Dianne Dillon-Ridgley

Environmentalist and Human Rights Activist has for thirty years worked on issues of the environment and sustainability, gender and CSR, both domestically and internationally.

Since 1997 she has been a director at Interface, Inc., global manufacturer of modular carpet and a leader in sustainable design. She was a director at Green Mountain Energy for the first six years and still chairs the Environmental Integrity Committee for the company.
She was appointed by the White House to the US delegation for the Earth Summit in Rio, UNGASS-’97 & WSSD in South Africa, making her the only person to serve on all three US delegations. She is founding chair — emeritus of Plains Justice, an environmental law center for the Great Plains states in the US and is a trustee for CIEL, (the Center for International Environmental Law) Population Connection (National Chair), WNSF (the Women’s Network for a Sustainable Future) the former national chair of River Network and president of ZPG. She was also CEO of WEDO and head of the Iowa Association of Human Rights Agencies, among others.

From 1999 through its tenure she was a member of the Oxford U. Commission on Sustainable Consumption and the
first US member appointed to the Global Water Partnership in Stockholm. Former President Clinton appointed her to the PCSD, his council on Sustainable Development. In the recent US election she worked for 18 months on the Obama campaign from its earliest days in Iowa and was part of the P-CAP: Presidential Climate Action Project). In 2000 she chaired the Millennium DPI conference at the UN, which first introduced the idea for the Millennium Development Goals.

She lives in Iowa City, Iowa and has two adult children, Dasal who graduated from Morehouse in Atlanta and Karima, who graduated from Harvard and recently married the sustainable design retailer Aaron Porvaznik-founder of “Olive and Myrtle”.