Press Releases

Live Online Interview with Leadership for a Changing World Awardees Dianne Bady and Janet Fout of the Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition

“All of us, since we were very young, have felt a deep connection, a kind of spiritual connection, to the natural world. We love being embraced by the steep hillsides that run down to West Virginia's lifeblood, the streams below. West Virginia is truly almost heaven…The survival of the culture of the Appalachian people depends upon the survival of the mountains themselves.” - Dianne Bady, Laura Forman, Janet Fout, Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition

Join Leadership for a Changing World on Friday, March 29 at 1 pm EST for a live, online interview with awardees Dianne Bady and Janet Fout of the Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition (OVEC). They will discuss how they share leadership in mobilizing their community around a difficult environmental issue, and will answer your questions live. In the coal mining states of West Virginia and Kentucky, mountain-leveling machines are lowering horizons. Mountaintop removal and valley-fill strip mining have decapitated 500 square miles of mountains, buried 1,000 miles of streams and destroyed communities. Coal companies maintain that such mining is essential to the local and national economy, but many West Virginians believe otherwise. Dianne Bady, Janet Fout and the late Laura Forman* have built a strong movement of hundreds of people who are fighting to end mountaintop removal in West Virginia. Through OVEC, coalfield residents join forces with environmentalists, attorneys, public health practitioners, union representatives and public officials who want to diversify the economy. Bady, Fout and Forman have worked together for eight years leading the Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition (OVEC), which Bady and others founded in 1987. For more information, visit http://leadershipforchange.org/awardees/awardee.php3?ID=4 or http://www.ohvec.org/. * Last December 11, Laura Forman died suddenly of a heart attack during a mountaintop removal protest in Huntington, WV.

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The Ford Foundation is an independent, nonprofit grant-making organization. For more than half a century it has been a resource for innovative people and institutions worldwide, guided by its goals of strengthening democratic values, reducing poverty and injustice, promoting international cooperation and advancing human achievement. With headquarters in New York, the foundation has offices in Africa, the Middle East, Asia, Latin America, and Russia.