Saint Joseph Valley Project - A Coalition of Community, Faith and Labor

Annual Saint Joseph Valley Recognition Banquet is Thursday October 29th, 2009. This years speaker is Jerome Ringo, president of the Apollo Alliance. The banquet will be held at the FOP lodge on 12th St. in Mishawaka.

Jerome Ringo, President
ringo at apolloalliance.org

Jerome Ringo came to the Apollo Alliance in 2005 as a dedicated champion of environmental justice and vocal advocate of clean energy. He has first hand experience of the challenges we face after working for more than 20 years in Louisiana’s petrochemical industry. More than half of that time was spent as an active union member working with his fellow members to secure a safe work environment and quality jobs. Louisiana’s petrochemical industry focuses on the production of gasoline, rocket fuel, and plastics – many of which contain cancer causing chemicals. As he began observing the negative impacts of the industry’s pollution on local communities – primarily poor, minority communities – Jerome began organizing community environmental justice groups. Jerome’s experience organizing environmental and labor communities and his drive to further diversify the environmental movement bridges many of Apollo’s partners to create a broad based coalition to provide real solutions for our energy crisis. In 1996, Ringo was elected to serve on the National Wildlife Federation board of directors and, in 2005, Jerome became the chair of the board. In so doing, he also became the first African American to head a major conservation organization. Jerome was the United States’ only black delegate at the 1998 Global Warming Treaty Negotiations in Kyoto, Japan, and represented the National Wildlife Federation at the United Nations conference on sustainable development in 1999. Jerome inspires audiences around the world to create a new clean energy economy. Some of his most notable keynote appearances include: the Montreal Climate Summit in 2006, the United Nations African Climate Conference in Nairobi, Kenya in 2006, the Kyoto Plus Conference in Berlin Germany in 2007, and the 2008 Democratic National Convention in Denver Colorado. In 2006, Jerome was a McCloskey Fellow and Associate Research Scholar at Yale University; in 2008, he was a Visiting Lecturer at the University of California, Santa Barbara’s Bren School of the Environment. Jerome is co-author of Diversity and the Future of the U.S. Environmental Movement (published in 2007) and The Green Festival Reader (published in 2008.) Jerome appeared in the Oscar-winning documentary, An Inconvenient Truth.