Van Jones is an eco-visionary, award-winning human rights attorney and powerhouse speaker. He is the founder of the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights (EBC), a strategy and action center, working for justice, peace, and opportunity in urban America.

He has served on the boards of numerous environmental and nonprofit organizations, including the National Apollo Alliance, Social Venture Network, Rainforest Action Network, Bioneers, Julia Butterfly Hill’s “Circle of Life” organization and Free Press.

Van won his first major award in 1998 when he was given the Reebok Human Rights Award. Other significant awards include the international Ashoka Fellowship, selection as a World Economic Forum “Young Global Leader,” and the Rockefeller Foundation “Next Generation Leadership” Fellowship.

In the aftermath of 2005’s Hurricane Katrina, Van helped to found ColorOfChange.org, an online advocacy organization. With more than 100,000 members, Color Of Change is now the nation’s biggest e-advocacy organization tackling Black issues.
[Read more]

Freed: Design Winner Will Build Actual City Block

Chris Cheatham (Green Building Law Update) interviewed Eric Corey Freed last week and just posted the first in a 2-part series interview:

My friends over at Sensible City recently offered me the opportunity to interview Eric Corey Freed. It’s not everyday I get to interview someone who was just interviewed by the New York Times so I jumped at the chance. Even better, Eric is an “organic architect” and studied under a former student of Frank Lloyd Wright. I am getting married in October at Wright’s Arizona home, Taliesin West, so I couldn’t pass up this opportunity.

Eric is involved in a tremendous design competition called Urban Re:Vision, and he describes how Dallas was chosen as the site for the competition: “The mayor, Tom Leppert, was fantastic. He’s got 30 years in the building industry and he understood Urban Re:Vision right off the bat. So the City of Dallas gave us this block next door to city hall and said ‘Here, this would be perfect,’ and everything kind of came together. Now we have what we always wanted, a real city block, with real stakeholders behind it and the winning entry will really get built.”

In Part I of the interview, Eric and I discuss “organic architecture” and the Urban Re:Vision competition in some detail. Eric also provdies insight into liability concerns surrounding the competition. On Wednesday, we will discuss broader legal issues surrounding the green building indusry and a controversy that arose over Eric’s New York Times interview.

[Read the interview here]

The internet is definitely abuzz with the potential of the Re:Vision Dallas project, as we’ve seen from the wide interest in this competition. Thanks to Bridgette Steffen over at Inhabitat for leading the way with this post.The latest from design competition leaders Urban Re:Vision, Re:Vision Dallas is a newly-launched design competition that’s not just an ideas contest, but a real urban project. The City of Dallas is asking for designers, architects, students, engineers and planners to look particularly at one city block in Dallas right across the street from the City Hall, envision the most sustainable city block ever, and draw up the plans. Winners will receive a cash prize and a chance to sell the idea to the developer, Central Dallas CDC, to eventually be built.

[ Read Inhabitat article ]

Re:Vision Dallas, the competition which gives creative urban design and community development professionals around the world a solid chance at creating America’s first fully sustainable inner city block, is sweeping social media around the world.

Find out about it at www.revision-dallas.com. Enter the competition at www.urbanrevision.com.

In addition to Italy, Serbia, United Kingdom, Brazil, Russia and Spain, here are a few examples from the American social media PR scene:

• Earth Friendly Magazine
• TreeHugger (Discovery Media) 
• WIRED Online
• Death By Architecture
• Sustainable City
• John Greenan
• Sustainability Digest
• Talk Contract
• World Architecture
• Jetson Green

And don’t forget the news media covering Urban Re:Vision…

• DWELL Magazine
• UTNE Reader
• KXAS (NBC) and KDFW (Fox) TV News
• Dallas Observer
• Dallas Examiner
• Dallas Morning News
• Dallas Public Radio
• Worldchanging
• NBC News (TV)
• The Stacey Frost Interview
• Greener Buildings
• Pegasus News
• Inhabitat

… just ran an interesting story which points out several exciting community programs, leading with Re:Vision’s fully sustainable city block in Dallas:

Sustainable Community Concept Takes Hold in Texas, Georgia, Tennessee

Oakland, Calif. — The drive to create communities that balance environmental, economic and social responsibilities through planned development is growing as shown by projects in Texas, Georgia and Tennessee.

In Dallas, the Urban Re:Vision project and others convened a design charrette earlier this month as part of a campaign to create what organizers say will be the first fully sustainable, urban square block in the U.S.

The site targeted for redevelopment is a two-square-block area that Dallas Mayor Tom Leppert has called a “forgotten landscape” — an unused parking lot across the street from City Hall.

The charrette laid the groundwork for an international design competition, called Building Blocks Dallas, which launches next month. The goal: Devote one square block to green space and design the other square block as an eco-friendly, economically viable area serving the needs of the urban community around it.

[Read Entire Story at GreenerBuildings.com]