"Beyond Flint: Environmental Justice, Urban Planning and Public Health" - 3/3

Thursday, March 3rd from 12-2 pm in the School of Public Health student lounge.
Vernice Miller Travis, an environmental justice activist, leader, and icon will be the guest speaker.   We will serve refreshments from 12-12:30 pm.  Ms. Miller-Travis will speak at 12:30 pm.
Vernice Miller-Travis, MUP, is the principal of an environmental consulting group called Miller-Travis & Associates, and a Senior Associate at Skeo Solutions.  Through both Miller-Travis & Associates and Skeo Solutions, she targets her efforts to working with communities that have undergone economic disinvestment and environmental degradation to facilitate and implement community revitalization and sustainable redevelopment initiatives and projects.  She was recently reappointed to the U.S. EPA’s National Environmental Justice Advisory Council by Administrator Lisa Jackson where she serves on the Work Group on Integrating Environmental Justice into Permitting. She also co-chaired the NEJAC’s Work Group on School Air Toxics Monitoring.  She serves as Vice-chair of the Maryland State Commission on Environmental Justice and Sustainable Communities, where she leads an effort to encourage state and local governments to consider the environmental and public health dimensions of local land-use and zoning decisions.    She also currently serves on the Board of Directors of the Healthy Schools Network, the North Carolina Association of Black Lawyers Land Loss Prevention Project and Imani Energy.  She is the co-founder and a member of the Board of We ACT for Environmental Justice (formerly known as West Harlem Environmental Action), a twenty-eight year-old, award-winning community-based environmental justice advocacy organization in New York City.   Ms. Miller-Travis is an Urban Planner and a graduate of Columbia University in the City of New York. In 1987, she served as a research assistant to the United Church of Christ Commission for Racial Justice and helped to write and publish their landmark report entitled: Toxic Waste and Race in the United States. She is the recipient of the American Public Health Association’s Section on the Environment Damu Smith Health Achievement Award in 2009.