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Where the Rubber Meets the Road in Building Products (April 24, 2013)
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Healthy Building Network Leadership Awards
The 2005 Healthy Building Leadership Awards celebrate six individuals who have demonstrated long term leadership in achieving environmental justice in Louisiana, and who now lead the call for a just rebuilding in the wake of hurricanes Katrina and Rita.
View Invitation to HBN's Leadership Awards - Nov. 10th, 2005
 Monique Harden, Esq., is a New Orleans resident, and a founder and co-director of Advocates for Environmental Human Rights, a nonprofit, public-interest law firm dedicated to defending and advancing the human right to a healthy environment. Monique's legal advocacy on behalf of residents in Convent, Louisiana helped to bar construction of the largest polyvinylchloride (PVC) factory proposed in the US, and established some of the first environmental justice precedents under law. In March, 2005, Monique initiated another precedent-setting proceeding with the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, alleging that the unhealthy and hazardous conditions caused by PVC and related industries near Mossville and Lake Charles, Louisiana violate fundamental human rights to life, health, and racial equality.
 Darryl Malek-Wiley, a New Orleans resident, is the Sierra Club's nationally renowned environmental justice organizer in Louisiana, who has worked for over 30 years with communities along the Mississippi River to fight toxic pollution and protect peoples' health. Darryl coined the term "Cancer Alley" to describe the Mississippi River corridor between Baton Rouge and New Orleans that is home to more than 200 industrial facilities and small towns that are mostly poor and black. In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, Darryl has been a much sought after and effective national spokesman on environmental justice and related issues.
 Anne Rolfes is a New Orleans resident and founding executive director of the Louisiana Bucket Brigade, a nonprofit environmental health and justice organization that gives communities near oil refineries and chemical plants the tools to document air pollution. The Bucket Brigade pioneered the simple and affordable tools, made famous in the HBO documentary Blue Vinyl, that allow ordinary citizens to detect airborne toxins in a scientifically reliable manner. As a result, hundreds of people have been empowered to measure air toxic releases in their neighborhoods. Today the Bucket Brigade is leading the effort to document post-hurricane contamination in New Orleans and neighboring parishes.
 Damu Smith is co-founder and former Executive Director of the National Black Environmental Justice Network and the founding co-chair of Black Voices for Peace. Damu has also served as Executive Director of the Washington Office on Africa, Associate Director of the Washington Office of the American Friends Service Committee, and Associate Director and national toxics campaigner for Greenpeace. Damu has worked extensively throughout Louisiana coordinating national support for successful local campaigns to stop the construction of a nuclear waste treatment facility in Houma and a PVC plant in Convent, as well as to relocate the Cancer Alley community of Norco out of the toxic shadow of an oil refinery.
 Wilma Subra is a chemist from New Iberia, Louisiana, who has helped more than 800 communities all over the United States challenge industrial polluters. Much of Wilma's work has focused on towns along the Mississippi River in Louisiana's Cancer Alley. In 1999, Wilma was awarded the prestigious MacArthur Fellowship, commonly known as the "genius award." In 2004, Wilma presented to the USGBC's PVC Task Group evidence from state government files, withheld by the vinyl industry, documenting major releases of the human carcinogen vinyl chloride into schoolyards and communities adjacent to vinyl manufacturing plants.
 Dr. Beverly Wright is a New Orleans resident, sociologist, and leading scholar on environmental and economic justice, and public policy. Dr. Wright is the founder and Director of the Deep South Center for Environmental Justice at Dillard University in New Orleans. For more than a decade, she has directed numerous community-initiated health surveys, evaluated community relocation plans, and supervised community development initiatives around contaminated sites. Dr. Wright directed groundbreaking research which documented the disproportionate impacts to African American communities from industrial facilities along Cancer Alley.
PAST AWARDEES
2004
Habitat for Humanity International
Habitat for Humanity, New Orleans Affiliate
Habitat for Humanity, South Puget Sound Affiliate
2003
New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer
Pentagon Renovation Program
2002
Kaiser Permanente
Environmental Building News
American Society for Healthcare Engineering
New York Department of Environmental Conservation
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