ESRAG - the Environmental Sustainability Rotary Action Group
Dec 03, 2021 12:15 PM
Karen Kendrick-Hands, Rotarian from Wisconsin@ICC
ESRAG - the Environmental Sustainability Rotary Action Group

This will be an in-person meeting held at the ICC. The speaker will address our club via Zoom link.

Karen Kendrick-Hands, a member of the Rotary Club of Madison, WI, USA, D6250 since 2012, co-founded the Environmental Sustainability Rotary Action Group (ESRAG), to synergize her passions for Rotary Service, protecting the environment and mitigating climate change by providing a way for like-minded Rotarians to collaborate. She has served as ESRAG’s Chair, Director of Communications, and Director of Projects.  She is a member of Rotary International’s delegation to COP26, the UNFCCC climate talks in Glasgow, Scotland, November 2021, and also attended COP24, as RI’s first observer delegate in December 2018. In February 2020, Karen presented to the Rotary Foundation’s Environmental Issues Task Force, on behalf of ESRAG.  Rotary International’s Directors and the Trustees of the Rotary Foundation accepted the Taskforce report unanimously and have created a seventh Area of Focus: Protecting the Environment. 

Karen is active with the Wisconsin Chapter of the Citizens’ Climate Lobby and is the Co-leader of its Rotary Action Team.  When active as an attorney, Karen worked as a volunteer public interest advocate for cleaner air and mobility and transportation choices, including serving on various local, state and regional advisory bodies, for over 30 years.  

Karen is blessed to have been a Rotary Youth Exchange student in 1967-68 to Australia. Karen and her husband Larry Hands, also a Rotarian and ESRAG Board member, have been married for 47 years, and have two married sons and three grandchildren. Together they have built a carbon-neutral home and are restoring prairie and savanna habitat on 80 acres in southwest Wisconsin, USA.