon and not a sprint. So we have to be very self aware and sensitive, and we have to be smart and crafty and thoughtful about how we are approaching this topic because it is politicized and it comes with a set of baggage that is working against us. There's an art of persuasion here that is really crucial if we want to get beyond just talking to the people who already agree with us.

What are you most excited about right now in the world of sustainability?

I want you to ask me the next question because I want to answer both of them together. 

What is one book you would recommend sustainability professionals read? 

The book that fundamentally changed the way that I thought about sustainability was Paul Hawkins' The Ecology of Commerce, which came out in the mid-nineties. It's maybe more relevant today. The basic premise is that in the capitalist society and the way that our economy is currently structured, companies are incentivized, for lack of a better word, to as efficiently and cheaply as possible take, make and waste. The companies that can do that the best are the ones that make the most profit while the rest of us are incurring the debt of environmental degradation and social degradation. Those things aren't monetized, but we are carrying that debt. In order for us to actually make some substantive, meaningful change, we have to look at our economy. We need to look at our economy more as a whole system. Typically what you would see in nature is that one plant or animal is creating waste that is nutrients for another organism.

We've got to look at a circular economy where we're doing that too. There's a closed loop where the waste of one is the feed stock of another. We are never going to make enough progress if we're just trying to guilt people into recycling more, buying less single use plastic, turning off energy, turning off their lights, using energy efficient appliances. Some people are going to do that, some people are not. But it's never going to be enough in order for us to make the change that we need to make. In order for us to have a fundamental shift, we have to make the right thing, the default, the easy thing to do, and we need to fundamentally change our economic structure so that corporations don't define their success solely by their bottom line profit or their distributable profit to their shareholders. But they're looking at the full, common good in terms of environmental and social degradation. So that brings me to your first question about what excites me right now in the world of sustainability. The climate science has been conclusive that our economy has to fundamentally get off of fossil fuels. The realist and pessimist in me saw that come out in 2018 and then again in 2019. The realist and pessimist in me says, how are we going to slow down our economy long enough to remake it and get it off of fossil fuels? The technology is there, it's the collective will. I struggled to see how the powers that be, the corporations, the politicians, the leaders, and not just in the United States, but all over the world, I didn't see a lot of motivation on their part. I think Gretta Thornburg rightly has pointed that out many times. The collective will just wasn't there. I will say what has thrown a wrench in that is COVID-19. COVID, it's horrible, the amount of people that are coming down with it, the amount of people that are dying, the disproportionate effect on minority and socio-economic and disadvantaged communities. It's laying bare so many problems, but it's the wrench in the system that gives me hope that that maybe this is our chance.

The timeline is right in front of our faces. The wrench in the system has occurred. We are all at home. Everything has slowed down. The economy is tenuous at best. It feels like this is the moment in time where we can fall on our faces forward faster. We can start to make up ground in a way that we might not have been able to had this not happened. I don't need to elaborate on this, but I think the administration change is the key to that whole thing happening. If we have four more years of the same administration, obviously this is not going to happen. So the moment in time is here, the stars have aligned in a weird way for us to really start to look at some meaningful, significant, and systematic changes to our society.

What are some of your favorite resources or tools that really help you in your work?

The thing that I have seen that is a little bit different about my niche of my industry, the sustainability professionals within the architecture industry, I don't know that I've ever seen in another group. Technically we're competitors, we're in firms that are competing each other to win work. Because we've always been a little bit of the underdog, we've been kind of on the outskirts. People are sometimes slow to listen to us and absorb what we're trying to say. But because of that, I feel like we have formed a pretty tight knit group of people. I can honestly say that I know personally most of my sustainability leader counterparts in most other firms. A lot of them have been my mentors, a lot of them I would consider my friends outside of work. It's because of groups like BuildingGreen.

BuildingGreen is a website educational platform that is dedicated to all things sustainability in the architecture, engineering and construction world. They have a great database that covers everything from anything you'd want to know about LEED, to product specifications, to great articles that cover the gamut on all things sustainability, but they also facilitate groups like what started out as the SD Leaders. The SD Leaders, it's a safe space for us to come together and talk about opportunities for us to advance sustainability and high-performance in our industry together.

We try to skirt around anything that might be proprietary or causes to divulge secret information about any particular firm, but allow us to collectively crowdsource what's working in your firm; what have you been doing that's helped people gain more knowledge around the built environment and materials or resilience or whatever the topic might be. The other group that's followed in the SD Leaders' footsteps that has created the Countdown on Carbon page that I referenced is the LMRT, which stands for a Large Firm Round Table. They have a sustainability group and that group is more specific to the challenges and opportunities for a large firm, but they've also been a bit more actionable in terms of what can we do to get together as the 60 largest firms in the United States to start to move the market or move collective positioning. Because we're the large firms it's been really great to see such camaraderie and aligning from groups that would otherwise be solely in competition. It's a unique network.

The Large Firm's CEOs for instance have said, we need to realign ourselves to be more like the sustainability group, because they collectively come together and get things done. It's a unique corner of the industry, but I think that it has helped all things sustainability in the built environment evolve farther faster.

Where can our listeners go to learn more about you and your work at LEO A DALY?

The LEO A DALY website, which is www.leodaly.com. My LinkedIn profile is Ellen Mitchell-Kozack. In both of those places you can find my email address. Go straight for my email.