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Environmentalist, Cartographer and Social Entrepreneur
Molly Burhans is an internationally recognized environmentalist, cartographer, and social entrepreneur. She is the founder of GoodLands and was the Chief Cartographer for the first unified global map of the Catholic Church in history, which premiered in the Vatican in 2016. Molly is one of Encyclopedia Britannica’s 2022 20 Under 40 in the category of Academic and Ideas. In 2021 the Sierra Club honored her with their EarthCare Award, previously awarded to the likes of Wangari Maathai and Sir David Attenborough. She is a 2021 National Geographic Emerging Explorer. In 2019 Burhans was named Young Champion of the Earth by the United Nations. In 2018 she was elected to the Ashoka Fellowship for her innovations in applying new technology to help the Catholic Church respond to climate change.
She has participated in the Vatican Youth Symposium, the Vatican Arts and Technology Council, and the United Nations Youth Assembly and has been an invited speaker around the world, including at Harvard University, Yale University, and the Pontifical Academy of Sciences.
Her work has been covered extensively in media, including the New Yorker, the Boston Globe, Forbes, Wired (Italy), Curbed, and Landscape Architecture Magazine, serving as an amplifying voice for the role of faith-based institutions in regenerative land-use and management around the world.
She holds a MS degree in Ecological Design from the Conway School and BA in Philosophy from Canisius College.
Artivist and Gangsta Gardener
Most widely known as the “Gangsta Gardener,” Ron Finley inadvertently started a horti-cultural revolution when he transformed the barren parkway in front of his South Central L.A. home into an edible oasis. Ron unexpectedly became one of L.A.’s most widely known artivists.
Frustrated by his community’s lack of access to fresh, organic food, Finley started a revolution when he turned the parkway in front of his home into an edible garden in 2010. Ron’s goal was simple: bring healthy food to an area where there was none, making him see first-hand how gardens build community and change people’s lives. This experience blossomed into a quest to change how we eat and to teach youth that they have the capacity to design their own lives.
Based in LA, Ron is now working on The Ron Finley Project, speaking at global conferences and in classrooms. He is currently on the Curatorial Team of the Destination Crenshaw project, a 1.3-mile-long outdoor art and cultural experience celebrating Black Los Angeles. He was also selected as one of the national artists for the Public Art Challenge Fertile Ground Project by Bloomberg Philanthropies in Jackson, Mississippi.
