Keynote Speakers Biographies
Jacqueline Patterson is Founder and Executive Director of the Chisholm Legacy Project and one of Time Magazine’s Women of the Year for 2024. Prior to the launch of the Chisholm Legacy Project, Jacqui Patterson served as the Senior Director of the NAACP Environmental and Climate Justice Program for over a decade.
Prior to the launch of the Chisholm Legacy Project, Patterson served as the Senior Director of the NAACP Environmental and Climate Justice Program for over a decade. During her tenure, she founded and implemented a robust portfolio that included serving the state and local leadership whose constituencies consisted of hundreds of communities on the frontlines of environmental injustice. She led a team in designing and implementing a portfolio to support political education and organizing work executed by NAACP branches, chapters, and state conferences.
Patterson has dedicated her career to intersectional approaches to systems change. Working with frontline communities from Kampala, Uganda to Kansas City, USA to Kingston, Jamaica, her passion for social justice led her to serve as coordinator and amp; co-founder of Women of Color United; Senior Women’s Rights Policy Analyst for ActionAid; Assistant Vice-President of HIV/AIDS Programs for IMA World Health, Outreach Project Associate for the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, Research Coordinator for Johns Hopkins University, and U.S. Peace Corps Volunteer in Jamaica. Patterson holds a master’s degree in social work from the University of Maryland and a master’s degree in public health from Johns Hopkins University. She currently serves on the Advisory Boards for Center for Earth Ethics, Environmental Justice Movement Fellowship, and the Hive Fund for Gender and Climate Justice, on the Governance Assemblies for Mosaic Momentum, and Collectrify, as well as on the Boards of Directors for the Institute of the Black World, the Bill Anderson Fund, Movement Strategy Center, the Just Solutions Collective, the National Black Workers Center Project, and Ceres.
Dr. Dorceta Taylor, the Wangari Mathaai Professor of Environmental Justice at the Yale School of the Environment (YSE), is the founder and Director of the Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Sustainability Initiative at the Yale School of the Environment. Professor Taylor received a Ph.D. and master’s degrees from the School of Forestry & Environmental Studies and the Department of Sociology at Yale University in 1991, 1988, and 1985.
In 2014, Dr. Taylor authored a landmark national report, The State of Diversity in Environmental Institutions: Mainstream NGOs, Foundations, and Government Agencies. She also wrote a second diversity report in 2014, Environmental Organizations in the Great Lakes Region: An Assessment of Institutional Diversity.
Dr. Taylor has also published influential books. The Rise of the American Conservation Movement: Power, Privilege, and Environmental Protection was published in 2016 during the 100th anniversary of the founding of the National Park Service. The book examines how conservation ideas and politics are tied to social dynamics such as racism, classism, and gender discrimination. Taylor’s 2014 book, Toxic Communities: Environmental Racism, Industrial Pollution, and Residential Mobility (New York University Press), examines the racial and socio-economic dimensions of exposure to environmental hazards in the U.S. She is also the author of The Environment and the People in American Cities: 1600s-1900s. Disorder, Inequality, and Social Change (Duke University Press). The book examines the history of environmental inequality and urban environmental activism. It received the Allan Schnaiberg Outstanding Publication Award from the Environment and Technology Section of the American Sociological Association in 2010.
Dr. Taylor’s contributions have not gone unnoticed. In 2021, she was inducted as an Honorary Fellow in the American College of Environmental Lawyers, a testament to her impact in the field. In 2023, she was included in the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery’s exhibit, Forces of Nature, which features leaders of the conservation movement. Dr. Taylor is the recipient of several prestigious awards, including the National Audubon Society Women in Conservation Award, the National Science Foundation Presidential Award for Excellence in Science, Mathematics, and Engineering Mentoring, the Burton V. Barnes Award for Academic Excellence from the Michigan Chapter of the Sierra Club, the Charles Horton Cooley Award for Distinguished Scholarship from the Michigan Sociological Association, and the Frederick B. Buttel Distinguished Contribution Award from the Environment and Technology Section of the American Sociological Association.