Sustainability

Goody Clancy views every one of our projects as an investment in a more healthy, sustainable built environment. We create “long life, loose fit” spaces, where inherent flexibility serves not only immediate needs, but the future needs of an evolving community. We design energy-efficient spaces that create the best return on our clients’ investments. We continue to bring circular ecology to the forefront with a definition of “net zero” that encompasses both embodied and operational carbon.

Commitments to a Healthy World

Goody Clancy is a signatory to the American Institute of Architects (AIA) 2030 Commitment and its goal to achieve carbon neutrality by the year 2030, and to the AIA Materials Challenge, which seeks to design and construct solely with holistically optimized materials. We are also a member of the Sustainable Design Leaders Group, an organization of 100 national and international firms convened twice a year to share best practices. Through this organization, we promote the use of healthy, non-toxic, socially responsible building materials by convening a regional Healthy Materials Summit, and by informing over 4,000 product suppliers that we give preference to those documenting environmentally responsible sourcing and production.

Social Sustainability

We understand that sustainability is also economic and social. Goody Clancy is the first JUST organization in Boston. The JUST label is a voluntary disclosure and transparency platform created by the International Living Future Institute to help organizations measure social justice and equity in the workplace. Through this platform, we have committed to disclose information about our operations, including where we invest and how we treat our employees. (For more information about JUST, please click here.) We are also signatories to the Boston Women’s Workforce Council’s 100% Talent Compact, an employer pledge initiative aimed at gender pay equity. We actively explore the challenges of unintentional bias through company-wide workshops.

Certifications, Expertise, and Tools

We are very proud of our success in working with the US Green Building Council’s LEED program. Two-thirds of our architectural staff is LEED Accredited, and all of our projects completed within the past five years have been designed to achieve LEED certification at Silver or higher levels. We also use LEED for Neighborhoods (LEED ND) as a core performance standard for our neighborhood and district planning. A selection of our LEED-certified projects is included below.

We are also experts in a number of sustainability certifications beyond LEED. We have designed and constructed projects that are Passiv Haus (PHIUS) compliant. We have also pursued Living Building Challenge petals on multiple projects. Our project teams have found these sustainability certification programs to be helpful frameworks for designing thoughtful, tailored responses to our clients’ sustainability goals.

Goody Clancy uses Whole Building Life-Cycle Assessments as a design tool for many of our projects. LCAs allow our teams and clients to calculate the environmental impact of each building component (e.g., structures, walls, windows) across a range of metrics. This enables us to evaluate the carbon cost of our design choices over their entire lifespans—a more accurate assessment of a project than EUI calculations alone.

Certified LEED Projects

PLATINUM

GOLD

SILVER

Resilience

The accelerating pace of global climate change poses another dimension to environmental stewardship: making our communities resilient. Goody Clancy is committed to working with cities and regions to insure their investments in resilience builds communities that are more than ever places of opportunity, equity, and enhanced quality of life. Through this work, we learned important lessons that continue to inspire our approach to resilience:

First, the cost in terms of human and social disruption, and environmental impacts associated with relocation far exceed the costs of protection.
Second, every dollar spent on resilience should be a dollar invested in people and placemaking.
Third, engage community members in every step of planning to build a culture of resilience that nurtures personal responsibility and the shared political will to launch large-scale, often transformative investments.