Saturday, October 21st, 7:30pm
Location: Ballroom, Embassy Suites
Separate admission: $85
NOTE: Register early (this event always sells out well before the conference begins) if you want to raise the roof at the super-popular Bioneers Awards Dinner!
Join Kenny Ausubel, Nina Simons, Joshua Fouts and the Bioneers community of leadership for a mythic meal and rousing celebration to honor several extraordinary activists, thinkers and artists, true Bioneers heroes and sheroes. Come bask in the warmth, passion and good cheer of the Bioneers community, as we feast on a succulent meal designed by Embassy Suites Executive Chef Scott LaCrosse with food provided by cutting-edge, innovative, conscious companies supplying fresh, local, sustainably grown produce, working with some of the leading organic and biodynamic farmers, ranchers, and dairies in the region.
Awardees
Amy Goodman and Denis Moynihan of Democracy Now!, the indispensable award-winning news program that airs on over 1,400 public TV and radio stations worldwide: These towering icons of independent media have given voice to the often intertwined struggles of Indigenous peoples, environmental and social justice activists, criminal justice reformers, and all the most important progressive movements of our era.
Sarah Crowell (for Destiny Arts): The Destiny Arts Youth Performance Company (a program of Destiny Arts Center, the renowned Oakland-based violence prevention/arts education nonprofit), led by its artistic directors Sarah Crowell and Rashidi Omari, works with multicultural groups of teens to produce original performances combining hip-hop, dance, theater, martial arts, song, and rap. The company, which has performed locally and nationally since 1993 and has been the subject of two documentary films, has rocked the house on Bioneers’ main stage for many years.
Jeremy Narby, an anthropologist who has been working as Amazonian Projects Coordinator for the Swiss NGO “Nouvelle Planète” since 1990, backing Amazonian indigenous organizations in land titling, bilingual and intercultural education, environmental monitoring and sustainable economic development initiatives, has been one of the most impactful and effective allies of Indigenous people in South America. He is also a brilliant thinker whose has worked for decades to reconcile shamanic and Western scientific ways of seeing the world in groundbreaking books, including: The Cosmic Serpent: DNA and the Origins of Knowledge, and Intelligence in Nature.
Victor Pineda and James Thurston
Victor Pineda, an urban planner and social entrepreneur, is President of World Enabled and of The Global Alliance on Accessible Technologies and Environments (GAATES), the leading international organization dedicated to the promotion of accessibility of the built and virtual environments. Currently a professor in the Department of City and Regional Planning at UC Berkeley, Victor is widely recognized as one of the planet’s leading experts on disability rights, policy, planning and design, and speaks and works around the world.
James Thurston, Vice President for Global Strategy and Development at G3ict (the Global Initiative for Inclusive Information and Communication Technologies) is an international technology policy leader who has been a key figure in efforts to use technology to promote the inclusion and human rights of people with disabilities around the world.
Kandi Mossett, of Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara ancestry, is the Indigenous Environmental Network (IEN)’s Lead Organizer on its Extreme Energy and Just Transition Campaign. She has emerged as one of North America’s leading voices in the fight to bring visibility to the impacts climate change and environmental injustice have on Indigenous communities across North America and internationally.
john a. powell, Director of the Haas Institute for a Fair and Inclusive Society at UC Berkeley, previously Executive Director of the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity at Ohio State, has taught at numerous universities and law schools including at Harvard and Columbia. A former National Legal Director of the ACLU and co-founder of the Poverty and Race Research Action Council, he is one of the nation’s leading thinkers and scholars on civil rights and liberties, race, ethnicity, housing, poverty, and democracy. He joined the Bioneers Board early this year after many years of participating in the Bioneers conference.