ABOUT (Copy)

Founded in 1987, GreenWorks provides a broad range of services for clients in the Pacific Northwest and beyond. A regional leader in sustainable design, GreenWorks is dedicated to providing innovative solutions for clients by linking natural resources, urban environments, and people.

Our mission at GreenWorks is simple:

People + Nature by Design®

People

We provide a high level of quality and responsiveness to our clients. We show up every day as an empowered team of professionals who are curious, collaborative, and driven to amplify the livability of our communities and form a deeper connection to our world.

Nature

Nature provides inspiration and a worldview to tackle big issues and the lens to do it. We gather evidence through research and observation, striving for ambitious regenerative goals that are focused on urban habitat, green infrastructure, and ecosystems services.

Design

Design is our applied method of creative problem-solving, allowing us to achieve multiple objectives while elevating aesthetics and providing a sense of place. Our interdisciplinary efforts yield elegant solutions that are functional and beautiful, informed by knowledge and experience, with an entrepreneurial spirit of innovation that looks to the future.

GreenWorks is evolving.

GreenWorks is a community of designers who connect people and nature.  We see equity work as essential to our mission and indispensable to the design of resilient landscapes and ecosystems.  There are substantial and deeply rooted disparities in access to nature, recreation opportunities, urban tree canopies, and many other elements of green infrastructure that perpetuate disenfranchisement of people based on race, class, and other identities. With the goal of supporting and serving the most vulnerable and disadvantaged people in the communities, we task ourselves to ensure equity shifts and, at times, tests our design process and associated outcomes.

As a studio of largely white personnel, we recognize that we must augment the way we evaluate and perform our craft in order to have the impact we want to have. In 2019, GreenWorks launched our Equity Initiative. We are engaged in this work with the following intentions:

• Listen actively in order to create an open dialogue surrounding our conscious and unconscious privilege

• Create space for open and diverse viewpoints

• Trust that the process we have begun will allow us to become an anti-racist/classist/sexist organization

• Allow the process to be non-linear, uncomfortable or messy

• Become better designers and better citizens

• Accept that this work will change our organization.

This statement documents a genuine intention to grow. We are learning and listening internally and externally and believe that by becoming better listeners we will become better practitioners. We are holding ourselves accountable as we evolve.