People Types: Speaker

Deborah Meier has spent more than four decades working in public education as a teacher, principal, writer, and advocate and ranks among the most acclaimed leaders of the school reform movement in the United States. In the late 1960s she worked as a Kindergarten teacher in Central Harlem. In 1974, she founded Central Park Elementary School (CPE … Continued

John L. McKnight is co-director of the Asset-Based Community Development Institute and Professor Emeritus of Communications Studies and Education and Social Policy at Northwestern University in Evanston, IL. As a lecturer and consultant he has shared his experience in social service delivery systems, health policy, community organization, neighborhood policy, and institutional racism with community groups, government agencies, foreign … Continued

Kevin Lyons began his career at Rutgers University in 1988 as director of procurement working on numerous projects and proposals relating to green purchasing and improving contracts, transforming the way the university did its daily business, from lighting and energy management to waste recycling and contract packaging. Early in his career at Rutgers, he successfully … Continued

Dana Lee Jackson has worked in sustainable agriculture and food systems for over 35 years. In 1976 she co-founded, with Wes Jackson, The Land Institute, where she held several positions until 1992. A senior advisor to the Land Stewardship Project in Minnesota and to local food projects in her community, she has also served on the Project in … Continued

Van Jones is a CNN political commentator, regularly appearing across the network’s programming and special political coverage. The founder of Dream Corps, Rebuild The Dream, Green For All, the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, and Color of Change, he is presently a fellow at the MIT Media Lab. A Yale-educated attorney, he is the author of … Continued

Winona LaDuke—an Anishinaabekwe (Ojibwe) member of the White Earth Nation—is an environmentalist, economist, author, and prominent Native American activist working to restore and preserve indigenous cultures and lands. Winona LaDuke is a rural development economist and author working on issues of Indigenous Economics, Food, and Energy Policy. She co-founded Honor the Earth, a platform to … Continued

David C. Korten is co-founder and board chair of YES! Magazine, founder and president of the Living Economies Forum, an associate fellow of the Institute for Policy Studies, a member of the Club of Rome, and a former founding associate of the International Forum on Globalization. In 2001, he participated in founding the Business Alliance for Local Living Economies … Continued

Leopold Kohr (1909-1994) was an openhearted, urbane, convivial man who loved intellectual companionship and discussion. He was an economist, jurist, political scientist, and self-described philosophical anarchist. Believing in the effectiveness of returning to the local level to solve the problems affecting humankind, he saw small self-governing communities as best able to solve their problems with their … Continued

Margrit Kennedy (1939-2013) was a German architect with a Masters Degree in Urban and Regional Planning and a Ph.D. in Public and International Affairs. The author of books, articles, and reports for UNESCO and OECD on community school planning and building, her work on women and architecture, urban ecology, permaculture, money, land, and tax systems … Continued

Jane Jacobs (1916-2006) was a journalist, author, and urban activist who championed new community-based approaches to urban planning and was an effective advocate of strong and viable communities. She argued for mixed-use urban neighborhoods of great diversity, density, dynamism, and activity. She championed small industries producing for local markets with local resources and local labor for … Continued

Ivan Illich (1926-2002) was born in Vienna, Austria, and grew up in Europe. A Croatian-Austrian philosopher, Roman Catholic priest, and polemical critic of the institutions of Western culture, he could appear as a stern, forbidding character, which he put down to “growing up in five languages, but without a mother tongue”. He studied histology and … Continued

Hazel Henderson (D.Sc.Hon) was founder of Ethical Markets Media. She was a world-renowned futurist, evolutionary economist, a worldwide syndicated columnist, and author of award-winning Ethical Markets: Growing the Green Economy (2006) and eight other books. She created the Ethical Markets TV series, the EthicMark® Awards, the Green Transition Scoreboard® and co-created Ethical Biomimicry Finance®. Henderson’s first … Continued

Erick S. Hansch was a staff member of the International Independence Institute. He was born in Germany, lived several years in China, and lived in Portland, Oregon when not involved in field work for the Institute. Not the least of his several careers was in economics, in which he served as advisor to one of the Oregon … Continued

Hunter G. Hannum (1931-2020) was a teacher and critic of German literature and co-editor of Modern German Drama (Houghton Mifflin 1996), an anthology widely used in American colleges and universities. With his wife, Hildegarde, a member of the board of directors of the Schumacher Center for a New Economics, he was a freelance translator of the … Continued

Neva Goodwin seeks ways to translate an understanding of the economy in its full social and ecological contexts into action and policy. She follows on-the-ground experiments in alternative socio-economic institutional design, and is involved with efforts to motivate business to recognize social and ecological health as significant, long-term corporate goals. Her lifelong involvement with the care … Continued

Chellis Glendinning was born just after World War II and came of age during the decolonization, liberation, and feminist movements. The central themes of her writings and presentations include the interlace of the personal with the political and a critique of mass technological society as contrasted by sustainable, nature-based cultures. She has written several books, … Continued

William Ellis of Rangely, Maine, retired early from his career as a science policy consultant in agencies such as the National Science Foundation, Unesco, and The World Bank to work instead to promote the broad range of social innovations that empower people at the grass roots and promote community self-reliance. One of his positions was general … Continued

David Ehrenfeld was a founding member of the Schumacher Center for a New Economics. As a professor at Rutgers, he teaches both graduate and undergraduate courses in ecology. His work deals primarily with the interrelated topics of biodiversity, conservation, and sustainability. The founding editor of the journal Conservation Biology, a peer-reviewed scientific journal that deals … Continued

George D. Davis, a wilderness preservationist who served as Executive Director of the Wilderness Society (1974-75), was the principal partner in Davis Associates, an international land-use-policy consulting firm, and president of Ecologically Sustainable Development, the nonprofit successor to Davis Associates. He worked for thirty years in natural resource management, land-use planning, and environmental policy at … Continued

Marie Cirillo has dedicated her life to giving an active voice to the concerns of her neighbors in Appalachia in an effort to restore their land, livelihood, and economic self-sufficiency, which were devastated as a consequence of the extractive practices of absentee corporate owners. Brooklyn-born Cirillo joined the Home Mission Sisters of America, a Catholic … Continued

Majora Carter is the President of the Majora Carter Group LLC, which offers consulting services in environmental assessment, compliance, and planning. Carter simultaneously addresses public health, poverty alleviation, and climate change as one of the nation’s pioneers in successful green-collar job training and placement systems. In 2001 she founded Sustainable South Bronx to achieve environmental justice through economically … Continued

Christopher Houghton Budd is an economic and monetary historian with a doctorate in banking and international finance (Cass Business School, London). As director of the Centre for Associative Economics he works independently in many contexts ranging from mainstream to “green,” from central banks to organic farms. He has made a special study of the economics works … Continued

David Ross Brower (July 1, 1912- November 5, 2000) is considered by many to be the father of the modern environmental movement. Beginning his career as a world-class mountaineer with more than 70 first ascents to his credit, he became the first executive director of the Sierra Club in 1952 and successfully fought to stop dams in … Continued

Elise M. Boulding (1920 –2010) was a sociologist and author as well as a peace and women’s rights activist. She received numerous awards for her lifelong commitment and contributions to peace and justice. She believed the family unit, and especially the role of women within that unit, was crucial to the global peace movement. When … Continued

Ralph Borsodi (1886-1977) is known for his practical experiments in self-sufficient living and community landholding during the 1920s and 1930s as well as for the books he wrote: The Distribution Age (1927), This Ugly Civilization (1929), and Flight from the City: An Experiment in Creative Living on the Land (1933). His education consisted of homeschooling, private school, and personal reading. After gaining … Continued

Wendell Berry—farmer, essayist, novelist, poet, activist, teacher—lives with his wife Tanya on the banks of the Kentucky River. There he has farmed a Kentucky hillside for over half a century in his native Henry County, where his family has lived for eight generations. As a small-scale farmer who has used mules instead of machinery for … Continued

Thomas Berry (1914-2009) was a Passionist priest, cultural historian, philosopher, and self-described “geologian.” He was also a kind and gentle human being deeply concerned with the relation of the human world to the natural world. Having been ordained in 1942, he began studying cultural history, especially the world’s religions, and then received his doctorate from Catholic University … Continued

Dan Barber is the chef and co-owner of Blue Hill and Blue Hill at Stone Barns, and the author of The Third Plate (2014). He opened Blue Hill restaurant with family members David and Laureen Barber in May of 2000 and two years later he was named one of the country’s “Best New Chefs” by Food and Wine magazine. Since … Continued

Benjamin R. Barber (1939-2017) was an internationally renowned political scientist and activist. He combined a career as a distinguished scholar and political theorist with a life of practical commitment to democratic civic practices and the arts. He was the first Distinguished Senior Fellow at the Fordham School of Law’s Urban Consortium, President and Founder of the Global Parliament of … Continued

Donald L. Anderson (1932-2004) was a former Capitol Hill lawyer who helped draft antipoverty legislation in the mid-1960’s. He first began to think seriously about breaking down the “color bar” as a 13-year-old student at Washington D.C.’s Dunbar High School. Anderson, a graduate of the University of Michigan Law School and the London School of … Continued

Gar Alperovitz is the former Lionel R. Bauman Professor of Political Economy at the University of Maryland. Historian, political economist, activist, writer, and former government official, he is the author of numerous books, among them What Then Must We Do? (2013); Unjust Deserts, with Lew Daly (2008); America Beyond Capitalism (2005); Making a Place for Community, with David Imbroscio … Continued

Gordon Thorne (April 1941 – June 2018) was a visual artist based in Northampton, MA. Thorne began pursuing a career in the arts after graduating from Yale University, initially finding a spot where he painted on Main Street in New Haven. He was the Director of Available Potential Enterprises (A.P.E.), which he founded in 1977 … Continued

Jerry Mander founded and served as the former director, and distinguished fellow of the International Forum on Globalization (IFG), a San Francisco “think tank” focused since 1994 on exposing the negative impacts of economic globalization, and the need for economic transitions toward sustainable local economies. He was also program director of the Foundation for Deep … Continued

Nwamaka Agbo is CEO of the Kataly Foundation and Managing Director of the Restorative Economies Fund. In her roles, Nwamaka collaborates with the Kataly team to lead the foundation’s day to day operations, while holding the community-centered strategy and vision for the Fund. With a background in community organizing, electoral campaigns, policy and advocacy work … Continued