Building Health is Personal: Spotlight on Lendlease Americas’ Sara Neff

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Sara Neff, Lendlease Americas. Photo Credit: Brian Guido.

Sara Neff | Photo Credit: Brian Guido

AT A GLANCE

Sara Neff, Head of Sustainability, Lendlease Americas. Photo Credit: Brian Guido.

Sara Neff
Head of Sustainability, Lendlease Americas

2023 Best in Building Health
Special Recognition for Industry and Individual Leadership: Impact Through Social Value

Sara Neff is a formidable player in the sustainability space, and she knows a thing or two about using Fitwel to create value through community and health. As the Head of Sustainability for Lendlease Americas, she’s charged with delivering on the firm’s sizable commitment to create connected communities and generate $250 million in social value by 2025. At the same time, her professional and personal mission is to harness the growing momentum for healthy buildings and well-being among her peers, and demonstrate the tangible benefits through her work. One way she’s doing that? Elevating the social component of ESG to its rightful place.

A Breath of Fresh Air
Sara’s professional calling can be traced back to a personal realization – a breath of fresh air. As Sara puts it, there’s a “massive unseen impact” that the built environment has on our health. This first hit home when her two-year-old spent six months coughing herself to sleep night after night, without explanation. Then it dawned on her: why not try a practical approach with an off-the-shelf air filter? Their home also happened to be located right next to a clogged freeway and, two days after running the filter, her daughter’s symptoms greatly improved. Sara immediately realized the importance of intervention in support of health.

”Somehow the link between an air filter and our health was invisible to me – even as a green building professional – and in my own home. I then realized the link between buildings and health isn’t always intuitive... and it’s probably invisible to most of us.”

An Evolving Journey
Sara’s ascension to being a leader in the healthy building movement has paralleled the paradigm shift in ESG’s meaning and role in real estate, from a ‘nice-to-have’ consideration to an essential business imperative; and from serving as a cost-saving measure, to a long-term value driver. As Kilroy Realty’s first Sustainability Director, she was tasked with spearheading the firm’s sustainability program from the ground up. In just three years, Sara led Kilroy to be named the number one real estate company across all asset classes in North America by GRESB.

At the time, she recalls, “tenants started demanding LEED certifications and were willing to pay for them, which meant we had to learn about things like indoor air quality.” The need to verify health-promoting buildings became clear as studies increasingly showed a connection between LEED and health. Sara harnessed this connection, becoming an early adopter of Fitwel and uplifting health as a core component of Kilroy’s corporate social responsibility. With the understanding that healthy buildings are a pathway to prioritizing ESG, Sara also became a member of Fitwel’s Leadership Advisory Board (LAB), a selective group of industry experts at the helm of defining Fitwel’s growth.

When Sara moved to her next role, at Lendlease Americas, she immediately set out to continue her mission to put people at the center of investment decision-making. There, she even pioneered a new approach: using Fitwel to identify ways of promoting health within US military housing. This initiative–a first–only further demonstrated Sara’s commitment to think, and act, outside of the box. The Fitwel Community Standard provided a simple, evidence-based method to benchmark Lendlease’s successes, identifying ways in which their operations excelled, and ways in which they could be improved to create even safer, healthier communities.

Sara continues to lay the foundation for a healthier future. Looking back on all that she’s accomplished, Sara shared four illuminating insights that should be at the very core of how the real estate industry seizes the opportunity to incorporate health.

Read them by downloading our inaugural issue of Building Health, Defining Best in Building Health.

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