Speakers
Kim Lutz
Kimberly A. Lutz (Kim) is the Executive Director of America’s Watershed Initiative (AWI), a collaboration working with hundreds of businesses, government, academic, and civic organizations to find solutions to the challenges facing the Mississippi River and the more than 250 rivers thatflow into it. Formed in 2010, AWI engages leaders throughout the watershed with a diversity ofperspectives and sectors including conservation, navigation, agriculture, flood control and risk reduction, industry, academics, basin associations, local, state, and federal government agencies. In 2015, AWI published the first Mississippi River Watershed Report Card, designed to provide decision makers, watershed leaders and the public with easy-to-understand information about the state of the watershed’s health to aid them in developing a collaborative approach to managing America’s Watershed. A second report card will be published in December 2020.
Lutz joins AWI from The Nature Conservancy, where she initiated and successfully led two multistate watershed programs along the Savannah and Connecticut Rivers. Under her leadership, these programs improved river flows, restored large-scale floodplain forests, protected more than 6,000 acres, and achieved a significant refuge expansion. She was a founding member and former chair ofthe Friends of the Silvio O. Conte Refuge, a 70-member partner organization and multi-statewatershed coalition where she helped successfully build congressional relationships that resulted in $23 million in federal funding for the Connecticut River Watershed. She also served in the U.S. Department of the Interior, working directly for the Senior Advisor to the Secretary to develop anational program for protecting and restoring nationally significant rivers and associated watersheds. Lutz was also selected to participate in several leadership opportunities. In 2015-2016, she joined fellow conservation leaders in Massachusetts in a US State Department, Bureau of Education and Cultural Affairs program where she mentored emerging environmental leaders from Peru, Uruguay,and Mexico. She was also selected as a Global Sawhill Fellow, a senior leadership program of The Nature Conservancy. As part of this program, Lutz and her team developed the Conservancy’s first affinity group, Women in Nature (WIN), and established diversity and inclusion criteria for all managers.
Lutz obtained her Bachelor of Arts Degree from Wittenberg University in Springfield, Ohio in 1982 where she majored in Biology and Psychology. In 1987, she graduated from the University of Cincinnati with a Master of Science Degree in Biology. Her thesis research explored prairie restoration and resulted in a restoration plan for a county park. Lutz and her husband John, a non-profit leader in Elder Care, have two adult children. She has also been an active community volunteer, serving in leadership positions at her children’s schools, and with their church.