Our Buildings Hurt Us, But They Don’t Have To | Sara Neff | TEDxCulverCity
the voice for green and healthy homes, offices, and schools
About Me
My goal is to help mitigate climate change and improve human health through transforming the built environment. I’m doing this via serving as Senior Vice President at Kilroy Realty Corporation. I took Kilroy from having no sustainability program to being named the #1 publicly traded office company in North America on sustainability, and now we are going to achieve carbon neutral operations by the end of 2020, something no American real estate firm has done.
I love getting the word out about sustainability, health and our homes, offices and schools. I have been doing improvisational theater for the last 15 years, and my two amazing daughters spur me to tackle bigger and bigger challenges every day.
How it started:
I am probably a bad mom. Last year, my two year-old daughter started coughing herself to sleep every night for months, necessitating breathing masks and steroids. It wasn’t until she got diagnosed with asthma that it finally dawned on me that there could be a connection between my daughter’s breathing and the fact that we live in spitting distance of a busy freeway (I don’t spit on this freeway, for the record). I had learned about an air filter through a health-focused building certification I had to do for work and installed one at home, and the coughing was gone in two days. Seems like a happy ending, but the experience gnawed at me. For chrissakes, I’m a GREEN BUILDING PROFESSIONAL. And, like, a good one. So, maybe I’m stupid, or a bad mother (or both?). But that can’t be the whole story. I realized then that if a building’s health impacts can be invisible to me, all health and earth conscious as I am, those impacts are probably invisible to almost all of us. That experience is what inspired me to get the word out.
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Speaking on Health, the Environment and Buildings
Our homes, offices and schools are the massive unseen force that is dragging down our health, productivity and the environment with them, and my goal through my work and public speaking is to change that paradigm.
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Excited to be participating in this @bisnow panel at the end of the month with some of my favorite women in sustain… https://t.co/HY1Vb4t3DR -
Excited to be interviewed for this story about our targets to achieve net zero emissions by 2025 and absolute zero… https://t.co/HRwNsLASjE -
Happy to contribute to this @Bisnow article about climate resilience in NYC: https://t.co/d5r0Y6hki6
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