Our 7,200 sq. ft. building is a cooperative project of two historic peace churches and two well‐established and respected non‐profit organizations in the city of San Diego.
✔ The First Church of the Brethren (on whose property this building will be located)
✔ The San Diego Friends Meeting (Quakers)
✔ The Peace Resource Center of San Diego
✔ The American Friends Service Committee, U.S.‐Mexico Border Program
We are a working partner of Habitat For Humanity, and our project has been endorsed by the City Heights Area Planning Committee.
We are combining our resources and activities to create the Friends Center‐‐a unique building that will house our organizations and be a focus for peaceful social change, and spiritual growth. We will also be providing a facility that can be used by many other organizations in our community for meetings, workshops and programs, as well as providing a demonstration model, using earth‐friendly building values for now and for our future.
One reason we are building an ecologically‐ sensitive building is so we would know we did the very best we could to support life‐affirming construction practices in our world. For us, it’s a moral statement of doing the least harm possible in our biosphere.
Another reason is to create a demonstration project for builders (personal and corporate) who have developed, or who are developing similar values. In this way, the positive benefits for our earth will go far beyond that of just our building. Our research into the most appropriate materials, systems, and methods has been exhaustive. And since this building will be open to the public and heavily used by many different community groups, it will be easy to share the results of our research, available in our library, with the large numbers of people who visit. We will have volunteer docents available to provide tours as needed.
Friends Center San Diego, California
As the first permitted strawbale building to be constructed in center city San Diego, the Friends Center project was developed and designed as a showcase “green” building, a demonstration site for state-of-the-art environmentally sustainable building techniques, including strawbale construction, solar power, passive solar design, rainwater capture, and other energy-efficient components. In addition to design skills and knowledge of environmentally-friendly and energy-efficient materials and processes, Hubbell & Hubbell was instrumental in educating the City Building Department on alternative building materials and obtaining building permits, making this the first multipurpose strawbale project in the City. When completed, the structure is expected to receive a minimum of LEED “silver” certification by the US Green Building Council, and was used by the San Diego chapter of the USGBC as an early case-study of sustainable design and implementation.
Additional Resources
sdfriendscenter.org (original website)