We are pleased to share our 2022 Impact Report!

I deeply believe that as a society we are going to make the transition to a resilient future. That said, the path to get there may not be smooth or pretty. However, if the pandemic has taught us anything, it is that when faced with crisis, we can adapt and rise to the occasion.

At Green Canopy NODE, we stand at the forefront of this movement, fully aware of the magnitude of the problem and the immense potential for positive change. Through our commitment to building carbon-negative, healthy homes, we strive to regenerate communities and environments, demonstrating that housing can be a catalyst for transformation.

We are a deeply committed community of teammates, board members, shareholders, impact investors, institutional investors, homeowners, landowners, developers, affordable housing groups, architects, real estate agents, and sub-contractors.

Together we are building the future of housing!

I invite you to join us on this journey. Please feel free to start by sharing with me your insights and reflections on this report.

 With deep gratitude,

Susan Fairchild
Chief Marketing & Impact Officer

The Spring season begins a beautiful process of birth and renewal. What once was dormant, begins to awake, slowly unfurl, and reveal its true purpose. To be called to purpose with such intention is not to be taken lightly.

Amidst the ongoing strain of the pandemic and global crises, Green Canopy & NODE took the concept of purpose further. Rather than tackle the challenges of the construction industry separate from each other, we recognized that we could accelerate transformation of the construction industry towards greater sustainability, health, and affordability together. Today, Green Canopy NODE is a collective of investors, innovators, changemakers, makers-at-heart, and people living their lives aligned to purpose. Our shared vision is to provide more healthy and sustainable housing for people of all income levels across the nation.

I am grateful to not be alone in this work. At Green Canopy NODE we come together in a coordinated effort to do more than one person could on their own. I am blessed with a deeply committed community of teammates, board members, shareholders, impact investors, institutional investors, homeowners, landowners, developers, affordable housing groups, architects, real estate agents, and sub-contractors; all playing an important role in achieving our collective mission and vision.

I welcome you to engage with us on this journey! Please feel free to start by sharing with me your insights and reflections on this report.

With deep gratitude,
Susan Fairchild, Chief Marketing and Impact Officer
Green Canopy NODE

We are proud to share that Green Canopy NODE's co-CEOs, Bec Chapin and Aaron Fairchild, have been named to the 2022 MO 100 Top Impact CEO Ranking!

This award recognizes the 100 most impactful leaders sparking positive social and environmental change. Explore the MO100 ranking and learn more about what being an impact leader means to Bec + Aaron:

What does being an ‘impact leader’ mean to you?

Being an impact leader means three things to us: Finding the alignment between our skill sets and our values, creating alignment through a shared purpose, and solving complex challenges by working in partnership, across sectors. We aren’t going to solve our housing and our climate crises by ourselves. 

How has the theme of regeneration – of breaking down to break through – played out in your career?

Our company mission is to regenerate communities and environments. And to do so, we must first reflect on ourselves as individuals and create change within. This is done, in part, through eco-cycle mapping, which is a critical tool for us in evaluating our work. Plotting ourselves and our work on an eco-cycle map invites change and helps determine where we might be stagnating or where we can break down processes in order to improve.

Impact + Company Focus:

Green Canopy NODE intends to rapidly scale construction technology to lower building costs and help decarbonize the built environment. We combine smart construction technology solutions with a long track record of sustainable design, development, construction, and fund management expertise to seamlessly lower costs, shorten construction timelines, and create highly impactful housing for communities throughout the Pacific Northwest and beyond.

The year 2020 will go down in history books. We navigated through a pandemic and participated and observed civil unrest due to the murders of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, and others. During this time, an additional 200,000 small businesses permanently shuttered, while at the same time the largest tech companies grew and billionaires profited such that their wealth grew by 27% during the peak of the crisis.

Perhaps we needed 2020 to rip the band aid off our perception that the world is just fine, and that status quo is good enough. Yet, the built environment is still responsible for 40% of our global carbon emissions. And, amidst a housing affordability crisis, the nation is 3.8 million homes short of demand and growing.

Fortunately, people did come together to reimagine a more resilient and vibrant future. We hope that by sharing this report we can create further inspiration and market transformation towards a brighter, more resilient, healthy and equitable future that in our hearts know is possible. While 2020 was a particular challenging year, Green Canopy continues to position itself to disrupt the industry to ensure a better alternative to the current paradigm of housing.

With deep gratitude,
Susan Fairchild
Director of Investor Relations & Impact

By Kyle Mylius | Director of Investor Relations and Strategy | Green Canopy

Part one of this two-part series highlighted the residential real estate market opportunity in Seattle and Portland. 
 
Why is now the time to use business as a force for good? The region’s economic growth and prosperity have fueled urgent social and environmental challenges. If we fail to mitigate these unintended consequences, the costs to do so in the future might very well swamp the near-term benefits and wealth our robust local economy generates today. Instead, we can respond now to the observed market signals and feedback loops by investing some of the capital generated into thoughtful, holistic and practical solutions to those social and environmental issues.
 
At Green Canopy, we embrace the Chinese dictum, “The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second-best time is now.” As a for-profit company backed by shareholders, we seek to make money and create long-term company value through various verticals in real estate. But we are also driven to create real estate projects and financing models that allow us to live into the world we envision as manifested within our Theory of Change. This compels us to use a portion of the company’s resources to create vitally important social and environmental value for our shareholders, homeowners and neighbors who collectively make up the fabric of the communities in which we live, work and play.
 
We do this by running toward these challenges and recognizing them as opportunities. For example, we help mitigate global warming by building net zero energy homes. In so doing, we create value in new homes — value that home buyers, renters, banks and appraisers will increasingly recognize.  In time, more and more home builders and will want to capture that value and build to a net zero energy standard, making meaningful progress toward slowing our local impact on global climate change.
 
Beyond this very practical business imperative, lies an awareness within Green Canopy that our built environment has tremendous impact on the natural environment. We recognize that we have a responsibility as a real estate developer to change the ways homes are built and perform. Therefore, we endeavor to design homes to have increasingly less impact on the Earth compared to typical “code built” homes. And aspire to ultimately design and build homes as carbon sinks and regenerative structures that help reverse global warming.
 
We need to find ways to alter humanity’s relationship with the environment, and have the courage to execute those new ideas. I’ve come to believe that each person should shoulder some of the responsibility for not only adhering to environmental best practices but for creating new, practical models for protecting our world. We owe the world our physical labour and our earnest brain power.
-Dan O’Brien, Food for Thought: How a buffalo herd taught me to be a responsible capitalist, Beside magazine Vol 2
 
We cannot succeed in our goals if we serve only the wealthy. Net zero energy homes should be accessible to all homeowners and renters, including the 35 million Americans who spend an inordinate amount of their income on energy bills. Accordingly, Green Canopy is expanding inclusivity in the urban neighborhoods we serve. We are doing this by creating investment structures that attract like-minded investors, enabling us to scale our work and build more affordable homes within desirable urban neighborhoods.

We are often asked, “Why?” Or even, “We get that environmental sustainability, and features like net zero energy can also be financially profitable. But can’t you just let non-profits and public agencies tackle housing affordability?”  Our answer is a resounding, “No.” As systems thinking has taught us, social and environmental problem sets are inextricably linked. Solving for one without considering the other would be an inefficient and potentially even counterproductive use of capital.
 
Traditional urban residential development approaches and financing tools perpetuate multi-generational and systemic exclusion and inequality. The magnitude of the challenge demands a multi-pronged solution, as expanded on in the Seattle Times and and the New York Times. We are driven by more than a sense of moral obligation, more than an opportunity to both make money and do good. We do this work because we and our stakeholders enjoy power and privilege that — absent of taking a different approach — will only perpetuate and expand social injustice and environmental degradation in the place we all call home.
 
As long as we participate in social systems, we don’t get to choose whether to be involved in the consequences they produce. As such, we can only choose how to be involved, whether to just be part of the problem, or also to be part of the solution. That’s where our power lies, and also our responsibility. 
-Allan G. Johnson, Privilege, Power and Difference
 
Another question we get is, “So what is the cost for doing this work?” We have calculated the costs and it’s not as much as most assume, whether measured in profit margin to the developer or financial returns to investors. And what is often underappreciated, in part because it is harder to measure and quantify, are the benefits of reduced risks to the developer’s brand, the costs of obtaining permits and entitlements, and the ability to sell homes and differentiate value in a competitive market, to name just a few. Similarly, investors who back our work are taking a long-term perspective in seeking sustainable value creation and financial returns that do not extract value at the expense of others and the environment.
 
The stakeholders of Green Canopy work in earnest to use our time, talent and capital to harness the economic growth and prosperity of our region for the benefit of all. We acknowledge now is the time to engage and use business as a force for good, with more inclusive and less extractive approaches and business models than before — recognizing our power and privilege must be used responsibly and ethically. The time to plant the proverbial tree is now.

By Susan Fairchild | Director of Investor Relations & Impact | Green Canopy

Those who visit the Green Canopy Headquarters will find, in our entryway, a reminder handed down by our CEO’s father. It’s a framed quote by the baseball legend Yogi Berra, reading— “If you aim for nothing, you’ll hit it.”

At Green Canopy, we’re always looking to identify and clearly articulate the direction we’re headed. By doing this, our team and stakeholders come to a shared understanding of goals. We can all take ownership of these goals, and then create a plan of action to make them happen. One way we’ve done this in the past year, is by mapping out our specific “Theory of Change”. A Theory of Change provides a visual roadmap to creating the change we want to see in the world, and provides a target through which we align our strategies, outcomes, and goals.

Green Canopy began this process with the guidance from Jane Reisman, a Social Impact Advisor with over 29 years of experience in strategy and evaluation. Jane has dedicated her life to empowering non-profits, foundations, and systems thinkers with the tools to significantly increase the probability of achieving their desired impact.
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As we embraced doing the deep work* with Jane, the benefits to engaging in the process of developing Green Canopy’s Theory of Change became quite clear:

• Impact Alignment: Key stakeholders buy into and align towards our shared purpose and desired impact.

• Shared Language: Shared language enables key stakeholders – employees, board members, investors, vendors, homeowners, and others to speak with a common voice.

• Metric Alignment: Provides additional structure to which we can align our impact metrics to measure our progress, and learn from both our successes and shortcomings.

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We are pleased to share Green Canopy’s Theory of Change publicly for the first time. We believe in a better future. We invite you to be a part of it. 

Aaron Fairchild, Green Canopy’s CEO recently detailed the Theory of Change at an Empower Happy Hour. Watch Aaron’s presentation here. 

​*“Deep Work” is a concept written about by Cal Newport that he describes as the ability to focus without distraction, master complicated information and produce better results in less time— providing the sense of true fulfillment that comes from craftmanship.