Summits & Horizons
October 30, 2025 @ 5:30PM — 8:30PM Eastern Time (US & Canada) Add to Calendar
Memorial Hall : 1225 Elm St Cincinnati, OH 45202 Get Directions
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Join Adventure Crew for our signature fall fundraiser!
Carolyn Finney is a storyteller, author and a cultural geographer who is passionate about interrogating our past and dreaming a future that is liberatory, just and green.
Join us for an inspiring evening with Dr. Finney at Memorial Hall! She'll give the keynote speech at Summits & Horizons, our signature fall fundraiser, which will also feature Adventure Crew teens sharing stories about their adventures.
Event schedule:
5:00 p.m. Early admission for Speaker Social ticket holders for meet and greet with Carolyn Finney
5:30 p.m. Social hour, with heavy appetizers and drinks, for Speaker Social and Ballroom ticket holders
6:30 p.m. Program begins:
-- Adventure Crew presentation, including student stories
-- Keynote by Carolyn Finney
-- Paddle raise auction
More about Carolyn Finney:
Dr. Finney is grounded in both artistic and intellectual ways of knowing – she pursued an acting career for eleven years, but five years of backpacking trips through Africa and Asia and living in Nepal changed the course of her life. Motivated by these experiences, Carolyn returned to school after a 15-year absence to complete a B.A., M.A. (gender and environmental issues in Kenya and Nepal), and a Ph.D. in Geography at Clark University (where she was a Fulbright and a Canon National Science Scholar Fellow). Along with public speaking (nationally & internationally), writing, media engagements, consulting & teaching (she has held positions at Wellesley College, the University of California, Berkeley & the University of Kentucky), she served on the U.S. National Parks Advisory Board for eight years under the Obama Administration. Her first book, Black Faces, White Spaces: Reimagining the Relationship of African Americans to the Great Outdoors was released in 2014.
She is currently working on her new book (creative non-fiction) that takes a more personal journey into the very complicated relationship between race, land & belonging in the United States, and a performance piece entitled The N Word: Nature Revisited as part of an Andrew W. Mellon residency at the New York Botanical Gardens Humanities Institute. She is involved with a number of documentary film projects; her family’s story appears in the HBO documentary, Trees and Other Entanglements in Fall of 2023 (Vermilion Films). She recently completed a three-year stint as a columnist at the Earth Island Journal and was awarded the Alexander and Ilse Melamid Medal from the American Geographical Society in 2022. Carolyn is currently a scholar/artist-in-residence in the Franklin Environmental Center at Middlebury College.