Friend, alumna and Sustainer of Rockwood, Annie Leonard, appears on The Colbert Report and teaches Stephen a thing or two.

The Sierra Club, the largest and oldest environmental advocacy group in the nation, has named Rockwood Alum, Michael Brune, its next executive director. A longtime environmental organizer who has headed the Rainforest Action Network for the last seven years, Brune will succeed Carl Pope in March.

Featured on the cover of the latest Yes! Magazine is Climate Hero and Rockwood Alumna, Phaedra Ellis-Lamkins. In March 2009 Phaedra, a graduate of Rockwood's Leading from the Inside Out class of 2005, became the Chief Executive Officer of Green for All, a national organization working to build an inclusive green economy strong enough to lift people out of poverty. Read more about Phaedra, as well as articles from other Rockwood alumnae/i including Annie Leonard, Rob Biko Baker and Colin Beavan at Yes!'s website.

Rockwood is proud to celebrate Chellie Pingree, a graduate of Rockwood's Leading from the Inside Out Yearlong Fellowship and the elected representative to Congress from Maine's first district. Her election in 2008 marked the first time a woman was elected to Congress from that district and, for the first time in American History, that a state’s Congressional Delegation was comprised with a female majority.

Recent Leading from the Inside Out grad, Kristin Rowe-Finkbeiner knows that women's happiness has nothing to do with a dead deer on the table. Read more about her thoughts on the matter with her front-page entry for the popular website, The Huffington Post.

Earlier this month, recent graduate of Rockwood's yearlong fellowship, Leading from the Inside Out, Sharon Lettman was named Executive Director of the National Black Justice Coalition. Based in Washington DC, NBJC is a civil rights organization dedicated to empowering Black lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people and ending racism and homophobia. Sharon succeeds another Rockwood alumnus, Alexander Robinson, who skillfully guided NBJC for five years.

Every spring National People's Action brings hundreds of community organizers and grassroots leaders from across the country to Washington for its annual conference. And every year the event culminates in a hotly anticipated and meticulously planned direct action.

The thick-lined drawings of the Earth, a factory and a house, meant to convey the cycle of human consumption, are straightforward and child-friendly. So are the pictures of dark puffs of factory smoke and an outlined skull and crossbones, representing polluting chemicals floating in the air.

When Van Jones was tapped to serve as special adviser on green jobs at the White House Council on Environmental Quality earlier this year, the appointment was heralded as a significant development for the green movement. And for good reason. A pioneer in fusing economic opportunity and social justice with environmentalism, Jones, 40, represents an important progression in our country's perception and thus our approach to combatting global warming.

A special report on the eco-pioneers fighting for a cleaner, greener future.

In just over a decade, Ms. Carter, 42, has vaulted from working as a volunteer for what was a nascent organization called the Point Community Development Corporation and knowing almost nothing about environmental issues to becoming a nationally known advocate for environmental justice.

In just 10 years, the tiny Working Families Party has built a reputation for pulling off upset victories in low-turnout primaries and special elections, one or two at a time. Now, however, in a presidential election year, and with the Senate’s Republican majority endangered for the first time in decades, the party is putting its record on the line in half a dozen races from Ronkonkoma to Rochester.

From 2002-2003 the Oakland police department made 218 arrests of Sex workers. The epidemic of sex work in the bay area is not new but there is a push towards changing the policies that effect how sexually exploited minors are treated. At the head of this movement is Elizabeth Sy -- Director of Banteay Srei at the East Bay Asian Youth Center a 26 year old first generation cambodian woman who recently won a Rising Peace Maker Prize for her work with young women involved in the sex trade. YO! Recently talked with Sy and found out what steps she feels must be taken for sexually exploited minors.

Billy Wimsatt founded The League of Young Voters in 2003 to organize and empower youth – particularly young people from low-income communities who haven’t attended college.

Adrienne Maree Brown is the head of The Ruckus Society, an institute that has trained social justice organizers for more than a decade. A writer, singer and organizer, Brown was also a founder of the League of Young Voters and the co-editor of How to Get Stupid White Men Out of Office.

"Not being bold is sometimes too awful to imagine,” says Katie Redford. She should know. Katie’s career as a human rights lawyer is a combination of the boldest elements. It started in a small village near the border of Thailand and Burma, where she volunteered as an English teacher directly after college. It was an experience that changed this champion athlete from Massachusetts forever.