Alice Sung

As a first-generation American daughter of Chinese immigrants, Alice is a mother, woman architect, artist, green building/sustainability professional, facilitator/intermediary strategist, children and public schools advocate and climate justice change agent. Her background includes an architecture degree from UC Berkeley, a Master of Architecture degree from MIT, and many other training and credentials of the sustainability field to community resilience and engagement. She is a longtime champion of high-performance, zero-carbon public K-14 school districts. Her later architectural career has focused on prioritizing the health, environmental, economic, and educational benefits of green schools for those most impacted. She has also advocated for energy democracy, building decarbonization, climate change action and racial and environmental justice, especially for children and other vulnerable communities before public agencies and community meetings. She has led many environmental and green building sector-related organizations for over two decades.

Working with the NAACP Centering Equity in the Sustainable Buildings Sector—together in partnership with many local environmental justice and community-based organizations, industry organizations, policy-makers and thought leaders—Alice seeks to bridge technical climate solutions of the built environment to center equity, from public policy and organizational or systems change to program design and local implementation, in order to leverage a sustainable, just transition toward an equitable, resilient, zero-carbon future for all of us. She serves in the first cohort of the Environmental Justice Movement Fellowship at The New School, exploring bridging to belonging, at pace and scale.

Alice’s research, advocacy, and adviser-practitioner work explores root causes at the intersection of policy; governance; and social, institutional, political, and economic systems that have developed both the energy/climate and environmental justice/racial equity crises evident in our built environment. She examines the foundations of these systems, including complex topics of race, power, wealth, public/private ownership, colonial mindset and greed/self-interest, in a zero-sum culture that produces disparate, cumulative harms and environmental injustices. She seeks to bridge and develop collective actions with frontline communities and other partners that identify strategic leverage points to co-create new processes and models to implement systems-level change toward climate justice, energy democracy and health. Alice seeks to center equity first, in our most impacted places, through a green-building-sector Just Transition.