Develop your Leadership potential

Rooted is designed as a dynamic learning experience where participants at different career stages and expertise levels learn with and from each other.

When you're the one pushing for healthier materials, advocating for regenerative thinking, or feeling the weight of misalignment between your firm's practices and your values—this cohort is your support system.

who rooted is for

You might be the sustainability coordinator navigating resistance from project teams.

You might be the mid-career architect or designer who sees what needs to change but lacks the language to advocate effectively.

You might be the recent graduate trying to maintain your values in a conventional practice.

You might be the principal feeling isolated in your commitment to regenerative design.

What you have in common: You're operating as a change agent within systems that weren't designed for the transformation you're trying to create—and you need both practical tools and community to sustain the work.

what you’ll accomplish in 8 weeks:

    1. Identify and process the cognitive dissonance between your values and daily practice, developing strategies to navigate misalignment without burnout

    2. Strengthen your intuition and embodied wisdom as decision-making tools alongside technical expertise

    3. Recognize professional conditioning and inherited norms that perpetuate harmful practices, and develop the agency to challenge them—even when you're the only one in the room

    4. Articulate your personal "why" for this work in ways that connect with colleagues, clients, and leadership

    5. Develop resilience practices to sustain change leadership over the long term, including how to process grief, frustration, and isolation

    1. Map your position within organizational and industry systems to identify your unique leverage points for creating change

    2. Apply systems thinking frameworks (leverage points, feedback loops, Two Loops model) to understand where intervention will be most effective

    3. Distinguish between extractive and regenerative paradigms and recognize how these worldviews show up in firm culture, project workflows, and specification habits

    4. Identify feedback loops and resistance patterns in your organization, and develop strategies to work with (not against) them

    5. Recognize when to push, when to build relationships, and when to hospice outdated practices

    1. Evaluate materials using the Common Materials Framework: understand how your choices meet the AIA Materials Pledge impact areas of climate health, ecosystem health, human health, social health and equity, and circular economy

    2. Navigate transparency tools and certifications (EPDs, HPDs, Declare, C2C, FSC… the whole alphabet soup of sustainability) with confidence and critical thinking

    3. Identify chemical classes of concern and advocate for safer alternatives within project budget and performance constraints

    4. Apply embodied carbon frameworks to material selection decisions and communicate carbon impacts to project teams

    5. Integrate circular economy principles into design workflows, including designing for disassembly and material reuse

    6. Adapt specification language and workflows to work with your current projects and systems

    1. Communicate the business case for material health and regenerative design to skeptical colleagues, clients, and firm leadership

    2. Navigate resistance and pushback with strategies grounded in empathy, systems thinking, and strategic patience

    3. Build coalitions within your firm by identifying allies, understanding motivations, and creating shared language

    4. Use storytelling and reframing techniques to shift conversations from compliance to opportunity, from cost to value

    5. Facilitate productive conversations about material health that honor complexity and multiple perspectives

    6. Develop project-specific strategies that balance health goals with real-world constraints (budget, timeline, client priorities)

    1. Build a cross-firm peer network of practitioners navigating similar challenges—your ongoing support system

    2. Create personal practices for maintaining hope, agency, and connection to purpose amid systemic inertia

    3. Develop a personal action plan with concrete next steps you can implement within your current role and context

    4. Recognize your impact even when change feels slow, and celebrate small wins as part of larger transformation

there are lots of professional development options out there … why choose this cohort?

Investment: 8 weeks. Return: Every project, every RELationship.

What makes Rooted different from other professional development:

What You’ve Tried Before

LEED/WELL prep courses that teach you how to check boxes

Webinars that give you information you forget by next week

Technical training that ignores the emotional labor of advocacy

Individual learning that leaves you feeling isolated

Generic content that doesn't address your specific context

Compliance focus that feels disconnected from larger purpose

Paradigm-shifting frameworks that explain why the boxes exist and when to challenge them

Cohort-based learning where you process, apply, and integrate with peers

Integration of inner work that addresses burnout, grief, and sustaining change leadership

Peer community that becomes your ongoing support system

Facilitated discussions where you bring your actual challenges and get real-time coaching

Systems thinking that connects your work to planetary transformation

What Rooted offers instead

launching
Summer 2026

Sign up using the contact form to the right to express interest and receive updates as more information is released.