About Friends CenterIt has been said that we can’t live into what we can’t envision. Even before major construction was underway, the work of transforming Friends Center into a fossil fuel free and carbon neutral building became a story being told in unexpected places.
Here are some of the ways our project has touched others:
100 architects
and building professionals attended a seminar on green roofs: how and when they might be appropriate for building these professionals are planning.
200 architects
building professionals, and policy makers from nearby municipalities
attended a seminar on geothermal heating and cooling.
A Port Authority of New York and New Jersey Planner
saw a Friends Center flier that a friend had picked up at a United Nations Association event. He wanted consultation and encouragement on how to move a large system to making a commitment to green building.
8 IKEA store managers
read of the Green Roof being installed at Friends Center and asked if they could come to see what we are doing. IKEA is a Swedish furniture retailer who sell their wares around the world in huge warehouse-showrooms that average 300,000 square feet. That’s a lot of roof to go-green!
Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum
Ruler of Dubai, has declared starting in January 2008 all new buildings in Dubai would be green. Sandy Wiggins, then Chair of the United States Green Building Council, reported,
“I was in the Middle East speaking with government agencies, particularly in the United Arab Emirates and Dubai...When I talked about about Friends Center, I talked about it in language of the art of the possible. It is possible to build a climate neutral, fossil fuel free building in a way that makes economic sense. The next morning I walked out of my hotel and picked up a copy of the Gulf News, and read 'Dubai To Turn Green in 2008.'
"I want to thank the folks at Friends center for the willingness to risk exploring what is possible and do what is necessary, because it is inspiring people around the country, and now around the world, to massive change."
Wilmington College
2007 Westheimer Peace Symposium had the theme: “The Environment, Peace, and You: The Promise of a Sustainable World. ”The Coordinator of the Symposium and Curator of the Quaker Heritage Center at Wilmington, a Quaker College in Ohio, requested materials on the Friends Center project as part of the symposium. She later wrote, “It also turned out to have been perfect timing because Wilmington College was at the very early stages of two new renovation/construction projects of its own.” And she shared the Friends Center materials with the planners at the college.
There are other stories: Habitat for Humanity in Philadelphia, a Friends Meeting in Texas, a Friends School in Maryland, a major apartment complex. With just one article in The Philadelphia Inquirer more than 500,000 people were touched. Philadelphia City Paper pronounced that Quakers will lead the way into the environmentally friendly 21st Century (read more).
Who will this unfolding story touch next?
