AUM welcomes environmental activist for Juneteenth celebration

Catherine Coleman Flowers, founder and director of the Alabama Center for Rural Enterprise, has spent her career bringing attention to the largely invisible problem of inadequate waste and water sanitation infrastructure in Black, Indigenous, Latinx and poor rural communities across the United States.

Flowers will share her work with students, faculty and staff at a brunch hosted by AUM to recognize Juneteenth on Tuesday, June 18. The event will be held at 9:30 a.m. in Taylor Center 221.223.

As a federal holiday, Juneteenth commemorates the emancipation of enslaved African Americans after the Civil War. AUM will be closed on Wednesday, June 19, in observance of the Juneteenth holiday.

An environmental and climate justice activist, Flowers is known as a powerful storyteller and communicator. She has advocated for environmental justice in moving testimony before U.S. Congress and the United Nations, framing access to clean water and sanitation as a civil and human right.

In 2022, Flowers received the Harvard Law School Horizon Award for her contributions to environmental policy. In 2020, she received a Genius Grant from the MacArthur Foundation, which supports creative people and institutions committed to building a more just and peaceful world. She also was named a 2020 McArthur Fellow for Environmental Health and Advocacy.

AUM’s Juneteenth brunch is sponsored by a grant from the John Templeton Foundation entitled “From Civil Rights to Civic Virtue: Forming Character through Community,” AUM’s Experiential Education and Engagement Center and AUM’s Office of Human Resources Affirmative Action and EEO.

Registration is required for the Juneteenth brunch. RSVP online by Thursday, June 13.