Carl Anthony leads the Ford Foundation’s Sustainable Metropolitan Communities Initiative and the Regional Equity Demonstration Initiative.  Prior to joining the Foundation he was a Convener and Co-Chair of the Bay Area Alliance for Sustainable Development (BAASD).  He was Founder and for 12 years, Executive Director of the Urban Habitat Program which promotes multi-cultural urban environmental leadership in the San Francisco Bay Area.  From 1991 through 1997, Anthony served as President of Earth Island Institute, an international environmental organization.  He has taught at the Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture and Planning, the University of California Colleges of Environmental Design and Natural Resources.  Anthony has a professional degree in architecture from Columbia University.  In 1996, he was appointed Fellow at the Institute of Politics, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University.

Robert D. Bullard is the Ware Distinguished Professor of Sociology and Director of the Environmental Justice Resource Center at Clark Atlanta University.  Professor Bullard has served as an expert witness and testified on dozens of civil rights and environmental justice lawsuits and hearings.  He is the author of twelve books that address environmental justice, urban land use, industrial facility siting, community health, neighborhood reinvestment, housing, transportation, suburban sprawl, smart growth, and regional equity.  He co-edited with Charles Lee (Commission for Racial Justice) and J. Eugene Grigsby (UCLA) Residential Apartheid:  The American Legacy (UCLA, 1994).  He also co-edited with Glenn S. Johnson Just Transportation:  Dismantling Race and Class Barriers to Mobility (New Society Publishers, 1997) and Glenn S. Johnson and Angel O. Torres Sprawl City: Race, Politics and Planning in Atlanta (Island Press, 2000).  His most recent books are entitled Just Sustainabilities:  Development in an Unequal World (Earthscan/MIT Press, 2003) and Highway Robbery: Transportation Racism and New Routes to Equity (South End Press, 2004). 

Angela Glover Blackwell is founder and CEO of PolicyLink, a national nonprofit research, communications, capacity building, and advocacy organization dedicated to advancing policies to achieve economic and social equity. A noted community building activist and advocate, Ms. Blackwell previously served as senior vice president for the Rockefeller Foundation where she directed the Foundation’s domestic and cultural divisions and developed programs centered on issues of leadership, inclusion, race, and policy.  Before that, she gained national recognition for pioneering an innovative approach to community revitalization as founder of Oakland, California’s Urban Strategies Council.  Ms. Blackwell has also been a partner with Public Advocates, a nationally known public interest law firm.  She is a co-author of Searching for the Uncommon Common Ground: New Dimensions on Race in America (W.W. Norton, 2002). 

john a. powell is an internationally recognized authority in the areas of civil rights, civil liberties, and issues relating to race, ethnicity, poverty and the law. He is the executive director of the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity at Ohio State University. He also holds the Williams Chair in Civil Rights and Civil Liberties at the Moritz College of Law. He has written extensively on a number of issues including racial justice and regionalism, concentrated poverty and urban sprawl, the link between housing and school segregation, opportunity-based housing, gentrification, disparities in the criminal justice system, voting rights, affirmative action in the United States, South Africa and Brazil, racial and ethnic identity and current demographic trends. Previously, Dr. Powell founded and directed the Institute on Race and Poverty at the University of Minnesota. He also served as the National Legal Director of the American Civil Liberties Union, where he was instrumental in developing educational adequacy theory. Prior to that, he served as the Director of Legal Services of Greater Miami.

The Forum’s Secretariat:

Deeohn Ferris is President of the Sustainable Community Development Group, Inc. a not-for-profit corporation dedicated to metropolitan sustainability, environmental health, smart growth and regional equity.  Ferris is an attorney whose interdisciplinary career spans government, industry and public interest.  She directed nationally significant compliance and enforcement activities at U.S. EPA; served as counsel to the American Insurance Association; and was the first senior African American environmental policy director at the National Wildlife Federation.   Since then, Ferris has launched two groundbreaking social justice initiatives: the Environmental Justice Project for the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights, the first pioneered by a major civil rights group; and the Washington Office on Environmental Justice, an international multiracial grassroots coalition.  She led the national campaign that resulted in the 1994 Presidential Executive Order on Environmental Justice, the EPA National Environmental Justice Advisory Council and a federal Inter-Agency Workgroup.  Ms. Ferris has lectured in China, Turkey, South Africa and Mexico and throughout North America.  Her work with communities extends from these places to Fiji, Indonesia, Brazil, India and Nepal.