Josie Plaut is Associate Director for the Institute for the Built Environment at Colorado State University where she guides companies, municipalities and organizations through developing capacity and action plans for sustainability. Josie is a strategic facilitator with a proven track record for guiding teams to realize their visions, goals and strategic priorities.  Her recent work spans domestic and international clients across a variety of scales including buildings, master plans and districts, organizational development and municipal programs, among others. She brings a unique combination of subject matter expertise in sustainability, effective facilitation, and systems thinking, resulting in shared purpose, clarity of vision and engagement from project constituents.  Josie is a published and cited author on the topics of sustainability, green building, and regeneration and has been a featured speaker at multiple local and national events.

Josie is a Patterson Center Certified StratOp Facilitator, a LEED Accredited Professional since 2004, and holds a degree in Sustainable Enterprise from Fort Lewis College and a Masters of Construction Management with an emphasis in Sustainable Building at Colorado State University. Josie is a founding developer of The LENSES (Living Environments in Natural Social and Economic Systems) Framework, which is a ground breaking system for creating transformational change toward regenerative design and practice. Josie is a member of the board of directors of Fastilium Property Group AB, a Swedish real estate investment company based in Stockholm and serves on the advisory panel to Valeo Groupe based in the United Kingdom.

What are you most excited about regarding IBE’s role at the NWC?

At IBE our mission is to advance the development of healthy, thriving built environments. We focus on bringing interdisciplinary and trans-sectoral teams together in a way that transforms their ability work together and generate the highest potential outcomes for our collective efforts.  We see NWC as a great place to apply our research and expertise around integrative team processes and sustainability in the built environment.  We expect to learn a lot too, which is always exciting.

Why is the NWC project important from your perspective and the perspective on the IBE?

Projects of this scale and significance have the potential to shift communities in meaningful ways – for better or for worse, and often as a mix of the two.  It is our intention to help the NWC project become a source of inspiration and overall benefit to the community.  What we see at NWC is the opportunity to engage the passion and brain trust of CSU in meaningful, applied research focused on some of the most pressing needs of our time: water, energy, waste, equity, population growth and ecological health.

Is there anything else you want people to know about the NWC project?

We are just getting started and this will be a long learning journey full of unexpected opportunities and lessons to be learned.  The important part is that we, on an ongoing basis, are putting our best thinking into how this project can realize its full potential to make a significant, positive contribution to the community, the region and beyond.