From the Ground Up A Call to Reimagine Our Place in Nature
43rd Annual Smith Nature Symposium Awards Dinner
Amy Morrison Heinrich, Honorary Chair &
Elizabeth Pruett, Chair
Honoring 2026 Environmental Leadership Award Recipient
KARENNA GORE
Author, Climate Activist, and Founder of the Center for Earth Ethics
SATURDAY, OCTOBER 10, 2026
6:00 PM
CHICAGO BOTANIC GARDEN
1000 Lake Cook Rd, Glencoe, IL
Join our movement for change! The Smith Nature Awards Dinner is Brushwood Center’s largest fundraising event of the year, and all funds raised from the evening directly benefit our programs for youth, families, and Veterans across our community.
Host Committee
Sponsorship
Our Sponsors
Thank you to our 2026 Sponsors
in formation
PREMIER
Shelby and Elizabeth Pruett
The Butler Family Foundation
COLLABORATOR
Kay Butler
STAR
Digital Pollen
Become a Sponsor
SPECIAL SPONSOR BENEFITS:
- Directly support programs in our community for youth, families, seniors, and Veterans.
- Name recognition opportunities on Brushwood website, social media, and materials.
- Brushwood Brunch with Karenna Gore at The Glen Rowan House at Lake Forest College.
- Celebrate at the in-person Awards Dinner honoring author, climate activist, and founder of the Center for Earth Ethics, Karenna Gore
- Join a community of supporters committed to a thriving and equitable world for people and nature.
For more information about sponsorship opportunities, please contact Mirja Spooner Haffner, Director of Development, at mspoonerhaffner@brushwoodcenter.org
Karenna Gore
Karenna Gore is the founder and executive director of the Center for Earth Ethics and teaching professor of practice of earth ethics at Union Theological Seminary in New York. Karenna formed CEE in 2015 to address the moral and spiritual dimensions of the climate crisis. Working at the intersection of faith, ethics, and ecology, she guides the Center’s public programs, educational initiatives, and movement-building. She is an adjunct faculty member at the Columbia Climate School.
Karenna is the author of Lighting the Way: Nine Women Who Changed Modern America (2006), and has written for numerous publications, including Slate, El Pais (Spain) and the New York Times. She serves on the boards of the Association to Benefit Children and Riverkeeper, an organization that protects and restores the Hudson River and safeguards drinking water. She is also an expert in the United Nations’ Harmony with Nature Knowledge Network, an online platform of practitioners, academics, and researchers.
Center for Earth Ethics
The Center for Earth Ethics works to change the dominant value system from one based on short-term material gain—no matter the pollution, depletion and inequity that result—to one based on the long-term health of the whole community of life. They work through education, convening and advocacy to raise public consciousness as well as to shift policy and culture.
They connect individuals and groups through four areas of focus: sustainability and global affairs; environmental and climate justice; Indigenous wisdom, values and rights; and ecology, spirituality and faith. They use their unique convening capacity to tackle pressing issues, not only to speak truth to power but also to amplify the voices of those building a different kind of power, often along the margins.
History of the Smith Nature Symposium
On May 6, 1984, more than 350 people gathered for the first Smith Nature Symposium featuring Roger Tory Peterson. Organized under the leadership of Barbi Donnelley, Symposium Co-Chair, this jam-packed convening of nature-lovers became the first of four decades of annual Symposia memorializing the significant civic legacy of Hermon Dunlap and Ellen Thorne Smith, who donated their land and cabin to help form Ryerson Woods.
Hermon, or Dutch, was chair and CEO of Marsh & McLennan, and led The Chicago Community Trust, Newberry Library, and many other Chicago Institutions. Ellen was a philanthropic leader and champion of nature with organizations such as The Field Museum and Chicago Zoological Society.
For more than forty years, the Smith Nature Symposium has brought people together to celebrate nature and imagine healthy and thriving human and ecological communities.
