Green Sports Alliance and Arc Performance Platform Join Forces to Help Sports Industry Get “Ready to Play” Post-COVID-19
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Green Sports Alliance and Arc Performance Platform Join Forces to Help Sports Industry Get “Ready to Play” Post-COVID-19
Sports sustainability leaders leverage the power of the USGBC-affiliated Arc performance platform to create an inclusive tool for sports facility managers to recover from COVID-19 and position the industry for greater resiliency
June 10, 2020 – As global sports industry leaders continue to plan for safe returns from the unprecedented shutdown as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Green Sports Alliance has partnered with Arc, an affiliate of the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC), to launch the “Ready to Play” initiative and toolkit to accelerate re-entry and propel the industry toward greater sustained wellness. The free-to-use Ready to Play tool, released to the sports industry on June 10, 2020, consolidates expert guidance from global health and safety authorities such as the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the World Health Organization (WHO) to empower venue operators to align with verified standards and involve staff, crew, athlete, and fan participation. Understanding current industry resource constraints—particularly current staffing and financial limitations—Ready to Play has been designed for facility manager accessibility and user-friendliness to seek mass participation towards a healthy and sustainable re-entry from COVID-19.Ready to Play is powered by over 80 independent health and wellness variables that exist within three critical impact categories: Facility Management, Occupant Experience, and Indoor Air Quality (IAQ). With complex and sometimes conflicting guidance from authority bodies, Ready to Play targets a simplified re-entry assessment that enables venues to compare strategies to industry-specific benchmarks. A panel of experts from sports greening, safety, and analytics has been curated to aggregate data sets from across professional and collegiate sports leagues, provide technical guidance to users, and bridge observed re-entry industry gaps.“We fully understand the multidisciplinary collaboration required for re-entry, and although not a panacea for complete risk abatement, Ready to Play will empower facilities across the industry to band together around transparency and education for a safe comeback that protects human lives,” said Roger McClendon, Executive Director of the Green Sports Alliance, a national non-profit that leverages the cultural and market influence of sports to promote healthy and sustainable communities. “We all want sports to come back as soon as possible, and the Green Sports Alliance is committed to accelerating a return that is focused around human and environmental wellness.”In addition to the complementary tool, Green Sports Alliance members will receive a free “Playbook” series outlining tips and case studies from effective implementation strategies, educational webinars on how best to approach re-entry and utilize the toolkit, industry re-entry status reports, and discounts on premium analytical evaluations available in the Arc platform.“Our new partnership brings together two pioneering environmental organizations to tackle a truly unparalleled moment in modern sports history, and we are excited to be part of it,” said Chris Pyke, Senior Vice President of Product at Arc, an affiliate of USGBC. “The mission of Arc is to make building and venue performance data accessible, inclusive, and insightful for all, and we have carried these values over into our COVID-19 re-entry tool. The intention is for Ready to Play to help venues reopen quickly and safely, allowing us to then focus on long-term human and environmental health performance for fans, athletes, personnel, and our communities.” Arc is a technology platform that allows spaces, buildings and places to collect data across five categories (energy, water, waste, transportation and human experience), manage and benchmark progress, measure their impact and improve their sustainability performance.While Ready to Play will allow venues to track re-entry progress with complete data confidentiality, it has also been designed to integrate into existing and forthcoming third-party verified safety and sanitation certifications, such as the GBAC STAR Accreditation Program and the soon-to-be-released WELL Health-Safety Rating for Facility Operations and Management.You can visit the Ready to Play portal for more information.Click here to register for a free webinar on Wednesday June 17th at 10:00am PT/1:00pm ET for a walkthrough of the Ready to Play tool.
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About the Green Sports Alliance
The Green Sports Alliance leverages the cultural and market influence of sports to promote healthy, sustainable communities where people live and play. The Alliance inspires professional sports leagues, sports governing bodies, colleges, teams, venues, their partners and millions of fans to embrace renewable energy, healthy food, recycling, water efficiency, safer chemicals and other environmentally preferable practices. Visit greensportsalliance.org for more information.
About Arc
Arc is a technology company that is affiliated with Green Business Certification Inc. and the U.S. Green Business Council. Arc believes that performance is the future of green building and launched the Arc performance platform to help create better buildings and places for people and the environment. Arc empowers its users to understand and enhance their sustainability, promote human health and well-being and contribute to a higher quality of life. Arc helps users achieve green building certification, improve individual building sustainability, manage complex portfolios and transform cities and communities. Arc powers next generation, performance-based rating systems, including LEED v4.1 O+M and LEED for Cities and Communities, and, is expanding to support many more performance-based solutions. Over 10,200 projects from around the world are using the platform to track and improve their data, covering more than 3.5 billion square feet of space and impacting 6.6 million occupants.