From Commitment to Action: Green Day 2026
Sasaki President and Principal Caitlyn Clauson kicked off the day by reminding us of Sasaki's core values.
Recently, Sasakians took part in Green Day, an annual firm-wide day dedicated to connecting around sustainability-oriented programming. Green Day brought together Sasakians from across all disciplines and geographies for immersive workshops focused on advancing a re-boot of our Sustainability Action Plan, to embed environmental stewardship more deeply into the way we work.
In her opening remarks, Sasaki’s Director of Sustainability, Tamar Warburg, said, “Today is about cross-practice collaboration, as we devise new design strategies that we can implement to express our values as a practice. This is just the start—we realize that goal-setting is successful when we roll up our sleeves to develop metrics and workflows to hold ourselves accountable.”
Barbra Batshalom’s keynote started the day’s activities, inspiring Sasakians to reimagine how we approach complex problems.
The day opened with a keynote from Barbra Batshalom, a change agent in sustainability and founder of Sustainable Performance Institute, who challenged us to think differently about how we approach problem-solving. Barbra’s keynote invited us to think about advancing the culture of innovation within our practice.
Smaller working groups shared their findings with the entire office.
Inspired and energized, Sasakians moved into hands-on engagement workshops. We asked ourselves: How do we measure what we care about? How do we build the workflows that make sustainability second nature, integrated into everything we do? Working groups from each discipline – architecture, planning, landscape and operations – proposed draft goals for project work focused on climate action, biodiversity, and design that benefits people and the planet while testing how those goals might apply across a range of real project scenarios.
“We know that commitments can cause change—we’ve seen that in the way we’ve integrated the AIA 2030 and AIA Materials pledges into our architecture and interiors workflows. Green Day is an opportunity for us to hone in on the metrics that will support our broader goals and map how we get there,” says architect Alison Nash, Sasaki’s Sustainability Coordinator.
The day culminated in a crit crawl, where Sasakians learned about three current projects through a sustainability lens.
The day wrapped with a Green Crit Crawl and Happy Hour, where staff gathered around three current Sasaki projects to examine them through a sustainability lens. These conversations created opportunities for teams to reflect on how to better integrate environmental goals from the earliest stages of a project through design, construction, and beyond.
“We’re expanding our thinking to consider sustainability as a process for design integration. And when we flip our thinking from sustainability as a part of a project to the sustainability as design integrator, it starts to change the way we look at the whole project—from building the team to site orientation to material choices,” says principal and Chair of Design Integration Pablo Savid-Buteler.
The Green Crit Crawl allows people from across the firm to connect around shared values and ideas.
Green Day is an important reminder of the value of our collective efforts to address climate action as a critical challenge of our time. Through knowledge-sharing, asking hard questions, and holding ourselves accountable to the metrics that matter, we’re creating pathways for better, more sustainable design.