Meyer Memorial Trust Case Study: Using Wood Procurement to Achieve Community, Equity and Conservation Goals

In 2018, Meyer Memorial Trust began construction on a new mass timber headquarters in its home city of Portland. The project was guided by Meyer’s goals to build an equitable and flourishing Oregon. The project considered wood as a building material with the distinct potential to achieve sustainability and equity impacts like carbon sequestration, worker rights, human health, watershed health, and wildlife habitat protection. Moreover, both of these key goals were viewed as interconnected with the unique potential to amplify each other and connect rural and urban Oregon.

Meyer and the project team partnered with nonprofit Sustainable Northwest to establish specific sourcing criteria for the wood used in the construction of its new headquarters. The innovation of this partnership was the dialogue it forged between the project team, the client, and supply chain to find hidden barriers and remove obstacles for sustainable wood sourcing.

The project was successful in sourcing all wood from the Pacific Northwest and 85% of the wood in ways that support forest stewardship. The project team partnered with six minority and women-owned businesses and seven small, family-owned businesses in the sourcing and installing of wood products.

This panel will discuss how designing with wood and the establishment of wood sourcing criteria can create benefits across the value chain for people, communities, and the environment. Crucial to this conversation will be identifying how to draw connections between community development and climate resilience, racial equity and the environment and using mission-driven investments to establish innovative policies and supply chain practices.

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