Greenbuild 2025 Legacy Project
The Greenbuild Legacy Project is a yearly initiative that leaves a lasting impact on the host city of the Greenbuild International Conference and Expo. The Greenbuild Host Committee selects a project that demonstrates the benefits of green buildings and sustainability for community health and equity.
Resiliency Studio for Sustainable Recovery
Greenbuild's 2025 Legacy Project is titled: Resiliency Studio for Sustainable Recovery. The Resiliency Studio is a welcoming, community-centered space designed to support families recovering from the Eaton Fire and residents of Pasadena and Altadena’s most impacted neighborhoods. This includes Altadena’s North Lake Avenue business district, where the fire destroyed key community staples such as a local hardware store, grocery stores, and the historic Charles S. Farnsworth Park is hurting a largely working-class community, where families already face systemic barriers to sustainable rebuilding and recovery. In Pasadena, the affected areas coincide with census tracts federally recognized as disadvantaged under the Justice40Census Tract Map Initiative. This space will serve as a climate resilience hub, providing hands-on tools, workshops, and sustainable resources to help community members rebuild with confidence, creativity, and care.
The studio will offer resources that reduce household costs while promoting low-carbon lifestyles, such as sewing machines for clothing repair, bike maintenance stations, gardening and composting education, and induction cooking demonstrations. It will also provide access to basic tools and equipment, available to the community, especially day laborers, many of whom lost essential job-related items in the fire, helping them get back on their feet and supporting their long-term recovery and livelihood. Pop-up workshops, speaker events, and hands-on skill-sharing will ensure the space is active, empowering, and culturally relevant. Inspired by both the urgent need for climate adaptation and the enduring strength of communities displaced by wildfire, this project aims to restore a sense of belonging, agency, and hope. Our vision is to create a replicable model of resilience through self-sufficiency, one that not only fills an immediate recovery need but also strengthens long-term environmental justice outcomes. By activating a currently underutilized storefront in a walkable, transit-accessible corridor, the Resiliency Studio brings visibility to sustainable rebuilding, makes resources tangible, and ensures that wildfire recovery is community-led and enduring, not just reactive.
Background
Day One has 38 years of experience working alongside residents, young people, elected officials, and other stakeholders to strengthen and build vibrant, healthy communities. Our efforts focus on advancing public health, advocating for inclusive policies, engaging youth, igniting community-driven behavioral change, and fostering climate resilience.
Throughout the years, Day One’s dedication has earned numerous awards, increased grant funding, and, most importantly, significant public health policy victories. These accomplishments help address systemic inequities, promote social justice, combat bias, dismantle tokenism, and tackle social determinants of health, particularly within vulnerable, underserved communities.
The agency and its team are recognized leaders in youth advocacy, community engagement, coalition building, policy development, and environmental health across the San Gabriel Valley. Our team excels in outreach, facilitating community meetings, forming coalitions, and leading the charge in implementing community-driven strategies. By prioritizing evidence-based public health approaches and sustainable urban planning, we work to prevent chronic disease, promote healthy, active living, and build climate resilience in cities and neighborhoods.
Our recent accomplishments include:
- Partnered with the City of Pico Rivera to create and adopt a Climate Action and Adaptation Plan
- Collaborated with LACI, The Energy Coalition and the State of California to implement an induction stove retrofit and air quality monitoring pilot in Basset and Avocado Heights
- Served as the LA County Safe Clean Water Program Watershed Coordinator for the Upper San Gabriel Valley
- Bike Month Pasadena 2023 and 2024, featuring an array of events such as bike rides, social gatherings, and bike repair workshops.
- Organized Pasadena Walktober in October 2023 and 2024, which consisted of 24 unique walking tours throughout the city.
- Trained over 160 community members to administer Naloxone.
- Hosted 18 Rx Drug Take Back events.
- Organized and conducted “Project Sticker Shock” which is an outreach effort to off-sale alcohol retailers by distributing prevention campaign materials to raise awareness of the penalties of providing alcohol to minors.
- Tobacco Retail Licensing policy campaigns in Pomona and San Dimas aim to reduce youth access to tobacco products and change social norms surrounding tobacco use.
- Spearheaded community engagement for the Pomona ACTS Direct-to-Renter program, which provided renters in Pomona with energy-efficient appliances designed to help alleviate heat and other environmental challenges.
- Awarded the EPA Community Change Grant for GREEN (Green, Resilient, Energy Efficient Neighborhoods) San Gabriel Valley, a regional collaborative, led by six community-based, non-profit organizations: Day One, Active San Gabriel Valley, Sustainable Claremont, Tree People, GRID Alternatives, and the Council for Watershed Health.
- Awarded the Transformative Climate Communities Grant in partnership with the City of Pomona
2024 Legacy Project
Greenbuild's 2024 Legacy Project: East Parkside, Past and Future: Building a Sustainable Community
This project was from the Centennial Parkside Community Development Corporation (CPCDC). CPCDC was established by a group of East Parkside residents with the intention of promoting an equitable development strategy that sustains an economically and culturally diverse community, improves the health and well-being of residents, strengthens the community’s identity and connectivity, and enhances the quality of the physical environment.
This project focused on activating public spaces that spark conversations between the past and future East Parkside. The project linked stories of the rich legacy and culture of community leadership and connectedness; the once vibrant neighborhood corridors; and the neighborhood’s historic significance to Philadelphia.
2023 Legacy Project
Gensler's Roots to Success initiative at Kelly Miller Middle School made a significant impact on the community. Located in the heart of Washington, DC’s Ward 7, Kelly Miller Middle School is an institution with a rich cultural history and legacy. The school serves a diverse population of students, many of whom come from families with limited resources. The school is also situated in a food desert, where access to fresh, healthy food is limited. The project addressed these issues by making impactful improvements to two of the school’s existing spaces.
2022 Legacy Project
Greenbuild's 2022 Legacy Project: Oakland Neighborhood Resiliency Hub Solar Battery Installation
This project addresses the Greenbuild Legacy project criteria through assisting socially-and economically-marginalized communities in safeguarding their health and wellbeing during dangerous situations like power outages and natural disasters. The Havenscourt/Millsmont community is predominantly Black, but the members of the community who will most benefit from this project are those with pre-existing health conditions, children and senior citizens.
This resilience project also addresses the need to reduce carbon emissions within the community through activities such as using solar, and it engages the broader local community in discussions and activities that raise awareness around environmental sustainability and carbon reduction.
2020-2021 Legacy Project
Greenbuild's 2020-2021 Legacy Project: Olivewood Gardens
In collaboration with the San Diego Green Building Council, Greenbuild's 2021 Legacy Project focused on helping Olivewood Gardens provide fresh food to surrounding communities located in a food desert around National City, California.
Olivewood Gardens and Learning Center's historic 7.85-acre property in National City, California serves as an inclusive and interactive, indoor-outdoor classroom for San Diegans of South Bay. They are driven to build healthy families in their local environment. This year's work included terracing land within the master plan created last year, installing new raised beds including soil on the new site, mulching, and painting a mural on the storage shed in Olivewood Garden's current production farm. The garden master plan includes a community mural, outdoor spaces for lounging and learning, a food forest and blueberry patch, a rainwater catchment system, and raised garden beds.