“What does it mean to have a world in which love, compassion, and support are more integrated into our economic and political systems and the community fabric around us?”
So asks Lindsay Baker, CEO of the International Living Future Institute (ILFI), in a newly released video interview with Yale Divinity School. ILFI oversees the most rigorous green-building certification program in the world, the Living Building Challenge—a standard the Divinity School’s Living Village residence hall is designed to meet.
An interview with Lindsay Baker: Watch the video.
The answer, Baker says, becomes clearer when a person listens to the story that the building project is telling.
“Buildings are incredible storytellers,” Baker says. “They have a lot to say in the world. One of the things that’s great about a project like the Living Village is the story it tells about what our world feels like when we have found balance with each other, with our economic systems, and with our ecological systems, such that we are truly healing our planet and the damage we have done, such that we are healing each other in terms of the health impacts we have on our communities and the way we interact with each other.”
A regenerative living-learning community scheduled to open in 2025: Learn more about the YDS Living Village.
“What does it look like,” Baker continues, “for our world to be ecologically restorative, socially just, and culturally rich? To be able to imagine that world is a helpful step in the right direction in working toward that world. I believe and trust that as the Living Village manifests on the Divinity School campus … it starts to demystify what it means to create that world, and starts to give us steps toward making our way there.”