This week, InterfaceFLOR’s Facebook fans and Twitter followers worked together to raise $2,204 for MASS Design Group, a non-profit using powerful architecture to raise up under-served communities. $2,000 was raised from the InterfaceFLOR USA Facebook page, and another $204 from our Facebook fans in Mexico, Brazil, South America and Central America.

This comes on top of InterfaceFLOR’s own donation of $2,500, meaning that the InterfaceFLOR community has personally provided $4,704 to MASS Design Group’s philanthropic mission.

To thank us, Michael Murphy, co-founder of MASS Design Group penned a guest blog post showing how your hard work will help advance MASS Design Group’s mission.

What if architecture could boost local economies? What if design could heal sick patients? Could buildings have the power to empower?

In this day in age, Quality architecture can no longer be determined by a photograph alone. Instead, buildings must be considered in terms of how society uses them over time; an extensive range of social, environmental, economic, and political implications must govern its success.

This broad range of criteria fuels the decision-making for MASS Design Group’s holistic designs, from the 140-bed Butaro Hospital and the 9-classroom Girubuntu School in Rwanda, to designing the policy initiative for Liberia’s new Health Infrastructure Standards. We collaborate with governments, NGOs, private sector firms, and health care experts to advocate for the most underserved and to provide scalable models of community-based development and training.

What’s the inevitable goal? The Butaro Hospital brought 400,000 Rwandans access to health care when it opened in January, but we were equally excited that through the hospital’s construction process, new local markets were stimulated and over 12,000 local community members were trained and employed. We believe that innovation, driven by interdisciplinary research and local immersion, can deliver well-built environments that are efficient, effective, and empowering—and thus have the capacity to break the cycle of poverty.

As we enter 2012, we are launching into similar projects for fostering effective, efficient, and dignified health care, that couple with opportunities for education, creative new markets, and job creation.

Butaro Doctors’ Housing, Butaro, Rwanda

We broke ground last fall on the housing for the doctors at Butaro—a project designed to attract and retain skilled physicians in the area as well as train over 100 community members in sustainable construction methods.

GHESKIO MDRTB Facility, Port-au-Prince, Haiti

To replace the original MDRTB facility that was destroyed in the 2010 earthquake, we’ve been designing a new state-of-the-art tuberculosis facility that implements effective ventilation methods for infection control as well as renewable technologies to maximize the use of available resources, decrease operating costs, and offset long-term environmental impacts. The 30 isolation rooms will provide patients with an effective and dignified place to stay for long-term treatment; construction is slated to begin in March.

Meanwhile, we are continuing to run our CSEB (compressed stabilized earth block) Workshop and Training Center in Port-au-Prince, providing local Haitian builders and architects with the expertise to create and use a locally produced construction material, and we continue to train a new generation of architects in Kigali, working to empower communities not only through access to resources but also through education.

Visit our website at www.mass-group.org or check out our blog at http://massdesigngroup.blogspot.com/ in order to learn more. We hope you will join our community by liking MASS Design Group on Facebook, following us on Twitter or joining our newsletter list where you can stay up to date on our latest happenings and job opportunities.