Triangle’s Mission & Vision

Founded in an office the size of a closet in 1979, today we provide neutral third-party facilitation and mediation support for decisions that involve hundreds of thousands of people across the western United States each year, and environment education programs for tens of thousands of school age children and hundreds of schools.

Triangle Associates was founded in response to the creation of the National Environmental Policy Act and other federal legislation that required government agencies to assess the environmental impact of spending federal money, a process that often requires gaining the input of stakeholders and community interests. Led by Alice Shorett, a pioneer in the field of alternative dispute resolution for environmental issues, Triangle was one of the first firms in the nation to offer environmental collaboration and conflict resolution. In the intervening 45 years, Triangle has provided mediation and facilitation on some of the largest built and natural environment decisions of the Pacific Northwest. This included the successful negotiation of the Snohomish River Basin agreement, the first environmental decision to use a mediator in the Pacific Northwest. In the late 1980s, Triangle Associates was approached by King County to create an education program that would help implement the area’s earliest recycling programs. Integral to the success of establishing recycling in the greater Seattle area, the firm established their environmental education arm in 1989 with the goal of providing the public, including area schoolchildren, with the information they need to make good decisions about waste reduction. Since that time, Triangle has helped utilities, government agencies, and non-profit environmental groups create educational programs that have addressed issues including waste reduction and sustainability, climate change, household hazardous waste, stormwater pollution prevention, energy and water conservation, biodiversity and ecosystems, renewable energy, climate change, river ecology and safety, and more.