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Workshop Speaker Biographies

ANNIE CONTRACTOR is the policy director at the Rural Organizing Education Fund. Her expertise focuses on bringing people into all levels of government decision-making. Her policy work includes establishing a wraparound services support unit in Colorado’s COVID-19 response through the public health infrastructure of the state, tactics for welcoming immigrants in a sanctuary city, and more recently, getting the Recompete Pilot Program passed and implemented with rural inclusion. With Rural Organizing, Contractor is bridging the gap between community organizing and community development by resourcing rural civic leaders with tools, strategies, coaching, connection to experts, and a peer network to support inclusive community engagement and powerful civic participation. She grew up in rural Wyoming, served as a U.S. Peace Corps volunteer in Zambia, hand-built a log cabin in Appalachia, farmed lettuce in Hawai’i, and amplified activists in Brazil. As a regional planner and social scientist, Contractor has designed and led four social justice research projects on three continents that have impacted food security, environmental justice, housing justice, and low-income mothers’ access to quality jobs.

SCOTT DOUGLAS attended the University of Tennessee in Knoxville where he co-founded the University of Tennessee Black Student Union. Following an aircraft assembly job in Nashville, Douglas moved to Birmingham in 1976 where he was a reporter for the Southern Organizing Committee for Economic and Social Justice (SOC). From 1984–1989, he served as the executive director of SOC. From 1989–1992, he was a program officer for the Partnership for Democracy Foundation. After serving as an environmental justice grassroots organizer for the Sierra Club, Douglas became the executive director of Greater Birmingham Ministries (GBM), an interfaith, multi-racial organization providing food and clothing to families while assisting low-income families to empower their communities through community organizing. GBM’s priorities today include expanding voting rights for people of color in Alabama. Douglas is a former board member of the Equal Justice Initiative and the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute and currently serves on the boards of the Highlander Research and Education Center and Jobs to Move America (JMA). When JMA established its first southern office in Alabama, he joined the negotiating team

for establishing a community benefits agreement (CBA) with New Flyer, Inc., a Canadian-based builder of battery-powered buses. GBM joined the Alabama NAACP as community representatives in JMA’s broad-based strategy of a united labor and community approach to resisting corporations coming to the South in pursuit of historic “southern discounts” that allowed the short-changing workers while endangering their communities. He has written articles on economic and racial justice for Southern Exposure, Howard Law Journal, the National Newspaper Publishers Association, and Dissent Magazine.

OLETA GARRETT FITZGERALD has devoted her life to the pursuit of justice and equality. As the director of the Children’s Defense Fund’s Southern Regional Office, she has placed special emphasis on education, including early childhood education, children’s health care access, and breaking the insidious cradle-to-prison pipeline pattern, which is all too prevalent in communities of color. Fitzgerald is the regional administrator for the Southern Rural Black Women’s Initiative for Economic and Social Justice (SRBWI). SRBWI operates in 77 counties across the Black Belts of Alabama, southwest Georgia, and the Mississippi Delta with a network of more than 2,500 Black women and young women. She is also the principal for an innovative project, the Supporting Partnerships to Assure Ready Kids Initiative, which has operated in more than 12 Mississippi school districts. Her distinguished public service career began long before she assumed her position at the Children’s Defense Fund. In 1993, Fitzgerald became President Clinton’s appointee as the White House Liaison and executive assistant to Secretary of Agriculture Mike Espy. Later, she was named the department’s director of intergovernmental affairs where, among other things, she worked on tribal governmental issues and coordinated the administration’s long-term recovery of midwestern states affected by The Great Flood of 1993. Fitzgerald serves on the boards of the Southern Rural Black Women’s Initiative for Economic and Social Justice and NEA Foundation; advisory boards for the Socially Disadvantaged Farmers and Ranchers Policy Research Center at Alcorn State University, Southern Black Farmer Community Led Fund, and Excel by 5; and she is a member of the International Women’s Forum. Fitzgerald received a BS from Tougaloo College and an MA in rural development from Antioch University (Midwest), with additional studies at the University of California, Davis, and honorary membership to Pi Alpha Alpha, the National Honor Society for Public Affairs and Administration from Mississippi State University. She contributed to the Covenant with Black America, introduced by Tavis Smiley, and numerous news stories by The New York Times, Huffington Post, the BBC, The Guardian, National Public Radio, Commercial Appeal, and NBC National and local affiliates, as well as other broadcast and print media.

REBEKAH GORBEA is the statewide coordinator for Tennessee 4 All, a statewide coalition representing 20 partner organizations and thousands of members across the state from labor unions, faith organizations, and community organizations. There is a wave of new energy industries coming to the South, including Ford’s Blue Oval City Project, an electric vehicle plant in West Tennessee. Tennessee 4 All, alongside local residents, is organizing from the bottom up to win a community benefits agreement (CBA) with Ford that covers affordable housing, environmental protections, and workforce development. The current task at hand is to win a CBA, but the strategy is to build a base of organized membership across rural Tennessee to win gains in good union jobs, strong public schools, and to make sure that Tennessee is working for everyone, not just the wealthy few.

JULIAN GROSS, Law Office of Julian Gross, is one of the nation’s principal experts on community benefits in land use development and public infrastructure. For more than 25 years, Gross has represented public entities and nonprofit advocates in contract negotiations, legislative and administrative drafting, and policy development aimed at improving land use development and public infrastructure, and advancing racial and economic equity. He has negotiated dozens of community benefits agreements, initiating and refining a groundbreaking contractual approach to the resolution of challenging urban development issues. He has taught, published, and spoken widely on the subject of land use and community benefits, with a focus on public and private negotiation strategies. Gross has also drafted numerous local hiring and contracting policies and has worked on living wage policies, disadvantaged business policies, and many other community economic development initiatives. He represents public entities and nonprofit affordable housing developers in negotiation of project labor agreements and community workforce agreements that advance multiple policy goals.

JENNIFER (JEN) HADAYIA (pronounced Huh-die-yuh) is the executive director of Air Alliance Houston, the longest running advocacy nonprofit singularly focused on the public health impacts of air pollution in Houston-Harris County. She has worked for more than 25 years in public health and health equity with state and county health departments and nonprofit organizations in five states and the District of Columbia. Hadayia was born and raised in Houston and is a proud resident of Houston’s Near Northside. She holds an MPA from Columbia University and a BA from Yale University.

MARK HAGGERTY is a senior fellow on the Energy and Environment team at the Center for American Progress. With a reputation as a nonpartisan expert committed to practical solutions, he is engaged in efforts to develop a comprehensive national policy that aligns climate, energy, and public lands

conservation goals with rural communities’ economic success. He has served on local boards and planning commissions, provided expert advice to state legislatures, and testified to Congress at the invitation of both Democrats and Republicans. Haggerty lives in Bozeman, Montana, where he co-owns millions of acres of public lands and waters with his family and friends.

JOHN HALL is the president and chief executive officer of the Houston Advanced Research Center (HARC), a nonprofit research hub providing independent analysis on energy, air, water, resilience, and climate equity. HARC’s research activities support the implementation of policies and technologies that promote sustainability based on scientific principles. The organization works to identify and implement scalable solutions to Texas’s extensive climate resilience and climate equity challenges. Hall has been a thought leader and practitioner regarding the impacts of energy on air quality, the environment, communities, and climate for the past 30 years. Prior to joining HARC, he chaired the Texas Natural Resource Conservation Commission, the predecessor agency to the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ). He left a lasting mark on TCEQ by implementing the Mickey Leland Environmental Internship Program. He also held leadership roles at the Environmental Defense Fund, focusing on clean energy efforts in 10 of the largest states in the United States and vehicle electrification initiatives in Texas.

WENDOLYN HOLLAND serves as the senior advisor for policy, tax, and government relations at the Alliance for Tribal Clean Energy. In this role, Holland supports tribes, tribal organizations, and Native Americans in their quest for renewable energy deployment as a means to improve sovereignty and enhance sustainable economic development. She served as the senior advisor for commercialization in the Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, a role that supported the movement of national laboratory technologies into the market. She then served as a member of the senior leadership team at Savannah River National Laboratory. In her consulting practice, Holland advises at the nexus of finance, technology, and policy, focusing on clean energy technologies. With a particular expertise in tax strategy and policy, her projects focus on the very essence of our social and environmental problems. With the background of a historian, she models her projects for the long-range view to bend the arc of history. She is among the nation’s experts on Section 48C, the Advanced Energy Manufacturing Tax Credit. Beyond 48C, Holland has supported many dozens of submissions for competitive federal funding opportunities, focused mostly but not exclusively on DOE solicitations. In this process, she has written more than 80 community benefits plans, most of which include strong provisions for neighboring sovereign tribal communities. Holland received her JD and LLM in taxation from Georgetown Law in 2017, her MBA in finance and strategy from the

Northwestern University Kellogg School of Management in 2001, and her BA in history and studies in the environment from Yale University in 1991. She is a frequent lecturer on U.S. renewable energy policy and Western Americana.

JANE FLEMING KLEEB is an experienced grassroots organizer, author, manager, political strategist, and nonprofit entrepreneur. In her work, she protects property rights while building an engaged base of citizens who care about the land and water. For her years of work in rural communities, Kleeb was named a Climate Breakthrough awardee in 2023, the highest honor in the climate change field. She is setting out to create a new project called Energy Builders that works with rural communities to change the economic model of large-scale clean energy projects to benefit the people who live on the land that is creating America’s next 100 years of energy. In 2010, she founded Bold Nebraska, which later became the Bold Alliance, a network of “small but mighty” coalitions in rural states working to protect the land and water with a focus on land justice and energy freedom with projects from the Pipeline Fighters Hub to the Easement Action Teams. Bringing urban and rural folks together through meaningful and creative actions has been Kleeb’s goal throughout her career. She was a driving force behind Reject and Protect, where 12 tipis were placed on Washington, DC’s National Mall and where the Cowboy and Indian Alliance rode horses through the streets of DC and the Ponca Corn Harvest that not only helped stop the Keystone XL pipeline but also brought some land justice to the Ponca people. Kleeb also hosted Nebraska’s largest advocacy concert, Harvest the Hope, with Willie Nelson and Neil Young. Since 2016, she has served in a volunteer capacity as the chair of the Nebraska Democratic Party. She also serves on the executive committees of the Democratic National Committee and the Association of State Democratic Committees.

ELIZABETH KOCS, the senior manager at GTI Energy’s Low Carbon Energy Solutions, manages key initiatives to support community benefits and impacts of integrated energy networks and the broader hydrogen and low-carbon energy ecosystem. She serves as the subject-matter expert overseeing the development of environmental, energy, and climate justice, including development of metrics to measure Justice40. Kocs has 30 years of experience developing and managing environmental projects and leading stakeholder engagement and community participation for applied research, planning, and policy initiatives locally, regionally, and globally. Prior to her current role, she served as the director of partnerships and strategy at the University of Illinois Chicago Energy Initiative, where she led strategic energy, sustainability, transportation electrification, and environmental and climate justice programs. She has received the Chicago Area Clean Cities Community Leadership Award for her work in transportation

electrification, and the COP26 Climate Challenge Cup for the climate justice research project.

TODD MALAN is the chief external affairs officer and head of climate strategy at Talon Metals, a publicly traded mineral resource company focused on discovery and development of high-grade nickel deposits in the Lake Superior region of the United States. Malan has responsibility for the company’s interaction with governments, tribal sovereign governments, media, investors, off-take partners, and communities. He leads Talon’s climate innovation activities, including carbon capture and storage via new approaches to carbon mineralization, reducing operational emissions at sites, clean energy sourcing, and customer partnerships. Malan previously led the corporate relations team for global mining and metals leader Rio Tinto in the Americas region and globally for the Rio Tinto Aluminum product group. Before joining the mining and metals sector, Malan was a managing director at Goldman Sachs. He is a graduate of the University of Washington in Seattle and studied at Birkbeck College at the University of London as a Hansard Scholar.

KIMBERLY MEDFORD joined Entek in 2012 as the vice president and general counsel. During her tenure, she has led the company’s legal, human resources, and environment, health, and safety departments. She has been part of Entek’s executive management team since joining the company. In both her role as vice president and general counsel, and now as president, of Entek Manufacturing, she is deeply engaged in Entek’s growth through mergers and acquisitions, joint ventures, financing, and development of new production facilities. Medford is directly involved with community development and major customer and supplier relationships across the Entek family of companies. Recently, she served on the outreach team responsible for gaining federal and state support for Entek’s new lithium plant. Prior to joining Entek, she represented the company as outside counsel where her practice focused on mergers and acquisitions and finance work with an emphasis in representing Native American businesses. Medford is a native Oregonian and chose to stay in Oregon for her education, graduating from Willamette University and the Willamette University College of Law.

JAY MEHTA leads Jobs to Move America’s (JMA’s) Community Benefits Agreement Resource Center. He began his work with JMA in December 2019 as the senior researcher for New Jersey and most recently served as northeast director, overseeing JMA’s programs in New York and New Jersey. He has 20 years of domestic and international research, campaign, and election-related experience. Mehta previously worked for the UNITE HERE Union, where he was successful in raising standards, organizing opportunities, and developing key community and political stakeholder relationships for hotel, airport, and

casino workers throughout North America. Following his time with the union, Mehta also served as an issue and opposition researcher for the Working Families Party and directly prior to joining JMA, worked as an independent research and creative consultant. He received his bachelor’s degree in philosophy and religion from Flagler College (2002) in St. Augustine, Florida, and a master’s degree in diplomacy, law, and global change from Coventry University in England (2003).

MEAGAN NIEBLER works as the Community Democracy program manager with Fair Shake Environmental Legal Services and is passionate about being a resource for environmental justice communities to find levers they can pull to move their vision into action. For the past 2 years, she has been supporting environmental justice communities in Ohio, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia during community benefits processes, including facilitating community engagement and community education, providing technical assistance to coalitions, and creating tools and templates in support of proactive and reactive community benefits coalitions, community benefits agreements, community benefits ordinances, and community benefits plans. The work of changing the shape of the decision-making table is something that has motivated her throughout her career, including previous work as a birth Doula supporting pregnant and parenting teens and Latinx families; developing, implementing, and evaluating family sexuality education programs, including the evidence-based Linking Families and Teens; and directing strength-based public health education and programs.

THEO PRIDE is a community organizer with Detroit People’s Platform, a social justice organization committed to building power for majority Black Detroit. His work focuses on equitable development and strategies to build and implement inclusive, collectively owned, solidarity economies in marginalized communities of color. He leads the Detroit Budget Justice Coalition, which seeks to win annually a municipal budget that invests in low-income, Black neighborhoods and one designed through participatory decision-making by residents. Pride brings his unique experience as a teacher and researcher of Black liberation movements and its impact on revolutionary politics and social change to inform his organizing work.

BONNIE RAM, Ram Consultancy, is an independent consultant and director of strategic partnerships at the Center for Research in Wind, University of Delaware. Her current focus is on the potential for coastal community benefits agreements with offshore wind projects and designing knowledge exchanges with local citizens and students in the mid-Atlantic region. Her research focuses on the clean energy transition, regulatory compliance, public perception of environmental risks, benefits and uncertainties, and strategies for robust

engagement. Ram has worked with a variety of organizations across Europe, Southeast Asia, and Southern Africa. Serving as a corporate officer at two national consulting firms for 20 years, she worked on a variety of projects from nuclear waste management to engagement strategies for wind programs. For 10 years, Ram was a strategic advisor to the Department of Energy’s Wind Technology Office and National Renewable Energy Laboratory and co-authored several national reports, including 20% Wind Energy by 2030. Ram was a senior researcher to the Danish Technical University (Wind) and successfully created a new social science department. Ram publishes in peer-reviewed journals, most recently a special issue in Risk Analysis. Also, she is an author of the environmental and stakeholder chapter of Wind Engineering Explained Theory, Design and Application (Third Edition).

ANN ROGAN currently leads Edge Collaborative—a civic incubator whose mission is to invest into community ventures that build a more participatory, inclusive economy. At the Edge Collaborative, she oversees a diverse portfolio across workforce, climate, and community wealth. Her work over the past two decades has centered on reimagining the role of economic development and climate opportunities in emerging markets—whether that is in rural India or inland California. Most recently, she served as a senior advisor in local government in Stockton, California, with FUSE Corps. During her 3 years at City Hall, she led a small team that built new capabilities inside the city and community—setting Stockton on a course to marshal more than $60 million in public-sector investments focused on climate. For the past several years, Rogan’s work on community benefits and climate has centered on the accessibility of electric vehicles within low-income communities, and a wide range of carbon management considerations in the northern Central Valley of California. She has held a variety of roles across the nonprofit, private, and public sectors—previously, having co-founded two companies—in renewables and 3D printing. In 2016, she served on the Government of Estonia’s e-Residency Advisory Group to advance digital entrepreneurship. Rogan earned a BA from McGill University in international development and English literature.

JACKSON ROSE is a faculty member at Montana State University, where he also co-leads the Geospatial Core Facility. A resource geographer by training, Rose’s scholarly research looks at rural communities that host large-scale underground mining projects, with a focus on non-regulatory agreements between community organizations and international mining companies. Prior to transitioning to Montana State University, he worked for 2 years in White Sulphur Springs, Montana, where he served as the executive director of the Meagher County Stewardship Council, a grassroots group negotiating a community benefits agreement (CBA) around an impending copper mine. Rose

currently sits on the council’s board of directors as the group works to finalize a CBA.

NANCY SCHLEPP is the vice president of communications and government relations and a corporate officer of Sandfire Resources America, a publicly traded company. She has more than 25 years of worldwide business experience in corporate affairs, government relations, international trade, communications, public policy, and human resources. Her previous positions include executive director of the Montana Taxpayers Association and national affairs director for the Montana Farm Bureau Federation. Schlepp is certified as a gracious space facilitator for working on critical issues effectively from the Center for Ethical Leadership in Seattle and is an alumna of Leadership Montana. Currently, she is the chair of the Montana Chamber of Commerce board of directors, serves on the executive boards for the Montana Chamber of Commerce and the Montana Taxpayers Association, and sits on the boards of the Montana Mining Association, REAL Montana, the Montana Non-Profit Association, and the Meagher County Community Foundation. Schlepp has also served as a Meagher County Commissioner, was on the steering committee that created Women Leading Montana, and in March 2024 co-chaired the Montana chamber’s Inaugural “Blazing Trails: Montana Women in Business Summit” in Bozeman, Montana. She grew up in Ringling, Montana, where her and her husband own and operate the family cattle ranch with their three children. Their most recent endeavor is purchasing the iconic Ringling Church with some friends, which they have restored to an event and wedding venue. Schlepp holds a BS from Montana State University.

MADELINE SCHOMBURG, Energy Futures Initiative, focuses on energy justice, examining access and inclusion in policy processes, and decision-making in her research. Recently, she has focused on the use of community benefits plans as a mechanism to facilitate community engagement in clean energy project development. Her latest project examined community perspectives on the community engagement practices employed in the Department of Energy’s hydrogen hub program. Her scholarship has appeared in Energy Research & Social Science and Economics of Energy & Environmental Policy. As an assistant professor of environmental policy at Colorado State University, Schomburg collaborated with scholars from numerous institutions and with community partners to advance social science research in energy and the environment. At Colorado State University, she also served on the steering committee of the Center for Environmental Justice where she helped create new programs in environmental justice and built partnerships with grassroots environmental justice organizations. Schomburg completed her doctorate in ecology at the University of California, Davis, and her BA in economics and environmental studies at Connecticut College.

HADIA SHEERAZI is a manager in the Climate-Aligned Industries Program at RMI (founded as Rocky Mountain Institute), co-leading community engagement and equity-centered workstreams to accelerate the decarbonization of the highest emitting industrial sectors, with a focus on clean hydrogen hubs, carbon dioxide removal, shipping, steel, aluminum, and waste methane. She conducts capacity-building workshops for clean tech project developers, state and federal policymakers, and regulators; leads thought leadership on best practices for inclusive, two-way engagement to derisk projects; and provides guidance on the design and implementation of responsive community benefits plans to remediate the impacts of historic underinvestment, environmental injustice, and decades of legacy pollution in low-income; Black, Indigenous, and People of Color; frontline; and fence-line communities. Sheerazi is a contributing author on the New York City Panel on Climate Change, which helps inform the city’s multihazard adaptation and resilience strategy to protect vulnerable and low-income communities. She has cross-sectoral experience in climate, energy policy, and sustainability in public, private, and nongovernmental organizations; community-based organizations; intergovernmental organizations; and academic sectors. Sheerazi has been internationally recognized for her research and contributions to climate action, equity, sustainability, women’s empowerment, and inclusive adaptation by the United Nations (UN) Development Programme, UN Women’s Empower Women initiative, the White House Council on Women and Girls, Hydrogen Economist, and the Financial Times.

MATTHEW S. TEJADA is the senior vice president for environmental health at the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), a position he assumed in December 2023. Tejada leads NRDC’s environmental health portfolio and programs that focus on air, water, toxics, and climate adaptation, among other issues. Under his leadership, the Environmental Health program centers NRDC’s mission and work to ensure coordination and collaboration across the organization’s activities to consistently focus and achieve meaningful progress on improving environmental health across the United States and internationally with a priority on advancing protection for those most overburdened and vulnerable to an unhealthy environment and the impacts of a changing climate. Prior to joining NRDC, Tejada served as the first ever deputy assistant administrator (DAA) for environmental justice within the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA’s) national program office for Environmental Justice and External Civil Rights (OEJECR). He joined EPA in March 2013 as a career senior executive and the director of the Office of Environmental Justice (OEJ), a position he held until the reorganization of OEJ into OEJECR in September 2022. As DAA, Tejada provided leadership for EPA’s environmental justice portfolio, including the integration of environmental justice throughout all of EPA’s policies, programs, and activities and coordination and alignment of

environmental justice priorities with external civil rights compliance priorities. Tejada’s portfolio also including leading environmental justice efforts with other federal agencies, states, tribes, local governments, and other stakeholders such as academia and private-sector institutions. Before his career at EPA, he spent more than 5 years as the executive director of the environmental justice advocacy Air Alliance Houston in the Houston and Texas Gulf Coast area. Tejada received his master’s and doctoral degrees from the University of Oxford where he was a member of St. Antony’s College and a BA in English from the University of Texas at Austin, then served 2 years in the Peace Corps in Bulgaria.

ROMANY WEBB is the deputy director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia Law School. Webb also holds appointments as a research scholar at Columbia Law School, adjunct assistant professor of climate at the Columbia Climate School, and senior advisor on climate science at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism. Her research focuses on two primary areas: (1) energy and (2) negative emissions technologies. Webb’s energy-related research explores how legal and policy tools can be used to minimize the climate impacts of energy development as well the impacts of climate change on energy infrastructure. She also researches legal issues associated with the development and deployment of negative emissions technologies on land and in the ocean. Between 2020 and 2023, Webb served as a vice chair and then co-chair of the Climate Change, Sustainable Development, and Ecosystems Committee of the American Bar Association’s Section of Environment, Energy, and Resources. She also served on the National Academies’ Committee on Ocean Carbon Dioxide Removal and Sequestration from 2020 to 2022. In 2024, she was appointed to the Pool of Experts of the United Nations (UN) Regular Process for Global Reporting and Assessment of the State of the Marine Environment and invited to be a contributing author of the Third UN World Ocean Assessment. She also serves on a number of other advisory boards, councils, and committees. Webb also completed a fellowship with the Kay Bailey Hutchison Center for Energy, Law, and Business at the University of Texas at Austin, where she researched energy policy. She received an LLM with a certificate of specialization in environmental law from the University of California, Berkeley, in 2013. She also holds an LLB, awarded with first class honors, from the University of New South Wales (Australia).

MEGHAN WILSON, an assistant professor at Michigan State University and a Detroit native, is an advocate for energy and environmental justice within communities grappling with financial crisis. Drawing from her experiences in navigating financial restructuring within institutions, such as the City of Detroit and Detroit Public Schools, Wilson emerges as a catalyst for change, seamlessly integrating economic development with environmental and energy equity. Her

collaborations extend beyond conventional boundaries, including partnerships with utilities to develop community benefits plans, ensuring that marginalized communities have a voice in shaping their energy future. With a PhD in political science from Brown University, Wilson’s expertise spans public finance, urban development, race and ethnic politics, and state and local government. Through her scholarship and advocacy, she continues to inspire meaningful change, driving forward the imperative for energy justice and environmental equity in every facet of society.

AMANDA WOODRUM is the co-director of ReImagine Appalachia, a four-state coalition of diverse stakeholder groups working together to find common ground and create a 21st-century sustainable, equitable Appalachia and maximize the benefits to the region’s communities from the federal climate infrastructure package. She has a master’s degree in economics and law degree from the University of Akron in Ohio. Over the past 15 years or so, Woodrum has conducted research, advocacy, and coalition building at the intersection of climate, energy, health, labor, and anti-poverty policy. After living in New York City and experiencing 9/11, she returned to Ohio determined to make the state and the region the kind of place she wanted to live.