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All Speakers

  • Allan is former Chief Executive Officer of the London Climate Change Agency (LCCA), a company owned by the London Development Agency and led by the Mayor as Chairman. Allan is also an Executive Director of the London ESCO and Chief Technologist of the London Development Agency. Prior to his appointment, Allan was Woking Borough Council's Director of Thameswey Ltd., developing and implementing projects through its public/private joint venture Energy Services Company Thameswey Energy Ltd., the first companies of their type in the UK. He has over 30 years experience in the housing, property, building services, energy, water, waste, transport and climate change sectors. During his time at Woking, Allan reduced CO2 emissions by 77.5% from 1990 levels and undertook groundbreaking work on energy and water efficiency, private wire CHP cogeneration and trigeneration decentralised energy systems, environmentally friendly waste recycling/recovery and energy from waste technologies, alternative fuels for transport, renewable energy and fuel cells. Allan was appointed a Member of the British Empire in 1999 for services to energy and water efficiency and was instrumental in Woking gaining the Queen's Award for Enterprise: Sustainable Development 2001, the only local authority ever to receive a Queen's Award for Enterprise.
  • Brad Bradshaw is the President of the Massachusetts Hydrogen Coalition and Velerity Management Consulting. Brad helps clean energy companies capitalize on growth opportunities, develop business and marketing strategies, raise capital, and develop new products and services. He has been closely involved at both the national and state levels in clean energy legislation, and has recently been investigating the business opportunities and risks associated with operating in a carbon constrained world, focusing on carbon mitigation, sequestration. offsets and trading.
  • Mr. Rosenblum has 15 years experience in research, consulting, training & education, public policy, and community advocacy at the intersection of environment, business, and community engagement. For the past two years, he has focused on conducting a needs assessment for the creation of an advocacy group focusing on improving urban life in Boston by improving transportation options beyond the tradition use of the automobile. He is co-founder and Executive Director of the LivableStreets Alliance. As part of this effort, he launched a Boston-focused bicycle advocacy group, "Boston Bicycle Planning Initiative," in November 2004 in response to an opportunity to bring together a cohesive presentation at a City Council hearing. He consults part-time with the Cadmus Group in Watertown, MA, conducting training programs and provided consultation for USAID (US Agency for International Development) and UNEP (United Nations Environment Program) on Cleaner Production programs (i.e., pollution prevention), environmentally sound design, and environmental impact assessment (mostly in Africa and Asia Near East).
  • Steve Russell is the Fleet Superintendent for the City of Keene, New Hampshire. If it rolls in the City of Keene, Steve is responsible for keeping it rolling. The city vehicles of police, fire, rescue, public works, water, wastewater, and the recycling center which are powered by diesel fuel have been using Biodiesel successfully for over seven years. Under Steve's direction the fleet has been recognized nationally by ICLEI/Local Governments for Sustainability for its extensive use of Biodiesel. As well, in 2004 Keene's Fleet Services Division was the recipient of The State of New Hampshire Governor's Award for Pollution Prevention, recognizing it for its work in Biodiesel and other pollution prevention work. For the last five years Steve has been sharing his knowledge about Biodiesel, pollution prevention, and alternative fuels with fleet managers, public works directors, national park staff, and transit fleet operators all around the United States. Most recently he spoke at the University of Massachusetts Department of the Interior Clean Energy Conference.
  • Jacki Wilkins is the new president of the 400-member Boston Chapter of the Women's Transportation Seminar. Wilkins, a senior project manager for environmental permitting at the Massachusetts Port Authority, begins her two-year term at WTS as the local transportation industry winds down from large-scale construction projects like Logan Airport modernization and the Central Artery Big Dig Project. Wilkins first joined WTS in 1994 and has served as vice president, treasurer and co-chairwoman of committees responsible for student scholarships and planning the WTS National Conference held in Boston in 2003. W ilkins graduated with a degree in geology from Pennsylvania's Lafayette College and later did graduate work in environmental studies before serving 11 years with the states Executive Office of Environmental Affairs She also worked as a consultant for 6 years before working at Massport.
  • Loretta J. Ross is a founder and the National Coordinator of the SisterSong Women of Color Reproductive Health Collective, composed of 70 women of color organizations across the country. Ross' areas of expertise are reproductive rights, human rights, women's issues, diversity issues, hate groups and bias crimes. Ross is the founder and former Executive Director of the National Center for Human Rights Education (NCHRE), a training and resource center for grassroots activists on using human rights education to address social injustices in the United States. Prior to that, from 1990 to 1995, she served as the national program research director for the Atlanta-based Center for Democratic Renewal. Ross' involvement in women's health issues was initiated as a result of a personal triumph. She was one of the first African American women to direct the first rape crisis center in the United States in the 1970s. Women's human rights are of significant concern for Ross because she was sterilized at age 23. Ross was also one of the first black women to win a suit against A.H. Robins, manufacturer of the Dalkon Shield that sterilized thousands of women worldwide. Ross is co-author, with 3 other writers, of the book *Beyond the Politics of Inclusion: Women of Color in the Reproductive Rights Movement* (2004, South End Press). She is currently authoring a book on a black women's activism in the reproductive rights movement called *Black Abortion*. Other writing projects include editorials for the Progressive Media Project for the Knight-Ridder newspaper chain and she serves as a political analyst for Pacifica News Service and Alternative Radio. Ross has appeared on talk shows such as *The Donahue Show*, *The Charlie Rose Show*, CNN, BET *Lead Story*, and *Good Morning America*. She has also been featured in *Emerge Magazine*, *Biography Magazine*, *San Antonio Express News*, and the* Los Angeles Times*. For the last two years, she has also been collecting oral histories of elder feminists of color for archives at Smith College. Ross was invited to testify before the U.S. Congress, the United Nations, and the Food and Drug Administration on women's health and human rights issues. She served eight years on the Washington D.C. Commission for Women. She currently serves on the board of directors for the Foundation for African American Women, the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission, the Committee on Women, Population and the Environment, and SisterLove Women's AIDS Project. Ross received an honorary Doctorate of Civil Law degree in 2003 from Arcadia University.
  • Steven Bach was senior vice-president and head of worldwide productions for United Artists studios. In *Final Cut: Dreams And Disaster in the Making of Heaven's Gate* (1985), Bach chronicles his involvement in the troubled production of *Heaven's Gate* (1980), a film widely considered to have been the decisive reason for the financial bankruptcy of United Artists. Bach is the author of *The Life and Legend of Marlene Dietrich and Dazzler: The Life and Times of Moss Hart*. He taught film studies at Columbia University and Bennington College. His biography of the Nazi-associated filmmaker, *Leni: The Life and Work of Leni Riefenstahl* (2007) overturns many of the claims Riefenstahl put forward in her self-defence regarding her contact with Hitler's regime, and was named by the New York Times as one of the most notable books of 2007. Bach died after a brief illness in March of 2009. He was survived by his companion, Werner Rohr.
  • Deborah Rodriguez has worked as a hairdresser since 1979, except for a brief time when she was a corrections officer in her hometown of Holland, Michigan. She used to direct the Kabul Beauty School, the first modern beauty academy and training salon in Afghanistan where she lived with her Afghan husband. According to *the New York Times*, six women also involved in the beauty school in Afghanistan dispute parts of her memoir, particularly concerning the Beauty School's founding, how she won control of the school and why, and her stories about several Afghani women. The author and publisher say that in the future, they will make it clear Rodriguez didn't found the school and that the Afghani women's identities needed to be protected. Rodriguez left Afghanistan in April 2007 after returning to Kabul from a book tour to find that her husband, Haji Sher Mohammed, had been sexually harassing salon girls and planning to steal her money. After being warned that she would be kidnapped if she stayed, she fled. The Kabul Beauty School has caused outrage in Afghanistan, where websites have revealed the salon girls' true identities. They have been denounced as prostitutes who have soiled the reputation of Afghan women.