"I've Known Ancient Rivers"- Rivers as the gateway to freedom
Upcoming conference presentation: Slave Dwelling Project
Conference Bio: Sharon E, Richardson, MPA, mother of 3 daughters born in SC, combines a heart centered approach to executive leadership with her cognitive, collaborative and intuitive healing gifts to embody a resilient mindset.
Her hope is to promote a greater appreciation for the river corridors, as a living system.
Sharon promotes a collective pride of cultural heritage as a conscious act of understanding the good, bad and ugly of our shared relationships with the natural landscapes, especially the Lowcountry Rivers.
Mission driven by truth and transparency, she identifies as a Cultural Conservation Strategist, Author, Speaker, Educator, Nature Based Solution Advocate, Impact Investment Advisor, Community Capacity Thought Leader.
With 30 years of case studies, funding innovative solutions and driving landowner/community engagement to permanently protet and/or restore over 35,000 acres of culturally complex and ecologically rich lands, including hundreds of miles of stream and river corridors.
Speaker at the ASLA Landscape Architecture National Convention: “Heavy Lifting, How Conservation Lands Can Embed Climate Resiliency at the Regional Scale”.
She collaborates with State and Local leadership and community groups, to identify and green Infrastructure opportunities to drive more inclusive professional development opportunities.
From a spiritual perspective, she holds a deep understanding of systemic and generational trauma of the many under-resourced and disadvantaged descendent communities, often pushed to living in the margins of historic floodplains. Professionally, the landscapes she works in have deep histories often related to pre-Revolutionary Colonization Imperial Strategy.
The Ashley, Combahee, Ashepoo, Savannah, Edisto and other rivers weave those stories together. Her experience in Beaufort as the Long Range Planner in 1995, afforded her the opportunity to drive an inclusive community engagement process for SC’s first comprehensive plan including being active in the Penn Center Sea Island Initiative with Sea Island elders.
She successfully implemented the State’s first River Overlay Buffer Ordinance, protecting the expansive marshes and creeks of the St. Helena Sound, to benefit the Gullah Geechee heritage and connection to healthy waterways.
Co-authored: Brabec, Elizabeth and Richardson, Sharon, "A Clash of Cultures The Landscape of the Sea Island Gullah" (2007). Landscape Journal. 48. https://scholarworks.umass.edu/larp_faculty_pubs/48.
Authored Chapter 12, in Protecting the Land: Conservation Easements Past, Present, and Future , Julie Ann Gustanski and Roderick H. Squires, editors, Island Press, 2000.
A long time advocate for environmental and social equity and gender justice, she focuses on landowners and communities in high priority river watersheds and floodplain communities, to understand and remove barriers to investment in green infrastructure and incentivized solutions that benefit the greater public good
Moving “Resiliency Beyond the Rhetoric” and into action and empowerment.
The SC legacy of her daughter’s births bind her maternal tenacity with her professional passion: protecting the river corridors and the stories of the people who have lived because of the rivers, from the indigenous, to the formerly enslaved, to present day communities. All to build healthy bridges for cultural pride and heritage with improved equity and justice of future generations.