When thinking about the theme of this year's conference, Scalable Solutions, our team began to ask: which "scale" do we want to address in our presentation? At the highest level, we all know that we have to act at a planetary scale to avoid an environmental crisis. We also know that we need to "scale up" solutions that have so far been adopted only in small areas of the building sector--specific technologies or methods. With our presentation, though, we want to discuss the scaling up of the design team and process itself. Gone are the days when a lone genius architect would make a signature building with the stroke of a pen. Our new climate reality demands that project design be a true team effort from the beginning. This means that the scale of the design effort should already include an energy modeler and the local energy provider even at the very earliest phases. Through early target-setting, collaborative iterative modeling, and consistent communication with utility rebate and incentive programs, we can indeed scale up ambitious green building across New England. This session tells the story of two projects scheduled for completion in 2022 for nonprofit institutions in New England: the new home for the New Canaan Library in New Canaan, CT and the Mill River Whittingham Discovery Center in Stamford, CT. The New Canaan Library is a net zero-ready building set to achieve an EUI reduction of 89 percent from the AIA 2030 Commitment baseline. It is one of the first projects to participate in the Design for Freedom initiative, which seeks to eliminate slave labor from the building supply chain; it also benefited from the utility’s energy modeling and renewable energy production incentive programs. The Mill River Discovery Center, a visitor center with exhibit spaces and science classrooms for an urban park built over a brownfield site, is aiming for LEED Gold certification and will generate a third of its energy needs through a rooftop solar array. The design also addresses innovative LEED v4.1 credits centered around Equity & Community Benefits and Biophilic Design, both important goals for the project client. In this presentation, our speakers will highlight their collaborative roles in: defining specific goals with ambitious but budget-constrained client organizations; establishing realistic benchmarks and tracking mechanisms; running iterative energy models to identify specific components to optimize; discovering synergies between different green building goals; and ensuring that project goals are met during construction. By presenting not just the case study projects themselves, as is more commonly done, but truly highlighting the collaborative processes that resulted in these final products, with their successes, challenges, hiccups, and lessons learned, we hope to provide our answer to the call for Scalable Solutions and inspire attendees to learn from and even improve upon our stories. We should also note that throughout the talk, we will also seek to redefine the term “performance” as used in the green building industry. We are proponents of a holistic approach that integrates energy efficiency, human health and comfort, ethical material sourcing, community benefits, and biophilic design, finding synergies between elements to achieve a truly sustainable building. Driving down EUI at the expense of other design criteria is itself unsustainable.