RDI Consulting

The Resilient Design Institute offers a wide range of services to help your community, organization, building, or program address resiliency. RDI founder and president Alex Wilson leads such efforts and brings in collaborators as needed for specific projects.

Alex has been at the forefront of the resilient design movement since his work on The New Orleans Principles following Hurricane Katrina in 2005. His work on “passive survivability” (the idea that buildings should be designed and built to maintain habitable temperatures during extended power outages) has been pivotal—and serves as an important bridge between resilience and sustainability (because buildings that keep occupants safe during a power outage use far less energy and generate far less carbon emissions during normal operations).

Rather than maintain a staff at RDI, the organization collaborates with other experts for most of this contract work. This distributed organizational structure is efficient and allows the skills to be matched with the needs for those projects. Visit our collaborators page for more on the individuals and organizations we work with.

For new project inquiries email alex@resilientdesign.org

David W. Orr, Ph.D

David W. Orr is Paul Sears Distinguished Professor of Environmental Studies & Politics, Emeritus. He also served as “Counselor to the President” of Oberlin College for ten years. He is the author of eight books, including Dangerous Years: Climate Change and the Long Emergency (Yale, 2016) and Down to the Wire: Confronting Climate Collapse (Oxford, 2009) and co-editor of three others. He has authored over 220 articles, reviews, book chapters, and professional publications. In the past twenty-five years he has served as a board member or adviser to ten foundations and on the Boards of many organizations including the Rocky Mountain Institute, Bioneers, and the Aldo Leopold Foundation.

He is currently a Trustee of the Alliance for Sustainable Colorado, Children and Nature Network, and the WorldWatch Institute. He has been awarded nine honorary degrees and a dozen other awards including a Lyndhurst Prize, a National Achievement Award from the National Wildlife Federation, leadership awards from the U.S. Green Building Council (2014) and from Second Nature (2012), and a lifetime achievement award from Green Energy Ohio and the North American Association for Environmental Education. He has lectured at hundreds of colleges and universities throughout the U.S., Europe, Latin America, and Asia. He headed the effort to design, fund, and build the Adam Joseph Lewis Center, which was named by an AIA panel in 2010 as “the most important green building of the past thirty years,” as “one of thirty milestone buildings of the twentieth century” by the U.S. Department of Energy, and as one of “52 game-changing buildings of the past 170 years” by the editors of Building Design +Construction in January, 2016. He was instrumental in the design and funding of the Peter B. Lewis Gateway Center. He is the founder of the Oberlin Project and a founder of the journal Solutions. His current work is on the state of American democracy.