Steve Chase, PhD

Director of Environmental Advocacy Program

Department of Environmental Studies

AUNE Contact Information

603.283.2336
schase@antioch.edu

Highest Degree

PhD, Antioch University New England

Other Degrees & Credentials

MS, Antioch University New England

Overview

Steve Chase directs the master's program in Environmental Advocacy and Organizing--the only existing graduate ES program in the country specifically tailored to the training needs of public interest advocates and community organizers. Taking a broad view of environmental politics, the program addresses the overlapping issues of ecological sustainability, social justice, and democratic control over corporations.

“I founded this one-of-a-kind graduate program to train effective public interest advocates and organizers who would work for wilderness protection, public health, and sustainability — as well as peace, social justice, and democratic control over corporations. History repeatedly shows that well-trained activists build stronger, more successful social change movements.”

In support of his three year effort to create the Environmental Advocacy and Organizing Program, which welcomed its first cohort of students in Fall 2002, Steve received a Switzer Foundation Environmental Fellowship Award in 2000 and a Switzer Environmental Leadership Grant in 2002. In 2003, he was named an Ella Baker Fellow, a new fellowship program inspired by Ella Baker, the associate of Dr. Martin Luther King who founded the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in the 1960s.

Steve currently teaches courses in Patterns of Environmental Activism; Corporate Power, Globalization, and Democracy; Organizing Social Movements and Campaigns; Nonprofit Leadership and Management; and a ten-day field studies course on Environmental Justice Along the Mississippi. He also supervises student practica in the Spring and Summer. Steve is the author of the dissertation Activist Training in the Academy: Developing a Master's Program in Environmental Advocacy and Organizing and he edits the EAOP's "Well-Trained Activist" blog. He is also the national coordinator of Antioch New England's faculty interest group on activism and organizer training.

Steve also gave a well-received keynote address at a national conference on Psychology-Ecology-Sustainability at Lewis and Clark College in early June 2007. Picking up on a phrase from Martin Luther King's 1967 speech to the American Psychological Association, Steve's talk is entitled "Creative Maladjustment: Activism as a Way to Heal Self, Society, and Planet." Among other things, the talk includes a section on the learning needs of sustainability activists.

Steve has three grown children and lives with his wife Katy in Keene, New Hampshire. He is very active with the Putney Friends Meeting (a Quaker congregation) in nearby Vermont and is the author of an essay entitled "Following the Way of Jesus: A Quaker Challenge to Imperial Christianity." Whenever he gets a chance, he's out hiking in New Hampshire's White Mountains.

Last Updated: 3/3/10