Heather Tremain

Heather is active in her community and is currently Co-Chair of Vancity’s Community Foundation, and a past director of the Cascadia Region Green Building Council and past President of Tradeworks Training Society, a not-for-profit that provides construction trades training and job placement services to youth in Canada’s poorest neighbourhood.

In her work life she is leader who has dedicated her career to advancing sustainability issues within the built environment. Her current consulting work is focused on urban sustainability strategies related to transportation, climate change and planning issues.

She was recently awarded a Loeb Fellowship at Harvard University, which recognizes leaders in design and the built environment and affords them a year of independent study. Her research explored effective climate change policy at the municipal and regional levels.

In 2001 Heather cofounded reSource Rethinking Building, a Vancouver-based green building consulting and development company. The mission of reSource was to ‘transform the way buildings are built’. Delivering on its mission, reSource was recognized in the greater Vancouver area as a leader in the building sector having affected well over one billion dollars worth of construction and over 30,000 homes in British Columbia.

As co-founder and CEO of reSource Rethinking Building, Heather acted as the sustainability advisor on numerous local projects including: Vancouver’s first green market housing project, the creation of green building guidelines for the UniverCity community (a 15,000 member community on Burnaby Mountain), and the development of environmental strategies for the Southeast False Creek area. Heather engaged in extensive policy and strategy work to promote the adoption of sustainable policies at the municipal, provincial and federal levels.

In addition to her consulting work she led the development of The Verdant, a green and affordable townhouse project, which pioneered an innovative approach to green building finance. Verdant has won a number of awards including the Urban Development Institute awards for Innovation in Sustainability and Innovation in Affordable Housing and a national award from CMHC for Best Practices in Affordable Housing.

Heather was the co-creator of Healthy Home, a 39-part television series intended to create consumer demand for healthy and sustainable buildings. The series was available in over 60 million homes around the world.
She holds an undergraduate degree in Political Science from McMaster University, and a Masters degree in architecture from the University of British Columbia. In 2009 she was a Visiting Fellow at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy in Cambridge Massachusetts.