Fred Tutman, Riverkeeper & CEO

Fred was born and raised along the Patuxent River as were seven generations of his ancestors before him. As the Patuxent Riverkeeper, an organization he founded in 2004, Fred  is a grassroots community advocate for clean water in Maryland’s longest and deepest intrastate waterway. He is among the longest serving Waterkeepers in the Chesapeake region and the only African-American Waterkeeper in the nation. He lives on an active farm located near the Patuxent that has been his family’s ancestral home for nearly a century. Prior to founding Patuxent Riverkeeper in 2004, Fred operated a business that provided professional media and mass communication services internationally, including a long stint working with and advising traditional healers in West Africa and coverage of the Falkands conflict in Argentina on assignment by the BBC. Fred also worked as a volunteer activist on the Patuxent for over 20 years until the momentum of the volunteer environmental work overcame his media career and the challenge of Riverkeeping beckoned. Fred is a recipient of numerous awards and recognitions for his work on behalf of environmental causes and issues in Maryland. He also serves on a variety of Boards, Task Forces and Commissions related to the work of protecting the Patuxent and the natural environment. Among them, Fred serves on the Board of the Environmental Integrity Project, as a Governor appointed Commissioner on the State's Patuxent River Commission and on the Board of Waterkeeper Alliance, the international group that licenses Waterkeepers. After a late life sojourn into law school, Fred is now an adjunct instructor at historic St. Mary's College of Maryland, where he teaches an upper level course in Environmental Law and Policy. He is an avid kayaker, backpacker and adventurer. In his spare time he does trail maintenance on the Appalachian Trail, explores the Patuxent River by kayak, blacksmiths, writes and works on his farm.

Sonia Keiner, Communications/Events

Sonia Keiner is a Prince George’s County, MD-based activist and photographer. Her work in both university and non-profit settings has afforded her a unique perspective on how to educate, train and organize around food justice, environmental justice and leadership development issues. In 2006 she earned a Master’s degree in Education Policy and Leadership from the University of Maryland, College Park and has extensive development, communications and non-profit administration experience.  Sonia has served as Executive Director of The Orchard School & Community Center in Alstead, New Hampshire (a nature & farm-based school) and directed the efforts of a Community Center in a working class neighborhood outside of Washington D.C., bringing much-needed resources through fundraising and partnership cultivation.  Sonia is also the recipient of a number of local, state, national and federal grants for her social justice and community-based public art projects.  Her photography has been exhibited locally and her series of farmer portraits are part of the permanent collection at BusBoys and Poets Restaurant in Hyattsville, MD. She has facilitated many community photography courses, helping students create powerful images to tell their story. She lives on an historic farm in Upper Marlboro where she spends as much time possible growing and sharing food and herbs, cooking, organizing and creating. She grew up on the Patuxent River in Howard County, MD.  Sonia’s CV.

Bob Kaper, Director of Development

Bob Kaper is a longtime St. Mary's county resident who lives on the shores of the Patuxent River. He's spent most of his career in media and public affairs, working as a print journalist, TV/video producer and communications director, with a frequent focus on energy and environmental issues. An avid catamaran sailor and power-boater, he's also served as marketing/communications manager for a marine hybrid-electric propulsion firm. 

PATUXENT RIVERKEEPER, BOARD OF ADVISORS

David C. Harrington is a former member of the Maryland State Senate. He has a B.A. in Political Science from Howard University, and a M.A. from Miami University where he served as: Senior fellow and faculty member, James MacGregor Burns Academy of Leadership, University of Maryland. Board of Directors, Maryland Association of Counties. Eastern Regional Representative, National Association of Black County Officials. Former director of education, Close Up Foundation. Former president, Maryland Municipal League; Port Towns Community Development Corporation.

Tom Horton covered Chesapeake Bay for the Baltimore Sun for more than 30 years, and wrote environmental stories for numerous magazines, including the New York Times, Rolling Stone, National Geographic and Audubon. He is author of eight books on the Chesapeake. His book, Bay Country, won the John Burroughs Award, given annually for the best book of nature writing in the U.S. Currently he lives in Salisbury Maryland where he teaches at Salisbury University, and works on books and magazine stories.

 

2016

PATUXENT RIVERKEEPER, BOARD OF DIRECTORS

Henry S. Cole, PhD of Upper Marlboro, MD is the founder of Henry S. Cole & Associates, Incorporated, an environmental consulting firm that provides scientific support, communications and advocacy for corporate, non-profit and community organizations. Prior to founding the firm in 1993, Dr. Cole served as science director for national environmental organizations, Clean Water Action and the National Campaign against Toxic Hazards. Cole's reports on the Superfund Program and on mercury contamination received wide spread media coverage and spurred action to curb emissions and use of this toxic chemical. During the late 1970's and early 1980's Dr. Cole served as a senior scientist with U.S. EPA's Office of Air Quality Planning and Standards where he managed several programs involving stationary source, urban-scale and regional air quality simulation models.  He served as Associate Professor of Environmental Earth Sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Parkside and a Professor of Environmental Studies at Howard University. Dr. Cole received his Ph.D. in Meteorology at the University of Wisconsin in 1969.

Richard Dolesh has worked with parks, resource conservation and natural resources for nearly all of his professional life. Most of his experience in these areas has been on the Patuxent River. He is currently a Senior Policy Associate with the National Recreation and Park Association, previously was Director of Forest, Wildlife, and Heritage Service for Maryland Department of Natural Resources (DNR) and before that, was Chief of Natural and Historical Resources for Maryland National Capital Parks and Planning Commission (MNCPPC). He is the author of a number of articles in the Parks and Recreation Magazine and other publications relating to parks and conservation.

Will Biddle is a retired educator and civic activist and avid outdoorsman living in the Davidsonville Area.

Vernice Miller-Travis is an Urban Planner and a graduate of Columbia University in the City of New York. She is also a published author of numerous articles and book chapters on race and land-use, environmental justice, Brownfields redevelopment and hazardous waste policy, sustainable community development, historic preservation, and neighborhood revitalization. She is the recipient of the American Public Health Association’s Section on the Environment Damu Smith Health Achievement Award in 2009, and also a Charles H. Revson graduate fellowship from Columbia University (1992), and a W.K. Kellogg Foundation Kellogg National Leadership Fellowship (1997).Currently, she is also the principal of an environmental consulting group called Miller-Travis & Associates, and a Senior Associate at Skeo Solutions.

Tracy Lloyd McCurty (Nile Sirius Asantewaa), Esq., is the Executive Director of the Black Belt Justice Center and the Co-Alchemist of the Acres of Ancestry Initiative/Black Agrarian Fund, a multidisciplinary, cooperative ecosystem rooted in Black ecocultural traditions and textile arts to regenerate custodial landownership, ecological stewardship, and food and fiber economies in the rural South. As a great-great granddaughter of sharecroppers turned independent farmers in eastern North Carolina, Tracy views her work as a continuation of her ancestors' value paradigm rooted in collective land tenure, spirit-culture reclamation, and ecological harmony. Decades of farmer-led organizing combined with Tracy’s leadership over the last three years through the Black Farmers’ Appeal: Cancel Pigford Debt Campaign advanced reparative land justice for Black farmers through various federal legislations and agricultural policies including a USDA foreclosure moratorium, debt cancellation, and direct payments for past discrimination (these policy recommendations became pillars in President Biden’s 100-day action plan). Tracy has elevated both intracommunity and national discourses regarding reparative justice through participation in numerous racial and land justice convenings including the “Whiteness As Property: A Twenty-Year Appraisal” Critical Race Studies Symposium at UCLA School of Law. Tracy is energized by the urgent call to (re)build a decolonized society governed by the values of racial equity, indigenous knowledges, spiritual journeying, and cooperative economy. She believes the Black Rural Imagination is regenerative when boundless and interdependent. To learn more about our liberatory ecosystem, visit www.acresofancestry.org.

Rabiah Nur is an Indigenous healer, activist, storyteller, speaker, ceremonialist and daughter of the Great Mother. Her work in the world is to heal and empower women through connection to nature, to spirit, and to their innate wisdom. She works to facilitate a rebirth of a new and healthy society where women are valued, empowered, whole and are held as the sacred beings that they are. If women are unhealthy, the whole society is unhealthy. Currently, Rabiah consults with and teaches at conferences, gatherings, schools, religious organizations, and retreat centers to offer Earth-based spiritual teachings, grounding energetic work, collective healing for teams and work groups, and education about appropriate use of Indigenous practices and traditions. She has co-designed an initiative in partnership with the Patuxent Riverkeeper called Honoring Our Sacred Waters, which exists to increase awareness of the spiritual connection between people and water through honoring, ceremony, and education. Rabiah was given an initial vision for this initiative which has been adopted by numerous organizations in the Chesapeake Bay area.

Dr. Barbara Sollner-Webb did her undergraduate work at MIT and went to graduate school for Biology at Stanford. She did her doctoral research on chromatin at the NIH with Gary Felesnfeld, followed by a postdoc with Ron Reeder at the Carnegie Institute in Baltimore. For almost three decades, Sollner-Webb was a member of the faculty of the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. (She was only the ninth woman to be tenured at Johns Hopkins since its founding over 100 years ago.) Her research first focused upon the mechanism of rRNA gene transcription, then rRNA processing, and she now studies both a form of RNA processing that can change 4 ⁄5 of the codons in mitochondrial mRNAs and a system discovered by her group that provides novel information on how the mammalian cell organizes its DNA in the nucleus. She is an environmental activist and deeply involved in the civic life of her community.  She enjoys riding Icelandic horses. 

Sacoby Wilson, PhD is an assistant professor with the Maryland Institute for Applied Environmental Health (MIAEH) and Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics, School of Public Health, University of Maryland-College Park. Dr. Wilson is an environmental health scientist with over ten years of experience working in community-university partnerships on environmental health and justice issues. He has expertise in exposure science and applied environmental health including community-based exposure assessment, environmental justice science, social epidemiology, environmental health disparities, built environment, air pollution monitoring, and community-based participatory research (CBPR). For the past two years, he has been building a program on community engagement, environmental justice, and health (CEEJH) to engage impacted communities, advocacy groups, and policymakers in Maryland and the Washington, DC region on environmental justice issues and environmental health disparities.