At Green Sail we know that we only have one planet right now. Even if humanity is able to colonize other planets we should not let our ability to do so serve as an excuse for inaction to save the one we were born on. Furthermore, our society has real problems that we should do our best to solve before we spread ourselves and our problems across multiple planets. Due to these realities, Green Sail is founded with three prioritized principles.
- Planet
- People
- Profit
In that order. Period.
1. Planet
The first principle is saving the planet. Many people throw around the word “sustainability” without ever clarifying what this means for their business. Others simply ignore and do not address the issue. The reality is that you cannot be neutral on a moving train. The health of our planet is being destroyed and the built environment is a major part of that destruction. So what does saving the planet mean to us? We will do everything in our power to make sure that the buildings we build contribute to ecological biodiversity across the supply chain. This means we won’t use any products with materials on the Living Building Challenge Red-list. As an example this also means that buildings we design eliminate ground disturbance where bees are in residence and all of our homes will require our homeowners to provide permanent undisturbed habitat for bees and other pollinators in the design of the building. It doesn’t mean we won’t cut down a tree, but if we do cut a tree down we will plant at least one tree in its place and make sure to use the wood and cuttings in the most efficient way possible.
When you buy a home that we have designed for you, you are committing to working around the design constraints imposed by our planet. This means you are committing to spending your money in a different way with an unrelenting focus on sustainability and environmental responsibility and not on square footage.
2. People
Our employees, our contractors, and our community are the backbone upon which our success builds. This means that when we make decisions we are prioritizing the well being of our employees first. First things being first, safety is paramount and we are committed to zero safety incidents. We also firmly believe that if you take care of your people, your people take care of you. This means guaranteed health insurance with the lowest deductible we can get for every employee from day one. This means unlimited paid sick time off. This means four weeks of vacation per year. This means flexible working hours and all around reviews. This also means taking care of our community with company sponsored community volunteering and using our voice as a forward thinking company to do our best to improve the communities we operate in. That said, building high quality sustainable housing is not enough to create a great home for everyone. At Green Sail we recognize that homes and communities must be safe, healthy, nurturing, and sustainable. As such, we advocate for humanistic zoning, regulatory, and permitting policies designed to solve homelessness, abuse, and resource access issues so that everyone can enjoy their home and their community. Society does not automatically improve. We must consciously, deliberately, and persistently push it in the direction in which we want to see it go. Business is a major player in society and must recognize and embrace our corporate responsibility to behave as such.
3. Profit
We are a business and we need to make money to continue to exist but at Green Sail we view profit in a different way. Everything we produce costs money and we cover those costs with fees or charges. However, unlike most companies that price as high as the market will support without lowering demand too much, we create profit through the addition of value to your project. We only take a cut of that value added so that our interests are aligned and everyone benefits. The fundamental idea behind this is that we should not profit off of activities that leave people worse off than they were before. If we cannot find a way to do the right thing profitably it means that we are not adding sufficient value and we need to re-examine what we are doing and figure out a new way to add enough value to profit from the activity.