Bill Walsh

I am a lawyer who doesn’t practice law. I started a healthy building group, but I can’t hammer a nail straight. I’ve been a visiting professor at the Parsons School of Design, but have no fashion sense. I might seem like a walking contradiction, but what I mostly am is curious about new ways to create meaningful, enduring, and positive change in society. I’m a seasoned and accomplished executive who founded the Healthy Building Network, and grew it to be the nation’s leading authority on product transparency and healthy materials in the building industry.

The Healthy Building Network has been defining the leading edge of healthy building practice for 16 years, working in strategic collaborations with industry partners such as Google, Harvard University, Perkins+Will, Gensler and SmithGroup JJR. Green building organizations including the USGBC, International Living Future Institute and Enterprise Community Partners. Environmental health groups including NRDC, the BlueGreen Alliance, Health Care Without Harm and Healthy Babies Bright Futures. We are dramatically increasing transparency in the building products industry, and reducing human exposures to toxic chemicals. We are increasing commercial demand for healthier products, creating market incentives for healthier innovations in manufacturing. In 2015 we launched HomeFree, a new collaboration with affordable housing developers to bring the benefits of healthy building to people who are disproportionately exposed to toxic chemicals at home, on the job and in their communities.

With the support and inspiration from my long-tenured HBN colleagues, I’ve become a sought after expert in healthy building, chemical policy and environmental health traveling frequently to enlist and assist the allies in our growing movement.

Reach out to me if I can be of help to you, or pique my curiosity with an intriguing idea for a collaboration that can change the world.