Convocation 2021 Presenters
Keynote Speaker
Rev. Mariama White-Hammond is a pastor, advocate, facilitator, and farmer whose work spans issues and sectors as she seeks to create a more just and sustainable world.
In 2021, she was appointed Chief of Energy, Environment and Open Spaces for the City of Boston under Mayor Kim Janey. In that role she oversaw everything from Archeology to Animal Control. In particular, she focused on what Boston can do to combat climate change, reduce environmental inequities and protect Boston’s urban ecosystem for everyone to enjoy. She is the founding pastor of New Roots AME Church, a multi-racial, multi-class community that is innovating new ways of doing church.
Rev. Mariama uses an intersectional lens in her ecological work, challenging folks to see the connections between immigration and climate change or the relationship between energy policy and economic justice. She was a fellow with the Green Justice Coalition, which brings together eight social/environmental justice groups from around Massachusetts. She is the chair of the New England Grassroots Environmental Fund and the co-chair of RENEW New England.
She was the Executive Director of Project HIP-HOP, a youth arts organization, focused on teaching the history of the Civil Rights Movement and engaging a new generation of young people in activism. She has spoken and preached throughout the country and was the MC for the 2017 Boston Women’s March and the 2018 Boston People’s Climate Mobilization. She has a company, Change Agency, with her husband, Turahn Dorsey, that encompasses her public speaking, writing and consulting work with organizations committed to deepening their social
justice work.
Rev. Mariama has received numerous awards including the Barr Fellowship, the Celtics Heroes Among Us, The Roxbury Founders Day Award, and the Boston NAACP Image award. She was selected as one of the Grist 50 Fixers for 2019, Sojourners’ 11 Women Shaping the Church, and Get Konnected!’s Boston’s Most Impactful Black Women 2021.
Song Leader
Pax Ressler (they/them) is a non-binary performer, music director, and composer working at the intersections of theatre and music as well as arts and advocacy. They believe in the power of communal song to help articulate our shared values and stir us towards action. Pax is a passionate advocate and organizer of the non-binary and trans theatre community in Philly and a gardener of the Genderfunk Philly Instagram (@genderfunkphilly), featuring Philly’s trans and non-binary theatre talent. Pax recently wrote and released an album of non-binary love songs entitled “Change” (https://paxressler.bandcamp.
Conversationalists
Kaitlin Curtice is a Native American Christian author and speaker. As an enrolled member of the Potawatomi Citizen Band and someone who has grown up in the Christian faith, Kaitlin writes on the intersection of Indigenous spirituality, faith in everyday life, and the church.
Her first book, Glory Happening: Finding the Divine in Everyday Places, was published with Paraclete Press in 2017. It is a series of fifty essays and prayers focusing on finding the sacred in everyday life. Kaitlin’s new book NATIVE: Identity, Belonging, and Rediscovering God, came out in May 2020 with Brazos Press, and was named by Publisher’s Weekly as a Religion and Spirituality book to watch for.
Kaitlin has contributed to OnBeing, Religion News Service, USA Today, and Sojourners, among others, and she was interviewed for the New Yorker on colonization within Christian missions. In 2018 she was featured in a documentary with CBS called “Race, Religion and Resistance,” speaking on the dangers of colonized Christianity.
Kaitlin travels around the country, speaking on faith and justice within the church as it relates to Indigenous peoples. She has been a featured speaker at Why Christian, Evolving Faith, Wild Goose Festival, The Festival of Faith and Writing, and more.
She also occasionally writes at her blog, kaitlincurtice.com.
William Morris (he/him) is a 26-Year-old climate activist located in Torrance, CA. He holds his degree in environmental science with an emphasis on ecological restoration and a minor in watershed management from Humboldt State University. William works with Young Evangelicals for Climate Action (YECA) serving first as a field organizer and is now Co-chair of the steering committee. He volunteers with The Climate Reality Project, is the founder and chair of the Los Angeles chapter’s Faith-based Communities Committee, founder and chair of the creation care committee at Faith United Methodist Church, is part of the leadership team with Faiths4Future, and a member of the board at Circle Faith Future. William also has worked with faith organizations abroad spending time in Kenya, Chad and Mexico. He spends his time engaging with faith communities, schools, universities, and organizations around the topics of faith-based climate justice and education. His work has been featured in Rolling Stone Magazine, ABC News and BBC.
The Rev. Canon Stephanie Spellers serves as Canon to Presiding Bishop Michael B. Curry and spearheads Episcopal efforts around evangelism, reconciliation and creation care. Her newest book, The Church Cracked Open: Disruption, Decline and New Hope for Beloved Community (March 2021), follows on her popular titles Radical Welcome: Embracing God, The Other and the Spirit of Transformation and The Episcopal Way. Spellers has served as Chaplain to the Episcopal House of Bishops, directed and taught mission and evangelism at General Theological Seminary, and served as a canon in the Diocese of Long Island. Before that, she founded The Crossing, a ground-breaking church within St. Paul’s Cathedral in Boston, and led numerous church-wide renewal and justice efforts. A native of Frankfort, Kentucky, and a graduate of both Episcopal Divinity School and Harvard Divinity School, she and her husband Albert deGrasse make their home today in New York’s Harlem neighborhood. Learn more about her recent work at www.churchcrackedopen.com.
Susanne C. Moser (she/her/hers) is a geographer (Ph.D. 1997, Clark University) who works nationally and internationally as an independent scholar and consultant from a base in western Massachusetts. Her work with government agencies, non-profits, foundations, and other researchers and consultants focuses on adaptation to climate change, science-policy interactions, effective climate change communication, and psycho-social resilience in the face of the traumatic and transformative challenges associated with climate change. Susi is the editor of two award-winning edited volumes, one on successful adaptation to climate change; the other on how to communicate climate change. She is a prolific writer, an inspiring speaker and has served on scientific advisory boards for Future Earth, the International Science Council, the US National Research Council and has contributed to the IPCC and US national climate assessments. In all of her work, she seeks to embody and enact her deepest calling and thus to serve the world and Earth community from a spiritual, soul-anchored center.