What inspired you to get involved with the LA Regional Hub and CLF’s mission? How has your personal and professional journey evolved alongside the Hub’s development?

Tsandi Chen
Structural EIT, HDR | CLF Los Angeles Co-lead 

I came across the CLF website in college when I was searching for an industry organization that was interdisciplinary and all about sustainable building design. In 2022, I was one year into working in structural engineering, and I found out that there was a local hub in Los Angeles and that they were having an in-person event. So, I came to the event and found Luke Lombardi there, whom I met years prior. He mentioned the CLF LA hub was open to having more help on the organizing team, so I joined the following planning call, and now for the past 2.5 years, I’ve gotten to help grow our CLF LA community!

After the major waves of COVID-19 passed, the initial goal was to regrow the hub. Having webinars was nice but they could not replace the quality, one-on-one conversations that you get from in-person events. Together with my stellar co-organizers, Luke Lombardi, Laura Karnath, and Rachelle Habchi, we host monthly events that alternate between webinars and in-person gatherings. We invite speakers from our networks, and our in-person events are kindly hosted at our members’ office spaces.

A key contributor to our LA hub’s success is cross-collaboration. We have overlapping interests with our architect friends at AIA|LA Committee on the Environment (COTE), and generate events that would be mutually useful to our communities. We’ve also recently collaborated with Rocky Mountain Hub and will soon be collaborating with the SF/Bay Area Hub! We typically feature three speakers per webinar, which makes it easier for them to participate since each presentation lasts only about 15 minutes.

This summer, due to the new CALGreen measures, we’ve launched a CLF LA Los Angeles LCA Tool User Group monthly call, where our friends Ann Jiras and Justin Sharkey facilitate a lively forum for LCA tool users to ask questions, discuss challenges, and share best practices.

Due to our expanding CLF LA hub of structural engineers, architects, sustainability consultants, and others, we’ve now established two annual events that bookmark the start and end of the years. For our December event, we have an “Open Mic Night,” where individuals from our hub share embodied carbon reduction wins from their projects. In our New Year event, we host an entertaining Embodied Carbon Trivia Night, where people get to mingle, share some laughs, and learn some fun facts!

The major achievement is when our attendees connect and reach out to each other when they have questions. The truth is that we all work for firms that tend to keep knowledge internal and do things per their own standards. And as individuals, we can choose to mirror that. Or, we can knowledge share and build upon each other’s expertise, and inspire one another. The latter are the overarching goals that we’ve stuck to as a hub and have allowed our hub to stay relevant and actively contribute to the solution.

If you’re interested in connecting with the CLF Los Angeles Hub, check out the hub website at www.clf-la.org.

How is the Seattle Hub evolving and continuing to make an impact?

Jessie Templeton
Embodied Carbon Service Lead, Brightworks Sustainability | CLF Seattle Co-lead

One of the things I love most about the Seattle CLF hub, and really the embodied carbon community in general, is the willingness to truly collaborate, without the hubris of title or company, admitting the solution is something much greater than any one of us.

For the past 6 years I’ve been involved in the Seattle Hub, we’ve been focused on education, making connections, and promoting movement in the industry. Early on, the group started a tool user group. There were a number of us who met regularly to figure out how to use WBLCA tools, problem-solve wonky data, and share tricks like breaking open reporting spreadsheets for post-processing… sorry, Tally. Generally, the tool user group was a sounding board and a germinator that helped many Seattle AEC firms initiate and grow their embodied carbon accounting programs.

Since then, the Seattle Hub continues to host a tool user group that is an amazing resource, especially for newer users, and hosts regular monthly meetings focused primarily on education and sharing everything from the implementation of innovative bio-based materials to embodied carbon in infrastructure, to touring steel mills and buildings with low- EC strategies. All of these educational sessions and meetups fuel meaningful dialogue and I find I’m always coming away with new threads to follow or different ways to think about solving embodied carbon. I also deeply appreciate the community the CLF has formed here in Seattle and the fact that there’s an entire group of carbon nerds I can lean on for riffing ideas or sifting through complex problems.

In our latest planning meetings, we’ve been talking about where to go from here. There is always the need for education and sharing, but also a desire to incubate more action. How can we harness the intellectual capital and experience of hub members to shift the industry faster? Toward this end, we’re considering working groups centered around specific efforts – perhaps growing the Seattle Reuse ecosystem, policy, whole-life carbon accounting, or who knows what this group will come up with next. Attend our annual planning meeting next month to participate in the direction of the hub.

If you’re interested in connecting with the CLF Seattle Hub, join the CLF Online Community to stay up to date with hub events!