Illinois Green's Impact Over the Last 5 Years
Five years ago, Illinois Green Alliance launched a new strategic plan with a bold north star to guide our work: to make net zero buildings feasible, affordable, and so commonplace that every building in Illinois was net zero by 2050.
Mainstreaming the technology and building methods, whether new or existing, is no easy feat. But we realized no one was better positioned to make it happen than green building professionals.Our focus over the last five years have been about laying the foundation necessary to meet our long-term vision and I’m excited to share the progress we’ve made.
These past five years have been guided by three pillars:
● Educating industry professionals to ensure they have the expertise to use net zero building methods in their work and can help us raise awareness about their value with building owners and policy makers.
● Removing barriers by providing information about the technical, financial, social and policy roadblocks to net zero adoption and passing new laws that help to overcome these barriers.
● Demonstrating it can work everywhere by collaborating with building types in historically underinvested communities that are considered difficult to implement net zero methods.
That focus has paid off, allowing us to meet many of the goals we set for our work across all of our strategies. For example:
Our organization and our reach have grown exponentially!
Our team has doubled from four staff members in 2020 to eight now!
Our membership has also grown by 250%
Our following on LinkedIn has grown from 346 to over 7,000!
We’ve helped Illinois become a national leader in green building policy!
By making the voice of building industry professionals heard in Springfield, we helped Illinois pass two nation-leading climate bills: the 2021 Climate and Equitable Jobs Act and the 2025 Clean and Reliable Grid Affordability Act.
We’ve helped local communities take major action too! Evanston became the second city in the Midwest to adopt
building performance standards and the city was also the first to implement
high-performance stretch codes. Oak Park became the first municipality in the state to pass a new construction decarbonization ordinance.
We've provided the education that industry professionals need!
Over the last five years, we’ve held 289 events with over 18,500 people attending. These include new, innovative signature events like our first-ever Getting to Zero Tech Forum.
We also launched a brand-new resource to help industry professionals, owners, and operators find trusted advice to meet their energy goals: the Building Energy Hub. Through the hub, we’ve developed tools to power Illinois with clear building performance solutions including the Funding and Financing Guide, Building Performance and Decarbonization Guide, Vendor Directory, and more!
We’ve helped schools go green!
90 schools across the state have implemented sustainability projects through the
Illinois Green Schools Project. This initiative worked with 129 sustainability expert mentors to provide the tools and knowledge to empower over 5,700 students and 500 staff and faculty to take action in their community.
What's next for Illinois Green
These achievements over the last 5 years have helped Illinois buildings make incredible progress towards net zero, but there’s still plenty of work to do. We’re going to continue expanding our education reach across the state, developing new tools for the Building Energy Hub, supporting successful green building policy adoption and implementation, and more. To ensure that we meet these goals, we’ll be launching a new strategic plan that will guide the next 5 years of our work. Stay tuned to hear more about our plans and how you can get involved!
