Summer Fowler

Founder & CEO

WELL Faculty, Associate AIA, LEED® AP+ BD&C, OAME Board of Directors (incoming Chair)

Summer Fowler is a passionate advocate for the intersection of Sustainability and Social Equity. She started her career at Sienna Architecture in Seattle, where she pioneered several cutting edge sustainability projects, including one of the first Living Buildings the June Key Delta House, and the first LEED Neighborhood Development Pilot project in Dubai. In 2009, she founded ecoREAL Solutions with the mission to make Green Building accessible for all.

She started to build her Green Canary software on her first project working on a Federal jobsite just after LEED certification was mandated. She saw the issues with RFI’s, change order and confusion, while living with the subs on a remote location learning their headache with documentation. Consequently, her tools integrate sustainability seamlessly with the design and construction process from the owner specifications to the boots on the ground. This makes certification a natural biproduct of the process.  This integrative process ensures every project can optimize their building performance goals, while ensuring a healthy indoor environment for the people as well.

She teaches, leads, and innovates to make Green Building the best investment for the occupants, the buildings, the environment, and the community it serves. With an expertise in Well Building her triple bottom-line approach has helped owners, including the City of Portland, Multnomah County, School Districts, Non-profits and private owners like the Ritz Carlton and Walmart HQ, exceed their sustainability and equity goals. This has included non-profits achieving Net Zero goals they didn’t think were possible through incentives, and utilizing the ETO’s Path to Net Zero incentive path to help numerous projects achieve the critical Architecture 2030 challenge. As part of the owner rep team, she helped the City of Portland make the leap from LEED Platinum to also pursuing the 1st municipal Well Building Certification for the major renovation of their historic Portland Building.

She is an expert in making sustainability more affordable, including HUD MIP financing, ETO’s Path to Net Zero program, and federal programs to help projects from low-income school districts and affordable housing push their green building goals towards achieving the Architecture 2030 challenge in tight budgets. 

Summer started the Sustainability and Equity Committee for the Oregon Association of Entrepreneurs thirteen years ago before joining the board and is the incoming Chair. She is Well Faculty and served on the International Well Building Institute's Global Equity Advisory Committee to advocate for Well Buildings for All, which was her own non-profit mission in 2016. This led her to speak about the “New Value Proposition for Well Building for All” at GreenBuild Mediterranean conference in Italy.

All this is culminated into her recent venture to launch Green Canary Software as a separate company to get her Lean LEED, WELL and healthy procurement tools into the hands of everyone pursuing cost-effective sustainability goals. Her Healthy Material Tracking software "red-flags" any emission violation with ALL products automatically in the submittal process to help ensure teams meet the stringent indoor air quality performance testing requirements. Teams often exceed credit expectations by giving the tools to the subs to verify every product naturally in the submittal process instead of point-chasing. It is so easy it’s just protocol. This supports the mission that sustainable healthy buildings are a basic human right.