Board Member
Olin M. Ivey Ph.D.
omivey@juno.com
P.O. Box 5155
Chattanooga TN 37406
423. 645.5045
The
life scope of Olin Ivey has involved many ventures: educational
administration and instruction
from pre-school through seminary and graduate professorships;
missional involvement, from Cuba to Mexico to Costa Rica; author and
editor of several books and numerous articles (both print and web);
local church pastor (inner city [NY City], suburban [California],
small town [Georgia & Tennessee]); broadcaster (WLBB, WGFS,
WABC,
KWOW, WDOD); and environmental / sustainability advocate. He is an
ordained minister of the United Methodist Church.
In
addition to being a Director of the Urban Century Institute, Ivey
currently serves as a Board member of EarthCare, Chair of the Justice
Committee of the Alabama-Tennessee Association of the United Church
of Christ (UCC), and a member of the Steering Committee of the
National Religious Coalition of Creation Care. He is President of
VIVA Sustainable Systems, LLC, which is developing a biofuel process
that generates fuels, fertilizers, and other from residues and wastes
in environmentally sound ways.
As
Executive Director of the Georgia Environmental Organization for most
of the 1990s, Ivey initiated
the discussion of sustainability in Georgia in 1993 with the first
state-wide gathering at the Georgia World Congress Center. He held a
series of conferences and consultations on sustainability throughout
the remainder of that decade. He served on task forces and working
groups of the President's
Council on Sustainable Development (Clinton Administration), was on
the executive committee
of two other national sustainability groups, and envisioned &
edited
Georgians
on
that included reflections on sustainability by a number of leaders
throughout Georgia.
Olin
has worked in Tennessee since 1999. In 2004 he developed and
coordinated two conferences:the
statewide
Threshold:
Sustaining a Land Called Tennessee
(first statewide conference on sustainability in Tennessee) and
JustWater,
an environmental justice conference for the Alabama-Tennessee
Association of the United Church of Christ. His on-line resource
guide,
Eco-Management
of Church Facilities,
is
used by churches around the world.
Ivey
is working on the book,
Beyond
the Threshold: Sustainability in a Land Called Tennessee,
similar to the one produced in Georgia. He is a founding member of
The Tennessee Higher Education Sustain-ability
Association (THESA). A member of the national Roundtable on
Sustainable Forests, he initiated
its Action Group on Urban Forestry.
He
lives in the urban neighborhood of Glenwood
in Chattanooga, Tennessee where he is
an officer of the Glenwood Neighborhood
Association and a member of the revitalization committee. Ivey
continues
to hold in creative tension the micro and macro aspects of
sustainability. Each
perspective, he believes, informs the other. Neither perspective can
be realistic without the insights from the other.
Ivey
attended Oxford College of Emory University for the first two years
of his college career. His undergraduate degree was received from
East Tennessee State University. He holds two Master's degrees from
Drew University (M.Div. & S.T.M.) in Madison, New Jersey. His
M.A. and Ph.D. are from Claremont Graduate University in Claremont,
California.
