On Thursday afternoon of the 2022 MACo Summer Conference, join Delegate Robbyn Lewis and Thomas D. Peterson, President of the Center for Climate Strategies (CCS), during the Diversity Caucus & Women of MACo Luncheon for an essential discussion regarding equity and public infrastructure.

MACo’s luncheon speakers will highlight inequities resulting from historically poor public infrastructure investments and their impact on Maryland’s communities. Moreover, they will detail their work remedying said impacts, noting the work that still needs to be done and additional solutions to pursue.

Delegate Lewis’ biography follows:

Robbyn has lived in Baltimore for more than 20 years. She is an international public health leader with a global view and a heart for home.

She is the first African American — the first person of color — to represent our district. Robbyn is also the only state legislator who is car-free by choice; she gets around by walking, transit, biking and rideshare.

Robbyn grew up in the suburbs of Gary, Indiana; her father was a physician and her mother, a teacher of children with hearing impairment. Inspired by her family’s legacy of community service, compassion and pride, Robbyn knew early that she would pursue a career in health care.

After studying in France and Taiwan, Robbyn served her country in the U.S. Peace Corps. Assigned to a maternal and child health clinic in Niger, in west Africa, she worked alongside local nurses at a rural health clinic, conducting malnutrition surveillance, providing pre-natal care to mothers, and delivering life-saving immunizations to babies at risk of measles and other deadly, preventable illnesses.

Following graduate training in public health, Robbyn applied her scientific, cross-cultural and public health skills on three continents, working to prevent infectious diseases like tuberculosis, malaria and HIV/AIDS. Her work in cervical cancer prevention contributed to global policy change by the World Health Organization, saving the lives of women in under-resourced settings.

Back in Baltimore, Robbyn worked at the Maryland Health Benefit Exchange to roll out the Affordable Care Act. That experience gave her hands-on experience with issues related to health equity, access and affordability – issues that now form the foundation of her legislative leadership.

For two decades, Robbyn has been a community leader in the Patterson Park neighborhood. Her accomplishments include:

• Helping establish the Patterson Park Public Charter School
• Leading an award-winning greening movement that mobilized hundreds of volunteers and increased her neighborhood’s tree canopy by 20%.
• Founding the Red Line Now PAC in 2011, Maryland’s first and only grassroots political action committee dedicated to fighting for transit investment in Baltimore.
• Establishing the Livable Streets Coalition, which aims to reduce pedestrian injury in predominantly African American and Latino neighborhoods in east Baltimore.

Robbyn joined the Maryland General Assembly in 2017 and has served her District 46 neighbors as their State Delegate for 5 years.

President Peterson’s biography follows:

Tom Peterson founded CCS in 2004 to help governments and stakeholders understand and formulate responses to climate change. Over the past decade this included developing and implementing a widely recognized template for comprehensive, multi objective, consensus based planning and analysis that led to the development of 22 US state plans, national scale up and integration of subnational climate action plans in the US, the Low Emissions Development System for the six Border States of Mexico, and the Low Carbon Development Planning and Analysis System for the Provinces of China.

He has designed and directed numerous subnational and national policy development and capacity building initiatives and assessments in the US and abroad. He has collaborated with many national and regional philanthropies, government agencies, and other funding institutions to mobilize capacity for subnational, stakeholder based approaches to policy and agreements on progressive actions on climate change.

His posts over the past 30 years include Senior Advisor to the White House Climate Change Task Force, LEGIS Fellow to the Office of US Senator Joe Lieberman, Economist with the US Environmental Protection Agency, and Vice President of DSL Capital Corporation. Mr. Peterson is an Adjunct Professor and Teaching Fellow at the Center for Advanced Governmental Studies/Global Security Center at Johns Hopkins University, as well as the Energy and Climate Center at Johns Hopkins University. He is known for his expertise and innovations on climate policy development; climate, energy and economic security integration; and stakeholder consensus building.

Date/Time: Thursday, August 18, 2022; 11:30 am – 12:30 pm