Stone Social Impact Forum featuring Catherine Coleman Flowers

Acclaimed environmental activist, MacArthur “genius” grant recipient, and author Catherine Coleman Flowers, founding director of the Center for Rural Enterprise and Environmental Justice, will headline the virtual Stone Social Impact Forum, a signature series highlighting civic change agents who advance social change and innovatively address areas of inequality in our society.

Catherine Coleman Flowers will share her journey in environmental activism and how she broadens the scope of environmental justice to include issues specific to disenfranchised rural communities by galvanizing policy and research to redress failing infrastructure that perpetuates socioeconomic disparities across the United States. Did you know that even today, more than 2 million Americans still live in homes without running water and proper septic systems–causing a range of negative public health and environmental impacts? This is one of the major issues Ms. Flowers’ organizations have been working to address to improve the health and living conditions of low-income, rural Americans.

Catherine Coleman Flowers is founding director of the Center for Rural Enterprise and Environmental Justice, which works to address health and economic disparities and amplify the voices of community leaders in the context of climate change through the lens of environmental justice. Flowers is also the rural development manager for the Equal Justice Initiative, a senior fellow for the Center of Earth Ethics at Union Theological Seminary, and a member of the board of directors of the Climate Reality Project and the Natural Resources Defense Council. Flowers is an internationally recognized advocate for the human right to water and sanitation through her work with the UN Sustainable Development Agenda. She was recently awarded a 2020 MacArthur Fellowship grant for her work as an Environmental Health Advocate and has chronicled her journey in “Waste: One Woman’s Fight Against America’s Dirty Secret”.

The Stone Social Impact Forum is signature series that features bold civic change agents who demonstrate various pathways to tackle inequality, advance social change, and inspire all people to be civically active. The Forum is a joint initiative of the Edward M. Kennedy Institute for the United States Senate and the John F. Kennedy Library Foundation, made possible through the generous support of the James M. and Cathleen D. Stone Foundation.