Keynote Speaker
Keynote Speaker: Mustafa Ali
Former Senior Advisor for Environmental Justice and Community Revitalization at the EPA and current Senior Vice President of Climate, Environmental Justice, and Community Revitalization for the Hip Hop Caucus in Washington D.C. (photo source)
Mustafa Ali joined the Hip Hop Caucus, after working 24 years at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. At the EPA, he served as the Assistant Associate Administrator for Environmental Justice and Senior Advisor for Environmental Justice and Community Revitalization. Mustafa elevated environmental justice issues and worked across federal agencies to strengthen environmental justice policies, programs and initiatives. At the EPA, Mustafa led the Interagency Working Group on Environmental Justice (EJIWG), which was comprised of 17 federal agencies and White House offices focused on implementing holistic strategies to address the issues facing vulnerable communities. Mustafa Ali worked for EPA Administrators beginning with William Riley and ending with Scott Pruitt. He joined the EPA as a student and became a founding member of the EPA’s Office of Environmental Justice (OEJ). Mr. Ali also served as the Director of Communications in the EPA’s Office of Environmental Justice (OEJ), where he led the Communications and Stakeholder Involvement (CSI) team. In 2012, Mustafa launched the EPA’s Environmental Justice in Action Blog, which reached over 100,000 followers. This blog highlighted innovative actions to address environmental justice, sustainability and climate change issues. In 2010, Mr. Ali also served as the Environmental Justice Lead for the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill. In 2004, he was selected as the EPA’s National Enforcement Training Institutes “Trainer of the Year” for his efforts in training over 4,000 across the country in “The Fundamentals of Environmental Justice.” Mustafa Ali was a Brookings Institution Congressional Fellow in the Office of Congressman John Conyers from 2007 through 2008. His portfolio as a Legislative Assistant focused on Foreign Policy in Africa and South America, Homeland Security, Health Care, Veterans Affairs, Appropriations and Environmental Justice. Mustafa is a former instructor at West Virginia University and Stanford University in Washington, and the former co-host of the “Spirit in Action” radio show which focused on social justice issues. (http://hiphopcaucus.org/our-story/team/mustafaali/)
Session 1
Panelist: Alexie M. Torres-Fleming
Executive Director, Access Strategies Fund
Alexie is an activist, community organizer, public speaker and urban planner from the South Bronx, New York with over 25 years of experience in social justice leadership in low-income communities of color. She also brings over 10 years’ experience in the philanthropic sector as a foundation executive director, board member, and senior fellow. Her life’s work has been dedicated to the intersections of faith, economic and racial justice, democratic change, youth organizing, women and supporting the leadership of communities of color. A nationally sought after speaker, Alexie has received numerous awards throughout her career including the 2008 Rockefeller Foundation’s Jane Jacobs Medal for New Ideas and Activism, the Caritas Medal from the Vincentian Society for her service to the poor, and the “Servant of Peace” medal from the Permanent Observer Mission of the Vatican to the United Nations. In January of 2009, Alexie was named one of “50 Visionaries Changing Our World” by the Utne Reader. In addition to founding Youth Ministries for Peace and Justice, she is the co-founder of the Bronx River Alliance and the Southern Bronx River Watershed Alliance. Today, Alexie continues her public speaking and writing while also serving as Executive Director of Access Strategies Fund, a philanthropic foundation that harnesses the collective power of underserved communities to use the democratic process to improve their lives. In 2015, she was appointed by President Obama to serve on the President’s Advisory Council for Faith-based and Neighborhood Partnerships. Alexie is also New Voices Fellow for Sojourners in Washington, DC and a 2014 Loeb Fellow at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design. (http://www.accessstrategies.org/about-us/our-people/alexie-torres-fleming)
Panelist: Magdalena Ayed
Founder and Director of The Harborkeepers
Magdalena Ayed is Founder and Director of The Harborkeepers, a start-up coastal resiliency and environmental advocacy organization in East Boston. Originally from Argentina, multi-lingual and with a degree in International Relations, Magdalena has acquired experience working in various sectors in New York, Boston and traveling abroad in countries like Brasil, Italy, Argentina, Algeria, and Ethiopia. Her past professional experience in diverse sectors such as in international marketing, human rights and humanitarian aid, medical interpreting and environmental organizing has given her insights into creative urban problem-solving techniques and innovative community engagement skills. Magdalena's passion for the Boston Harbor, local waterfront environmental issues, keen multi-cultural abilities and creativity has earned her support from the community as well as from partners and colleague across the board, support she leverages to advance city planning process that she hopes will have a lasting impact in creating resiliency and improving the communities in which she lives and works. She is also the film director of a documentary film called Destination East Boston that tells the story of 50 years of airport expansion and its impacts in East Boston.
Moderator: Lily Song
Lecturer in Urban Planning and Design
Harvard University Graduate School of Design
Lily Song is a Lecturer in Urban Planning and Design and Senior Research Associate with the Transforming Urban Transport-Role of Political Leadership (TUT-POL) project at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design. Her research focuses on the relations between urban infrastructure and redevelopment initiatives, sociospatial inequality, and race and class politics in American cities and other postcolonial contexts. Her projects— which topically span building energy retrofits, sustainable urban transport, and informal street vending among others— are motivated by the common question of how historically marginalized and disenfranchised urban inhabitants and communities can drive transformative urban policy and governance in collaboration with differently situated and abled partners. She holds a PhD in Urban and Regional Planning from MIT, where her dissertation, entitled “Race and Place: Green Collar Jobs and the Movement for Economic Democracy in Los Angeles and Cleveland”. (source: http://www.gsd.harvard.edu/person/lily-song/)
Session 2
Panelist: Sofía Owen
Attorney and the Community Organizer for Eastern Massachusetts and Rhode Island
Toxic Action Center
Sofia is Toxics Action Center’s Attorney and the Community Organizer for Eastern Massachusetts and Rhode Island. She provides organizing assistance and works to build power to address environmental racism, settler colonialism, and other systemic barriers that disproportionately affect communities on the front lines of pollution. Prior to joining Toxics Action Center, Sofía worked as a Trial Attorney for the Committee for Public Counsel Services in Lawrence, MA. She has a J.D. from Northeastern University School of Law and a Masters in Environmental Law and Policy from Vermont Law School.
Panelist: Armani White
Reclaim Roxbury
Armani was born and raised in Boston and is a community organizer. His organizing work has focused mainly on criminal justice reform challenging the war on drugs, the school to prison pipeline, and racist stop & frisk policies as well as resident organizing for community oversight and control of local development in the face of displacement.
Panelist: Sara Wylie
Assistant Professor Sociology/Anthropology and Health Science
College of Social Sciences and Humanities
Northeastern University
Sara Wylie is an Assistant Professor at Northeastern University with a joint appointment in Sociology/Anthropology and Health Sciences, where she is a member of the Social Science Environmental Health Research Institute. Wylie seeks to develop new modes of studying and intervening in large-scale environmental health issues through a fusion of social scientific, scientific and art/design practices, and is engaged in developing open-source research projects on low cost thermal imaging, low cost imaging of water pollution, community-based methods for detection of hydrogen sulfide among other civic science projects. Her book, Fractivism: Corporate Bodies and Chemical Bonds published by Duke University Press is an ethnographic study of the role science based NGOs played in the emergence of public concerns about the human and environmental health impacts of chemicals used in natural gas extraction, particularly hydraulic fracturing. Recently Wylie cofounded the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative (EDGI). EDGI is a collaboration of academics and non-profits working to track and respond to changes in U.S. federal environmental governance. Wylie has co-edited with Rebecca Lave EDGI's 100 Days and Counting series of rapid response, public reports detailing and contextualizing changes in environmental governance under the Trump Administration. Sara Wylie is a cofounder of Public Laboratory for Open Technology and Science, a non-profit that develops open source, Do It Yourself tools for community based environmental analysis. She received her Ph.D. from MIT’s History, Anthropology and Science, Technology and Society (HASTS) Program. Wylie is also a JBP Environmental Health Fellow with Harvard T.H Chan School of Public Health. In 2017 she was recognized by the Collaborative on Health and the Environment (CHE) as one of 20 Pioneers in Environmental Health under 40. Her CHE webinarsummarizes her book, work with Public Lab and EDGI. (https://sarawylie.com/)
Moderator: Gary Adamkiewicz
Assistant Professor of Environmental Health and Exposure Disparities
Department of Environmental Health, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health
Gary Adamkiewicz is Assistant Professor of Environmental Health and Exposure Disparities at the Harvard T.H Chan School of Public Health, where much of his work focuses on the connections between housing and health, especially within low-income communities. His research has included studies of indoor environmental conditions within the homes of children with asthma, and studies that aim to understand the factors that contribute to specific exposures such as: pesticides and other chemicals, allergens, secondhand smoke and combustion by-products. Adamkiewicz is a member of the Science Advisory Committee for the National Center for Healthy Housing, and has served on EPA’s Environmental Justice Technical Guidance Review Panel, under the auspices of the agency’s Science Advisory Board. He has also served as an advisor to the World Health Organization’s effort to establish indoor air quality guidelines. In 2012, The American Journal of Public Health awarded Dr. Adamkiewicz a ‘Paper of the Year’ honor for his work on housing as an environmental justice issue. Adamkiewicz holds a Ph.D. in chemical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a Master of Public Health from the Harvard T.H Chan School of Public Health.
Session 3
Sumbul Siddiqui
Cambridge City Councilor
Sumbul Siddiqui is currently serving her first term on the Cambridge City Council. Sumbul is a long time Cambridge resident, and brings her expertise as a legal aid attorney to the Council. She holds a BA in Public Policy from Brown University and a law degree from Northwestern Pritzer School of Law. Sumbul moved to the United States at the age of 2 with her parents and twin brother from Karachi, Pakistan. Her family won a lottery to enter Cambridge’s affordable housing system, which placed them in Rindge Towers in North Cambridge and then in Roosevelt Towers in East Cambridge. As a Cambridge Rindge and Latin student, Sumbul co-founded the Cambridge Youth Involvement Subcommittee, now the Cambridge Youth Council, currently in its 15th year. Her activism in Cambridge earned her a Cambridge Peace and Justice Award. Between college and law school, Sumbul served as an AmeriCorps fellow at New Profit, a Boston nonprofit organization dedicated to improving social mobility for children, families, and their communities. Sumbul is excited to work on creating more affordable housing, supporting small businesses, increasing civic engagement, making Cambridge more climate-resilient, and improving the health and safety of its neighborhoods. (source: https://www.cambridgema.gov/Departments/citycouncil/citycouncilmembers/sumbulsiddiqui)
Emily Norton
Chapter Director (Mass Sierra Club), Newton City Councilor
Emily Norton serves as Massachusetts Chapter Director of the Sierra Club, as well as an elected City Councilor in her hometown of Newton. Sierra Club is the largest and most influential grassroots environmental advocacy group in the country. As Mass. Director, Emily directs a staff of 7 who lobby for stronger policies and laws especially in the areas of clean energy, electrification of transportation, reducing plastic pollution, protecting water quality and reducing toxics. Sierra Club has run trainings for hundreds of volunteers all over the state to become more effective advocates, and is now launching a similar training program specifically for local elected officials.
As a City Councilor, Emily serves on the Finance Committee and the Public Facilities Committee as well as the Mass. Municipal Association Environmental Policy Committee. Some of her local victories include a citywide ban on plastic bags, adoption of higher clean energy mandates in City and residential electricity contracts, added restrictions on the use of polluting leaf blowers, creating more affordable housing by easing restrictions on accessory apartments, lobbying for firefighters and police to carry the lifesaving drug Narcan, and changing the title to "City Councilor" from the outdated and sexist term “Alderman”.
Prior to joining Sierra Club, Emily spent ten years as a research and communications consultant to groups such as Conservation Law Foundation, Environmental Defense Fund and the US EPA ENERGY STAR Program. Emily holds a BA in philosophy from the University of Vermont and a Master’s Degree in Public Policy from the Harvard Kennedy School.
Closing Speaker
Closing Remarks: Atyia Martin
Boston’s former Chief Resilience Office in the Mayor’s Office of Resilience & Racial Equity (MORRE), and currently serving as a Distinguished Senior Fellow at Northeastern University’s Global Resilience Institute and CEO & founder of All Aces, Inc. consulting.
Dr. S. Atyia Martin was appointed by Mayor Martin J. Walsh as the Chief Resilience Officer for the City of Boston as part of the 100 Resilient Cities pioneered by the Rockefeller foundation. She has also been adjunct faculty at Northeastern University in the Master of Homeland Security program. Previously, Dr. Martin was the Director of the Office of Public Health Preparedness at the Boston Public Health Commission (BPHC). In this role, she was responsible for coordinating public health, healthcare, and community health preparedness; emergency management coordination among the public health and healthcare system via the Stephen M. Lawlor Medical Intelligence Center; psychological trauma response coordination, and education and training through the DelValle Institute for Emergency Preparedness. She has a diverse set of experiences in emergency management, intelligence, and homeland security. Her previous professional experience includes the Boston Police Department’s Boston Regional Intelligence Center; City of Boston’s Mayor’s Office of Emergency Management; the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI); and active duty Air Force assigned to the National Security Agency. Dr. Martin earned her Doctor of Law and Policy from Northeastern University, Master in Homeland Security Leadership from the University of Connecticut, Bachelor in Liberal Arts with a Concentration in Administrative Studies and Serbian Croatian from Excelsior College, and Associate in Serbian Croatian from the Defense Language Institute. (http://www.atyiamartin.com/contact/)