Gaining Ground . Sustainable Urban Development Leadership Summit . Victoria, BC Canada . June 15-17 2006 .

Our Post-Event Report to Sponsors

What Delegates are saying about Gaining Ground

Read excerpts from Focus Magazine about Gaining Ground

Dear Website Visitor,

Gaining Ground Sustainable Urban Development Leadership Summit was held at Laurel Point in Victoria, BC on June 15-17, 2006.

It attracted 200 attendees from Canada, the U.S., and Mexico: developers, financiers, community leaders, consultants, policy makers, sustainability thinkers, and elected municipal and regional representatives.

Ed McMahon, one of our presenters and Charles Fraser Senior Resident Fellow for Sustainable Development at the Urban Land Institute in Washington, DC, described Gaining Ground as a significant “regional conference with world-class speakers.”

A number of you who attended as registrants or presenters described Gaining Ground as simply the best conference you had ever been to. Very high praise…thank you.

If this is so, it has to do with the good fortune of striking the right balance between sustainable development practice and the values, spirit, hope and humility that hover around our work; attracting three extraordinary developers undertaking major projects in three countries who are deeply committed to sustainability values in what they do; providing a conference environment in which all registrants could work with exceptional keynote presenters and other resources for the duration of the event; and generating ideas so rich and promising that it was hard not to leave feeling inspired and optimistic. On reflection, it may be that the ‘magic’ of this conference was that it managed to keep ideas and spirit linked to each other.

We have all been to many conference events, and are perhaps a bit jaded and cynical about benefits and outcomes. If you will accept that things change by ‘small degrees,’ you will be pleased to learn the conference yielded practical and immediate outcomes:

The principals of Victoria’s largest construction company came away from the conference with their heads brimming with ideas for improved sustainable development practice;
The province of British Columbia, because of the palpable impacts of the conference, is now planning a sustainability education workshop at the upcoming UBCM (Union of BC Municipalities) convention;
UDI (Urban Development Institute) Victoria appropriated the idea of ‘moral leadership’ from the conference and is currently initiating the concept of a sustainability audit with municipalities throughout the Capital Region.
It was an expressed goal of the conference to produce a ‘manual’ or ‘toolkit’ of successful or promising practices, policies and principles. This document is being prepared and will be made available by the end of the summer in print form and on this website.

These are extraordinary and meaningful outcomes from our conference, and they will pay real dividends into the sustainability account. After all, it was no accident—but a sign of intention—that the conference was called Gaining Ground.

For those of you who wish to reference the presentations at the conference you will find links here to full audio records of every keynote address and each of the project showcase presentations, including the Q&A sessions that followed, and Bill Reed’s synopsis as well. If we can deal with the technical challenges over time, we will also post the video record.

For those of you eager for more engagement with the ideas, issues and people of Gaining Ground, a second event is now in the early planning stages for June, 2007—nicknamed GG2. GG2 will build on the successes of this first conference and will assemble true North American leadership (Canada, the U.S. and Mexico) in development, real estate, finance, land use policy, governance, integrative and regenerative practice and thought, and sustainability advocacy for a summit whose work will focus on new learning, new values and new practice, and on the opportunity for a charter and new formal ethical leadership in sustainable land use practice and community-building.

Please feel welcome to stay in touch with us via this website. As soon as we are able, we will post information about next year’s Second Gaining Ground Conference.

Thank you to: