The Institute’s Sponsors

Sponsors

Founded in 1886, GAF has become the largest roofing manufacturer in North America. The company’s products include a comprehensive portfolio of steep-slope and commercial roofing systems, which are supported by an extensive national network of factory-certified contractors. The company’s success is driven by a commitment to Advanced Quality, Industry Expertise, and Solutions Made Simple for contractors, specifiers, and property owners alike. In 2011, GAF was the first roofing manufacturer to offer a Lifetime limited warranty on all of its laminated shingles. GAF has also developed Advanced Protection® Shingle Technology, which provides superior durability and wind resistance while reducing the use of natural resources. GAF also offers all major low-slope roofing technologies, including repair and maintenance products and roof restoration systems (often at half the cost of a new roof), as well as new roofing systems such as Everguard ® Extreme TPO.

Headquartered in Sweden, ASSA ABLOY is the global leader in door opening solutions, dedicated to satisfying end-user needs for security, safety and convenience. Since its formation in 1994, ASSA ABLOY has grown from a regional company into an international group with over 40,000 employees, operations in 70 countries, and annual sales exceeding US$7 billion. The company is a leader in electronic access control and has pioneered energy-saving Power Over Ethernet (PoE) technology. In the U.S. the company includes such well-known brands as Sargent, Yale, and Corbin Russwin. ASSA ABLOY has also become a leader in the sustainability movement, embracing Health Products Declarations, carbon emission reductions, and comprehensive sustainability reporting.

HKS is a worldwide architecture firm founded in 1939 with 24 offices and more than 1,400 dedicated and experienced professionals. Projects have been completed in over 1,500 cities in 92 countries. We are passionate, knowing that people live, work, play and inhabit the spaces and places we imagine and envision for our clients. We are responsive, understanding that we are in a service business and the vision is that of our clients – never of ours alone. We are global, creating exceptional spaces across the globe through our connected network of offices and people. We are one, with tremendous talent across a wide spectrum of expertise, believing that the value of talent, experience and knowledge is multiplied when shared. We are thorough, balancing extraordinary design with technical expertise and construction administration backgrounds for streamlined, on-time, within-budget projects.

The Green Engineer, Inc. is a sustainable design consulting firm, led by Chris Schaffner, P.E., LEED Fellow, a nationally recognized expert in cost-effective, high-performance design. The employee-owned company works with architects, builders, commercial owners, nonprofits and the government sector to provide a wide range of consulting services, including sustainable design, design review, LEED certifications, life-cycle analysis, energy and daylight modeling, energy audits, and climate action plans. The company is based in Concord, MA.

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.