Who We Are

Designing to Live Sustainably (d2ls) is a change agent working within our shared bi-national bioregion to nurture ideas from their conceptual stage to action, implementation and manifestation. We strive to serve as a vehicle through which great ideas can receive the support and financial means to come to fruition through a community network that offers the collaboration and synergistic effects to make them happen.

The d2ls mission, to collectively embrace our responsibility to future generations by doing more than merely coping with the effects of climate change, designing our built environment and policies to facilitate doing well recognizes that no amount or degree of only physical preparedness will be enough when the impacts from climate change create the most stress.

Surviving and thriving will require upgrading our societal infrastructure too. If we don’t build on our humanity and caring ways of sharing and helping each other, we’ll experience the chaos likely to be the case if we don’t act according to our highest principles. We know net zero houses alone will not make Buffalo sustainable. Living sustainably in Buffalo will only be achieved when there is an end to the segregation and inequality that divides the city.

While continuing to help nurture the ideas and projects of others, d2ls is developing three initiatives of its own: A Festival to facilitate making positive neighborhood changes, Yes In My Back Yard (YIMBY); a methodology for understanding what to prepare for in Regional Climate Change, Weathering Change in WNY; and Sprout Technologies initiatives to improve food security and food justice via Backyard Orchards and the Buffalo Food Forests (BFF).

What We’ve Accomplished

Designing to Live Sustainably [d2ls] began in 2009 with a mission to be highly inclusive and challenge the conventional paradigm with radical collaboration. Our initial projects, competitions, sought ideas, concepts and designs from every demographic, and encouraged submissions on the design of policy and systems of governance as well as built environment.

The inaugural 2013 competition, Imagine Buffalo, began a dialogue about our potential to leapfrog overbuilt cities, and to recognize that to be sustainable, we must end the City’s racial segregation and inequality.

The 2015 competition, Our Responsibility to Future Generations—Preparing for the effects of climate change [OR2FG] challenged the Buffalo-Niagara Region to use our comparative advantages to adapt and thrive as the effects of climate change impact us.

Designing to Live Sustainably’s competitions stimulated novel and useful innovative and sustainable design. The entries are a vehicle with which to foster inspiration for a dynamic, adaptive new vision for our future sense of place. D2LS continues to serve as a catalyst to the formation of a new paradigm for urban land use/building and a more equitable relationship between urbanized areas and their rural environs.

The impact of these competitions extends beyond what the awardees have been been able to see result from their participation. They brought together people and organizations, facilitating collaborations and synergistic effects.

We are a diverse and unilateral group that meets to brainstorm ideas for how we can promote living sustainably and thrive in a world plagued by the effects of global climate change.

Join Our Team!

We are seeking people that are motivated, dedicated and committed fully to seeing the Buffalo-Niagara bioregion become a place where we can enjoy economic, social, and environmental prosperity for generations to come.