We received some good news this week. Here’s the lead from a press release we’re sending out today:

Bensonwood’s Unity House Achieves LEED Platinum Status

Unity, ME – Unity House, the second home designed and constructed by Bensonwood Homes as part of the groundbreaking Open Prototype Initiative (OPI), has achieved LEED Platinum designation, the U.S. Green Building Council’s highest rating for environmentally sustainable construction.

It is exciting news, and also a reminder to me that there are several facets of Unity that help to define the path of hope in these hard times.

First, unity is a noun:

u⋅ni⋅ty
1. the state of being one; oneness.
2. a whole or totality as combining all its parts into one.
7. (in literature and art) a relation of all the parts or elements of a work constituting a harmonious whole and producing a single general effect.
Dictionary.com Unabridged

You can’t fake unity. You have it, or you don’t. I’m proud to say we have it. Nothing lasts very long without unity at its core. At all scales, unity is the soul of human organization and its source of sustainability. Unity is such critical lifeblood to organized behavior, that if it can’t be engendered, it will be enforced. For our governing bodies at all levels, most of us believe the most benign and powerful kind of unity is in our democracy rather than in the subjugation associated with autocracies. On the other hand, most corporations have opted for some form of command-and-control instead.

Unity is important, but it matters how it happens.