Building Transparency, a nonprofit organization that provides open access data and tools needed to inspire actions that positively impact the world, today introduces Alison Kinn Bennett as its new Executive Director. This announcement coincides with a critical moment in time for nonprofits across all sectors—especially within the built environment—as the current landscape now calls for greater industry collaboration to support widespread decarbonization and achieve meaningful outcomes.

Bennett will officially start on October 6, 2025. In her first 90 days and beyond, Bennett will connect with current Building Transparency tool users, industry leaders, and prospective partners to both listen and collaborate, shaping future initiatives. With the goal of centering the organization around data standardization and quality, Bennett aims to further strengthen Building Transparency as the industry’s nonprofit resource for construction material Environmental Product Declaration (EPD) data, promoting transparency and data-driven decision-making.

“Alison is the ideal leader to bring Building Transparency forward. Her experience and vision align with our goal to engage industry stakeholders and inspire progress through transparent, open access data,” says Don Davies, Interim Executive Director and one of the co-founders of Building Transparency. “Alison is optimistic, passionate, and driven. And she understands the powerful role that nonprofits can play in decarbonizing the built environment, now more than ever. I’m excited to see where Building Transparency goes under her leadership.”

With over 25 years of experience, Bennett is passionate about driving improvements in sustainability disclosures, environmentally preferable purchasing, and cleaner manufacturing. She spent almost three decades at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), where she focused on leveraging private sector innovation and public sector spending to support cleaner, more resilient supply chains.

At the EPA, Bennett brought together policy and technical staff across dozens of green building and products related programs to advance comprehensive, market-based approaches to environmental protection. Most recently, she led Inflation Reduction Act-funded efforts to develop a methodology for calculating product-level embodied greenhouse gas emissions and to support the construction sector in reporting via Environmental Product Declarations (EPDs).

Building Transparency and its mission are not new to Bennett. Through her work at the EPA, she and her team leveraged the data and methods that underpin the organization’s cornerstone tool, the Embodied Carbon in Construction Calculator (EC3), to inform initiatives to reduce embodied carbon. The tool allowed for key purchasers to easily find and compare construction materials to support green procurement.

“I’ve long admired Building Transparency’s leadership in elevating embodied carbon as a central climate issue—using the power of standards and data to drive meaningful change,” says Bennett. “EPDs are the cornerstone of that work, with the potential to spark action across a broad landscape of impacts, materials, and supply chains. I’m excited to join an organization uniquely positioned to turn that kind of transparency into real momentum. To inspire true collective action, we’ll need to join hands with a diverse set of partners. I hope that my network and experience bringing together the public and private sectors will open the door for new collaborations and initiatives.”

Formed in 2020, Building Transparency provides the resources necessary to shape a better building future. It hosts, manages, and maintains the EC3 and tally tools. EC3 houses a robust digital third-party EPD database and building material quantities from BIM models, construction estimates, or as builts. The tool currently features over 63,000 users, 16,500+ building projects in 83 countries, and more than 151,000 digitized EPDs. tally is the organization’s life cycle assessment tool, empowering higher-level design and material type choices. Today, tallyLCA has almost 3,500 users in the AEC industry.

For more on Building Transparency and its mission, visit the nonprofit’s website: https://www.buildingtransparency.org/.

About Building Transparency

Building Transparency is a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization that provides open-access data and tools needed to inspire actions that positively impact our world and address embodied carbon’s role in climate change. Formed in 2020, Building Transparency hosts manages and maintains the Embodied Carbon in Construction Calculator (EC3) tool, which provides thousands of digitized EPDs in a free, open-source database, and tally, the nonprofit’s life cycle assessment tool.

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Bennett aims to further strengthen Building Transparency as the industry’s nonprofit resource for construction material Environmental Product Declaration (EPD) data, promoting transparency and data-driven decision-making.