Category: CONFERENCES

Maisie Hughes is the owner of Design Virtue and co-founder of The Urban Studio. She is committed to inclusive placemaking with people and plants.

Hughes 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 and 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, she uses film to explore what landscapes need to be to feel welcoming for all people.

Hughes is an ISA Certified Arborist with Master of Landscape Architecture degree from Morgan State University, and a B.A. in Afro American Studies from Howard University.

Tykee James is the Government Affairs Coordinator for the National Audubon Society, and sits on the board of directors of the D.C. Audubon Society, Wyncote Audubon Society, Audubon Maryland-DC, the Birding Co-op, and the Academy of Natural Sciences.

After moving to DC, he has grounded himself in his special role: organizing bird walks with members of Congress and congressional staff! James has built residency in this work from his experience in Philadelphia, his hometown. His first job was an environmental educator and community organizer in his own neighborhood. He also served as an environmental policy advisor to a state representative. James develops himself as a leader through his fellowship with the Environmental Leadership Program and membership with the Green Leadership Trust. In his personal time, he is the audio producer for Wildlife Observer Network, a wildlife media project he started with some wildlife-friendly friends in Philly.

He hosts two podcasts: Brothers in Birding and On Word for Wildlife.

Mathew John is an Audiovisual Productions Specialist at the National Park Service where he leads the effort to conceptualize and produce educational, inspiring, and engaging videos to showcase the nation’s public parks. He is the award-winning director and videographer for Twenty & Odd.

Set against 400 years of suffering, healing and strength, with a backdrop of our nation’s most storied lands, the innumerable contributions of African Americans to the foundation of the United States are recognized in this short film. The film’s title, Twenty & Odd, is taken from a quote from English colonist John Rolfe describing the number of the first enslaved Africans brought to Virginia in 1619. The Park Service’s creative team chose this title to reclaim power of Rolfe’s phrasing that suggested that these enslave Africans were so insignificant that they could not even bother to be properly counted. The narrative for Twenty & Odd is Maya Angelou’s remarkable poem Still I Rise.

John earned his B.S. in Human Ecology at Ohio State University. He worked with the American Red Cross, from 2006 to 2008, as the Celebrity and Entertainment Outreach Coordinator. He coordinated with the entertainment industry to support humanitarian efforts through producing specialty media projects. He joined the National Park Service in 2009, leading video projects from inception to release, and launching many successful video series.

Morgan Johnson is an environmental justice activist and advocate and the Staff Attorney at Waterkeepers Chesapeake. Her love for the Chesapeake and Coastal Bays stem from trips to the Chesapeake and James River, as well as her time spent on the Potomac and Anacostia rivers while she was in D.C., interning for the Obama Administration's White House Community Solutions Team, housed within OMB.

Her family's own experiences with environmental racism brought her to this field, and is the reason she became an attorney. Johnson is a 2020 graduate of the University of New Mexico School of Law, where she earned her Juris Doctor and an Environmental Law Certificate. During law school she served as a clinical law student and clinic fellow working on environmental justice issues, legislative legal analysis, regulatory policymaking and water law matters. The body of Johnson’s professional experiences range from local to federal and non-profit to governmental.

She is passionate about leveraging her public policy skills and legal training to advocate for people, places, and species. Johnson also serves on the board of The Birthing Project USA, a global organization working to improve birth outcomes for Black mothers and babies.

Kahlil Kettering is the Urban Conservation Director for the Maryland/D.C. chapter of The Nature Conservancy. He develops their urban conservation strategy in D.C. and Baltimore, centered on implementing projects that elevate clean urban waterways, quality of life in urban communities, and the benefits nature provides to people in cities.

His work focuses on the ability to achieve environmental conservation outcomes through private equity investments via the new Stormwater Retention Credit market in D.C., strategic tree canopy expansion, the creation of urban green spaces for the benefit of nature and people, and engaging young people as environmental advocates.

Before moving back to his hometown of Washington, D.C., Kettering worked as an environmental analyst in Miami, FL advocating for the protection and restoration of Everglades and Biscayne National Parks. He has a Master’s in Global Environmental Policy from American University and a Master’s in Public Management from the University of Maryland.

KEYNOTE SPEAKER

Dr. J. Drew Lanham is a native of Edgefield, South Carolina, and the author of ​The Home Place: Memoirs of a Colored Man’s Love Affair with Nature​, which received the Reed Award from the Southern Environmental Law Center, the Southern Book Prize, and was a finalist for the John Burroughs Medal.

He is a birder, naturalist, and hunter-conservationist who has published essays and poetry in publications including Orion​, ​Audubon​, ​Flycatcher​, and ​Wilderness, ​and in several anthologies, including ​The Colors of Nature​, ​State of the Heart​, ​Bartram’s Living Legacy​, and ​Carolina Writers at Home​.

An Alumni Distinguished Professor of Wildlife Ecology and Master Teacher at Clemson University, he and his family live in the Upstate of South Carolina, a soaring hawk’s downhill glide from the southern Appalachian escarpment that the Cherokee once called the Blue Wall.

Chanceé Lundy is co-owner and principal of Nspiregreen, a firm that combines engineering and urban planning with community organizing. NspireGreen is dedicated to fulfilling a vision that facilitates the empowerment and transformation of every community through environmental planning. Focusing on community planning, multimodal planning, climate change and resiliency planning, Nspiregreen believes in creating healthy and safe communities for all.

Lundy cofounded Nspiregreen LLC in 2009 and has spearheaded projects providing technical support and/ or public outreach services to environmental clients on projects such as the District’s Comprehensive Energy Plan, Solid Waste Management Study, and Consolidated TMDL Implementation (Stormwater Management) Plan. Lundy received her Master’s in Civil Engineering (Environmental Concentration) from Florida State University and holds a B.S. in Environmental Science from Alabama Agricultural and Mechanical University.

She is a member of the American Society of Civil Engineers, Water Environment Federation, Women’s Transportation Seminar, and National Society of Black Engineers and is Mayoral Appointee to the Chesapeake Bay Scientific and Technical Advisory Committee. She lives in Washington, D.C. with her husband, Dwight Russell, and their rambunctious little boy, Amari.

Lionel D. Lyles, II is a tenor saxophonist, and band leader for the Lionel Lyles Quintent, living and working in the D.C. metropolitan region. Lyles II majored in music education while at Morgan State University and graduated in 2002. The Lionel Lyles Quintet recorded its first studio project in 2006, The Lionel Lyles Quintet: The September Sessions.

Soon after, Lyles II enrolled at North Carolina Central University to pursue a Masters of Music in Jazz Studies Saxophone Performance, and graduated in 2008. While at NCCU, he had the opportunity to study with great jazz icons such as Branford Marsalis, Joey Calderazzo, Jimmy Heath, Roy Hargrove, Brian Horton, Robert Trowers and Dr. Ira Wiggins. His ensemble has three albums to date: The Lionel Lyles Quintet: The September Sessions(2006), The Lionel Lyles Quintet: At the Precipice (2014), and The Lionel Lyles Quintet: Simplistically Complex (2019). In 2015, Lyles II won a JAZZY for best jazz tenor.

In 2016, he won best New Jazz Tenor player, and Best Performing Artist across all genres in 2016 - all given by the Washington City Paper.

George McDonald is the Chief of the Youth Programs Division and Experienced Services Program for the National Park Service. McDonald holds a B.A. degree with honors in Political Science from Hampton University. He joined the NPS in 2000, and in his capacity as Special Assistant he held leadership roles in advancing the development of the Tuskegee Airmen Historic Site in Alabama and the African Burial Ground National Monument in New York City. He served as the Program Manager for the Presidential Commission for the National Museum for African American History and Culture. In 2008, McDonald also successfully launched the new Youth Partnerships Program Fund Source in 2008. This funding program was designed to enhance and increase the number of underserved minority and disadvantaged population groups that participate in park activities and to provide employment and educational opportunities to minority and disadvantaged youth in our national parks.

Under McDonald’s leadership many innovative youth development programs including the Historically Black Colleges and Universities Intern Program, the Mosaics in Science Intern Program and Latino Heritage Intern Program have been developed to provide education, employment and recreational opportunities to tens of thousands of young people. McDonald was born and raised in Harlem, New York City and resides in the DC metropolitan region.

Jaelon Terrele Moaney is Regional Director for U.S. Senator Chris Van Hollen. Moaney is a proud descendant of America’s founding Black families in both Talbot (Copperville and Unionville, MD) and Kent (Georgetown and Worton Point, MD) Counties. As an author, screenwriter, scholar and public servant, he has ensured that the living legacies of the tidewater communities across the Chesapeake—particularly on Maryland’s Eastern Shore—are attributed both the reverence and swotting their soil is due.

Currently, Moaney holds a B.A. with honors in Political Science, Africana Studies, Leadership Studies and Environmental Studies (Williams-Mystic S’18), as well as graduate certificates from Yale Law School and Morgan State University. Throughout his journeys along all three U.S. coasts realizing ‘a more perfect union’ and as a Regional Director in the U.S. Senate alike, he has spared no time rolling up his sleeves to champion a better quality of life for all Marylanders and Maryland’s abundance of natural treasures.