Welcome to the Green in Action Podcast!

Join host Kimberly Vermeer as she shares stories of leadership in green affordable housing.

About the show

Building affordable housing is not an easy task – doing it sustainably is an even greater challenge. How do leaders in the field respond and achieve success?

Through my career in green consulting, I’ve been blessed to meet amazing people doing work on the leading edge of affordable housing. As the host of the Green in Action podcast, I’m excited to share these stories with you in every episode. We’re creating a forum to celebrate and learn from the successes, innovations, and challenges of green leaders in the affordable housing field.

I’m excited to use this platform to build a community where practitioners can learn from each other. And the podcast is not just a resource for practitioners – these stories hold lessons for anyone who would like to learn more about equity in green building.

— Host Kimberly Vermeer

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Children play at Mutual Housing at Spring Lake in Woodland, California, the featured project in our Resident Engagement episode. Photo courtesy of Mutual Housing California.

Our Stories

Why you should listen

stories of success

You'll hear from practitioners, advocates, and residents who are creating sustainable and resilient communities

equity and Sustainability

You'll be inspired by stories from the field about social equity in sustainability and housing

People, programs, and projects

You’ll be informed about strategies and trends influencing the growth of green affordable housing.

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the Green in Action Podcast

Meet the Team

Kimberly Vermeer

Host and Executive Producer, she/her/hers

Kim is passionate about delivering green benefits to affordable housing and eager to introduce listeners to the green leaders making a difference.

Klara Kaufman

Producer, she/her/hers or they/them/theirs

As a producer, Klara’s focus is on crafting the story of each episode. Klara does background research, works with interview transcripts, helps with interview tape selection, and drafts scripts. As the UHI Marketing and Communication specialist, she also oversees the podcast outreach and growth strategy.

Carl-Isaak Krulewitch

Audio Engineer and Editing, he/him/his or they/them/theirs

A recent graduate of Berklee College of Music, Carl-Isaak brings technical editing abilities to Green Horizons. He welds together the structure of each episode to bring you, the listener, the stories crafted by the team. When not editing music or podcast episodes, Carl-Isaak can be found composing for the piano or pondering the nature of the universe.

Matt with his wife and fellow musician, Rachel

Matt Vermeer

Music, he/him/his

Matt’s role in the podcast process is to compose and record the musical embellishments. By working with the team, he is able to synthesize music that enhances the story and impact of the podcast. He hopes you enjoy listening!

Featured Voices in
Green in Action

“Making a green building isn't just about solving technical problems, but it's also thinking about what it's going to be like to live there and what it's going to be like for the people who are going to call it home.”
Walker Wells,
Principal,
Raimi & Associates
"The most sustainable approach to revitalizing our urban core in all of our cities is to keep our existing building stock from going to the landfill.”
Guy Kempe,
Vice President of Community Development,
RUPCO
"When you start to think of a building as the place where a person lives versus just a bunch of blocks that are being kind of laid out in a certain configuration, it really changes the whole mindset.”
Tara Baruaskas
Executive Director, Community Corporation of Santa Monica
“We need the folks who will be living in the property, engaging in integrative design. We need the folks who will be responsible for keeping up the building and ordering replacement filters involved in the design. We need the folks whose phone will ring if the buildings isn't warm enough in the winter involved in the design.”
Krista Eggers,
Enterprise Green Communities
“The fact that very low income folks get to live in a healthy building and in a deeply performative building, quite often more deeply performative than the market-rate housing that's sitting next door, is a form of justice. It fits into a greater system of meaning for a city and a neighborhood.”
Anne Torney,
Partner, Mithun
“I would describe integrative design as a collaborative, problem solving approach. It's not a period. It's not a duration. It is a problem-solving approach that tries to wrestle both with how decisions are made, but also why decisions are made: and it grapples with them in real time.”
Ray Demers
Enterprise Green Communities

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New episodes

The Green in Action podcast launched in July 2021. Episodes are dropped monthly-ish.

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