Roger Rivera, Chair

Roger Rivera is the President and Founder of the National Hispanic Environmental Council, a national, non-profit, membership-based organization established in 1996 and based in Alexandria, VA, near Washington, D.C. With over 5,000 members, NHEC is the only national Latino environmental and natural resource organization in the country.

NHEC seeks to educate, empower, and engage Latinos on environmental and sustainable development issues; provide a national voice for Latinos before federal, state, and non-profit environmental decision-makers; and actively assist Latinos to pursue the many career, educational, policy, and business opportunities in the environmental and natural resources field. NHEC operates under the credo: "...because it's our environment too".

NHEC is both an advocacy and a programmatic organization. Some of NHEC's programs include our policy work on a variety of environmental justice and other issues; our Annual Conference and Career Fair, which is the pre-eminent national recruitment and networking event for Latino environmental college students and professionals; our "Minority Youth Environmental Training Institutes", which trains the next generation of Latino/minority teens in an intensive 10 day environmental education program in New Mexico; as well as regional Institutes in New York City, S. California, and Washington D.C; our "High School Environmental Career Awareness Program", a national program at selected high schools across the country; our on-going Latino outreach effort with the California Wild Heritage Campaign, which is building support in CA for preserving as wilderness some of the last, pristine, special places remaining in that state; our "Latino Hiking Club national program, which takes Latinos families and youth to the outdoors; and our policy and other work on climate change, including our "Latino Leadership Briefings On Global Warming", and more.

From 1988 to 2001 Mr. Rivera was the President of Roger Rivera and Associates, a public affairs firm in Washington, D.C. His firm provided public affairs, government relations, fundraising, and conference management services to a wide variety of clients, in particular national minority organizations. During this time, Mr. Rivera was also a political consultant to a number of Democratic national/state/local candidates, and has served as staff or as a consultant on every Presidential campaign from 1988 to 2004. For example, Mr. Rivera was the New York State Director for the Clinton-Gore Campaign in 1996, and in 2004 (while on leave from NHEC) was the Eastern Pennsylvania GOTV/Latino Coordinator for Kerry-Edwards.

Mr. Rivera has served on a number of federal advisory committees, including the U.S. Forest Services's "National Urban and Community Forestry Advisory Council", the U.S. Dept. of Energy's Hispanic Advisory Task Force, and on the Governing Board of the California Wild Heritage Campaign.

Mr. Rivera was born and raised in New York City, and received his B.A. in Political Science from the State University of New York at Stony Brook. He received his Masters in Public Administration from American University in 1983. Mr. Rivera and his wife Amy live in Alexandria, VA, outside Washington, D.C.