Deeohn Ferris is President/CEO of the Sustainable Community Development Group, Inc. a not-for-profit corporation dedicated to metropolitan sustainability, environmental health, smart growth and regional equity.  Ferris is an environmental attorney whose interdisciplinary career spans government, industry and public interest.  She directed nationally significant compliance and enforcement activities at U.S. EPA; served as counsel to the American Insurance Association; and was the first senior African American environmental policy director at the National Wildlife Federation. 

Since then, Ferris has launched two groundbreaking social justice initiatives: the Environmental Justice Project for the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights, the first pioneered by a major civil rights group; and the Washington Office on Environmental Justice, an international multiracial grassroots public policy coalition.  She led the national campaign that resulted in the 1994 Presidential Executive Order on Environmental Justice, the EPA National Environmental Justice Advisory Council and the federal Inter-Agency Workgroup.  Ms. Ferris has lectured in China, Turkey, South Africa and Mexico and throughout North America.  Her work with communities extends from these places to Fiji, Indonesia, Brazil, the U.K, India and Nepal.