Author: Vince Robinson

Xavier Brown is a native of Washington, DC and a graduate of North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University. He operates at the boundaries of urban agriculture, environmental sustainability, and African Diasporic culture. His work intertwines  sustainability with the issues that impact stressed communities from gun violence to mass incarceration.

Xavier is a Robert Wood Johnson Culture of Health Leader, funder of Soilful, co-founder of SouthEats Cooperative, and member of Black Dirt Farm Collective.

By studying the practices of indigenous people and going back to ancestral knowledge, Xavier is creating a new  sustainability movement that  is  healing the people and the land by reconnecting our sacred relationship to the earth.

A renowned thought leader, international speaker, policy maker, community liaison, trainer, and facilitator, Dr. Mustafa Santiago Ali serves as the Vice President of Environmental Justice, Climate, and Community Revitalization for the National Wildlife Federation. He is also the founder of Revitalization Strategies, a business focused on moving our most vulnerable communities from “surviving to thriving.”

Before joining the National Wildlife Federation, Mustafa was the senior vice president for the Hip Hop Caucus, a national non-profit and non-partisan organization that connects the hip-hop community to the civic process to build power and create positive change. In his role, he led the strategic direction, expansion, and operation of the Hip Hop Caucus’ portfolio on climate, environmental justice, and community revitalization.

Prior to joining the Hip Hop Caucus, Mustafa worked for 24 years at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). He began working on social justice issues at the age of 16 and joined the EPA as a student, becoming a founding member of the EPA’s Office of Environmental Justice (OEJ). He most recently served as senior advisor for environmental justice and community revitalization and assistant associate administrator, working to elevate environmental justice issues and strengthening environmental justice policies, programs, and initiatives. Mustafa worked for EPA administrators beginning with William Riley and ending with Scott Pruitt.

Mustafa uses a holistic approach to revitalizing vulnerable communities, and has worked with more than 500 domestic and international communities to secure environmental, health, and economic justice. Throughout his career, Mustafa has conducted more than 1,000 presentations across the country, including speeches, training, and guest lectures at over 100 colleges and universities. He is a former instructor at West Virginia University and Stanford University.

Mustafa currently serves as a board member for Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, Union of Concerned Scientists, Rodenberry Foundation, TREE, and Climate Hawks Vote. He is frequently seen on television, including appearances on MSNBC, CNN, VICE, BET, Full Frontal with Samantha Bee, and Democracy NOW! Mustafa is also a regular guest on WURD radio, Roland Martin Unfiltered, The Dean Obeidallah Show, and many others, and is the former co-host of the live radio show and podcast Think 100%: The Coolest Show on Climate Change with Grammy-nominated singer and actress Antonique Smith and civil rights icon Rev Lennox Yearwood.

Tamara Toles O'Laughlin is an environmentalist focused on equity, access and community. She develops capacity building programs and creates multimedia campaigns to dismantle privilege and increase opportunities for vulnerable populations to access healthy air, clean energy, and a toxic free economy at the local, regional, and national level.

Tamara is the North America Director at 350.org where she supports and is accountable to organizers and campaigners on the United States and Canada teams. As the leader of 350’s programming in North America she drives mission critical work and organizational investments to build a multiracial, multi-generational climate movement that is capable of holding our leaders accountable to science and justice.

Prior to joining 350.org, Tamara was the leader of the Maryland Environmental Health Network (MdEHN), based in Baltimore, Maryland. As its executive director she promoted the elimination of environmental threats to human health, and facilitated the development of coalitions led by impacted community members, and supported by health practitioners and environmental advocates.

Paulette Greene is an educator,  agri-herbalist, and community activist.  She and her partner, Donna, own and manage Mt. Pleasant Acres Farms, (MPAF) located in the Poplar Neck region of Caroline County.   MPAF is a key component of the historic Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad where Harriet led her parents,  brothers, and others out of slavery.

Paulette and her partner have created Mt. Pleasant Heritage Preservation, Inc., a non-profit “heritage foundation”  to preserve, promote, and support the farm and surrounding land as a leading site of  pre-Civil War life in Maryland --  to educate youth and local citizens in the historical and social context of “free Black”  life in the area.   In addition, they grow organic produce and grain crops.

Ms. Greene is also a board member/member of Stories of the Chesapeake Heritage Area, Eastern Shore Land Conservancy, Envision The Choptank,,  Jonestown Community Development Corp., Mt. Pleasant Heritage Preservation, Inc., The American Legion, Blake-Blackston Auxiliary Unit #77, Easton, MD, and former Board President of People for Better Housing, Inc. in Federalsburg, MD , and Board Member of the Maryland  Environmental Trust.

Paulette was a key leader and visionary in the expansion of Mt. Calvary UMC in Preston, MD where she served as a Trustee and Building Committee, Chair.

She lived and taught in N.Y. City,   Alabama, Maryland, and Japan where her partner was stationed with the U.S. Army.

Bonnetta Adeeb is the founder and president of STEAM ONWARD Inc. a youth development non-profit organization in Southern Maryland. Ms. Adeeb, now retired from teaching was an educator for 37 years. She taught social studies and Career Research and Work-based Learning, a school-to-work educational program.

The mission of Steam Onward is to increase the number of minority and under-served youth pursuing higher education in STEM related fields, in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. The “A” in Steam Onward is a reminder that the arts also utilize science and technology.  Steam Onward achieves our mission by providing youth in Charles County and Prince George's County, Maryland with after-school hands-on experiential learning opportunities in  five program areas:

• STEM career explorations,
• Internships in health and law,
• STEM field trips,
• Youth leadership development, and
• STEM action programs

The youth in Steam Onward, the driving force of the organization, refer to themselves as the Young Researchers Community Project (YRCP). Their motto is: We Could Have Cared Less, But We Decided to Care More.  Ms. Adeeb has obtained funding to create community demonstration vegetable, healing and rain gardens, restorations projects, and an orchard on the campus of a local high school in Waldorf, Maryland and at other locations. The purpose of the demonstration gardens is to educate both youth and community residents that gardening and environmental stewardship are both necessary and easy to create. YRCP members demonstrate that community gardens and other gardens can both produce food, and contribute to storm water management.

Three years ago YRCP members developed a Chesapeake Bay regional initiative called “NATURE’S KNIGHTS” to advocate for environmental justice, and promote individual stewardship by using community science tools, and action in the areas of food sustainability and water quality including oyster gardening. They are mobilizing youth, school, church and community based organizations as well as the Partnership for a Healthier in our area to take immediate action to solve these community challenges. Celebrating the 50^th Anniversary of Earth Day, we will launch an Urban Farm and Native Tree Nursery that will be a learning center for citizen science, and gardening and tree planting. It will supply native fruit and nut trees, berries, native plants for restoration projects and healing vegetables and herbs for improving the Wellness and Food Sustainability of the southern Maryland community.  With hundreds of homeless and food insecure citizens our youth are challenging the community to take action.

Coming from an activist minister's family, Bonnetta Adeeb has continued  that heritage of farming and  legacy of community service. She has fought for education that empowers all ethnicities, women, the poor, and underserved.

As the owner of Design Virtue and co-founder of The Urban Studio, Maisie is committed to inclusive placemaking with people and plants. Maisie works with mission focused organizations to create greener and more equitable cities. She brings decades of award-winning leadership to her projects and pays obsessive attention to the work to deliver high quality outcomes. She is currently working with clients to create a ladder to employment that will yield full time urban forestry careers and diversify the urban forestry workforce. As a 2018 Landscape Architecture Foundation Fellow for Innovation and Leadership, Maisie is using film to explore what landscapes need to be to feel welcoming for all people.

Maisie is an ISA Certified Arborist, with Master of Landscape Architecture degree from Morgan State University and a Bachelor of Arts degree in Afro American studies from Howard University.

Jabari Exum is a hip hop artist, percussionist in the West African/Latin tradition, actor and dancer. He has toured with Grammy Award-winning Rap Artist and Songwriter Common and was a drummer and choreographer for the phenomenal The Black Panther movie.

Since 1997, Jabari has also been a pioneering artist in a movement called, “Hip Hop Theater.”  Jabari's approach to everything he touches is unique and unconventional because he is able to pull from so many disciplines and gives himself freedom to explore and invent. Jabari has been acting, drumming, and rapping since he was 2 years old and has been blessed with the opportunities to receive guidance from some of the greats across many fields of creative expression.

President and Co- Founder of The Green Scheme, Washington, D.C. native Ronnie Webb (aka Ron Green) stands on the forefront of educating disadvantaged communities on environmental stewardship and community revitalization. From developing and implementing USDA food system projects to consulting on behalf of businesses and organizations to adopt more sustainable methods, Mr. Webb has more than 10 years of experience in the environmental sector.

After graduating from North Carolina A&T State University with a B.S. in Agricultural Economics, Mr. Webb became a certified green consultant while serving as an intern for D.C. Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton. Following his internship, Mr. Webb was offered a fellowship with the Hip Hop Caucus Education fund, an opportunity that helped him shape a platform in the environmental movement on the east coast with a focus on Washington, D.C. and Greensboro, N.C.

The Green Scheme’s founding was based on Webb’s realization of the lack of environmental awareness that existed in many communities. It is a non-profit organization designed to educate people of diverse cultural backgrounds about their role in the environmental movement. Ever since, Green Scheme has been up and running under the leadership of Mr. Webb who is just getting started. Mr. Webb has recently become a senior fellow in the Environmental Leadership Program, which is a national network of environmental leaders.

The Green Scheme has been active in the DC area for over two years. Positively affecting the lives of DC residents through urban agriculture and workforce development, The Green Scheme has creatively carved itself into the fabric of wards 7 & 8 using its community centered identity to plant gardens in the core of some of the most barren food desserts in the city.

Webb recognized the healthy food shortages in the poorest areas of Washington DC and decided a change needed to occur. The Green Scheme has created stronger communities and healthier families with its dedicated approach to wellness and education.

Dr. Karen Wilson-Ama’Echefu is a Harlem native who engages in public speaking. Hmmm. Public speaking? More like public humming, singing, skipping, dancing, tripping, questioning, challenging, inspiring, inciting, chuckling, telling, quelling, woofing, hoofing, winkling, twinkling, traveling,  messin' 'round, tweeting, elucidating, howling, equivocating, trilling, thrilling, pontificating, poetry-making, risk-taking, reporting, cavorting, and telling the truth as  she understands it to be.

Karen also sings music across the historical spectrum of the African Diaspora in the United States including spirituals, calls, jazz, blues, and rhythm and blues.  She curated, wrote and premiered, “A Tribute to Blueswomen:  Beauty and the Blues” with her group, Blue Wave – New York.  In collaboration with her musical director Stephen Vaughan, she developed a new genre called Story Cabaret for Blue Wave West, presenting original, traditional and contemporary stories all wrapped up in jazz, blues and singable tunes. Dr. Wilson-Ama’ Echefu has traveled and performed with Pete Seeger and her performance of Paul Laurence Dunbar's "The Party" was broadcast on PBS as part of their "Favorite Poem Project."

She was a featured presenter at the 2010 Blues and Spirit Symposium alongside legendary Hip Hop Artist Chuck D, and other notable music and history giants, and has spoken and presented on the intellectual and cultural life in the African American Slave Quarter Community on college campuses across the United States.  Dr. Wilson-Ama’ Echefu's research interests include African cultural and religious history, eighteenth and nineteenth-century enslavement in the United States, leadership and strategy in slave quarter communities, and the philosophies and theologies of Africans and their descendants in the Western Hemisphere as identified through their song, story and dance. Her scholarship identifies African intellectual and cultural presence in North America as providing evidence for continuities, discontinuities and transformations of African Diasporic culture in the United States and considers the West African Diasporic Blues Complex as a marker for African cultural presence in the Western Hemisphere.  She also writes on histori-cultural presence of African American women, which includes their beautiful blues.

Fred Tutman is a grassroots community advocate for clean water in Maryland’s longest and deepest intrastate waterway. He holds the title of Patuxent Riverkeeper, an organization that he founded in 2004. He is among the longest-serving riverkeepers in the Chesapeake region and the only African-American riverkeeper in the United States.

Fred also lives and works on an active farm located near the Patuxent that has been his family’s ancestral home for nearly a century. Prior to riverkeeping, he spent nearly three decades as a media producer and consultant on telecommunications assignments across the globe, including a long stint working with and advising traditional healers in West Africa and covering the Falklands conflict in Argentina for the BBC.

After a late-life sojourn into law school, Fred now teaches an adjunct course in Environmental Law and Policy at historic St. Mary’s College of MD. When not exploring the Patuxent River by kayak, he performs trail maintenance on the Appalachian TraiI, farms and blacksmiths in his spare time.

Fred also serves on a variety of Boards, Task Forces and Commissions related to the work of protecting the Patuxent and the natural environment. Among them, Fred serves on the Board of the Environmental Integrity Project, as a Governor appointed Commissioner on the State’s Patuxent River Commission and on the Board of Waterkeeper Alliance, the international group that licenses Waterkeepers. He is the recipient of numerous regional and state awards for his various environmental works on behalf of communities.