Sustainable planning for academic buildings such as the Osher Center for Integrative Medicine reduces ecological footprint and improves building efficiency/performance. Collaborative workshops are methods to integrate green measures into the process: establishing goals, developing green measures, and making consensus-based evaluation decisions. Energy conservation, indoor environmental/air quality, and resource efficiency provide strategies for achieving goals. Evaluation techniques such as rating systems and re-visiting goals are ways to gauge effectiveness of the green challenge at each phase of a new or renovated/reuse project.