Shifting to a Sustainable Civil Society
– Facilitated salons and workshops to inspire dialogue and produce new ideas and responses:

• Development Practice and Sustainable Architecture
Roger Bayley, Merrick Architecture: Olympic Gold, LEED Platinum, and Community Expectations—A Profile of the Southeast False Creek Olympic Village

• Policy and Governance in the City/Regional Context
Tom Murphy, Ken Melamed: The Political Challenges of Sustainability Leadership at the Local Level—Overcoming the Structural Obstacles

• Design and Building Practice
Jason F. McLennan, Cascadia Green Building Council: The Living Building Challenge—Aligning Building Practice With Sustainability Objectives

• Climate Change Strategies
Tom Osdoba, Director, Canada Carbon Trust: Designing an Organization to Radically Cut Emissions—Combining Leading-edge Knowledge and Investment that Matters

• Natural Systems and Land Use
Patrick Lucey, Aqua-Tex: Think Like a Watershed—Regional Strategies for Successful Water Stewardship

• Education and Professional Development
John English, Jennie Moore, Donald Yen, British Columbia Institute of Technology; Michael Bloomfield, Harmony Foundation, Moderator: Integrating Sustainability with Education and Professional Training—The Imperatives of Creating a New Generation of Practitioners

• Cultural Shift and Community
Conversation with Paul Hawken; Keith Jardine, Moderator

The Challenge of Sustainable Development
– Salons organized and facilitated to study a particular dilemma and to elicit strategic responses in:

• Urban-Scale Policy and Governance
Mark Holland, Holland Barrs Planning Group: Sustainable Cities 2050—Strategic Planning for Whole-City Transformations

• Finance and Valuation
Scott Muldavin, the Muldavin Company and Chris Corps, Asset Strategics: From Conventional to Sustainable: Removing Structural Barriers to Sustainable Real Estate Investment

• Business Values and Practice
Bruce Piasecki, President, AHC Group and R. Paul Herman, CEO and Founder, HIP Investor (Human Impact + Profit): ‘Business-As-Unusual’—Moving to New Value Propositions that Deliver for Shareholders and Society

• Sustainable Cities Visioning and Performance Management
Boyd Cohen, President, Visible Strategies: Using the 'See-it' Tool to Close the Sustainability Integration Gap

• Education and Professional Development
Steve Grundy and Dan Spinner, Royal Roads University: Living Learning Sustainability Laboratory Campus, and Greener Las Vegas—a 'New Paradigm' Relationship with the Nevada Development Authority

• Cultural Shift and Community
Bill Reed, Integrative Design Collaborative and Alex Zimmerman, Applied Green Consulting Ltd.: Shifting Our Collective Mindset: Deep Questions of Stewardship

• Development Practice
John L. Knott Jr., Developer, Noisette Project: Sustainability's Promise of Social Change—Building Social Repair Into Development Programs

GG2 is much more than an ‘industry’ conference and, like ingredients in a meal, it incorporates several themes.

One is leadership. The conference intends to hear from leaders in several fields who will candidly discuss their accomplishments, challenges and frustrations; inspire each other; and energize the innovation and leadership capacities in all of us.

Another is integrative, or whole systems, thinking about sustainability. The plenary presentations, salon topics and the wide range of delegate disciplines are all intended to foster intellectual collaboration, and to build novel communities of thought at the conference. We need to learn from each other, and sustainability is as much about the cultivation of a fresh view of life and practice as it is about a series of narrow, technical fixes.

A third is the identification and transfer of strategies, techniques, and values that move sustainability forward in practical ways, in these fields of action: development practice; policy and governance; education, professional development and training; public thought and community capacity-building; valuation, finance and investment (where we face an enormous challenge to shift from ‘bottom line’ to ‘triple bottom line’ thinking); and urban planning, land use and design.

The fourth and last is shift itself. Gaining Ground is not a conference of the converted. It intentionally blends ‘agnostics’ with ‘believers’ to ensure that ideas and conversations play out in a real-world setting of both hope and skepticism. The entire human community is enlisted in the sustainability discussion, and this conference will be most valuable if it engages us exactly where we are right now.

The program below has been designed mindful of these thoughts.