JOHN ACKERLY

Title: Board Member

John Ackerly founded the Alliance for Green Heat in 2009 to promote next generation wood and pellet stoves as a replacement for fossil fuels in American homes. Funded by the Department of Energy, NY state and other, the group held a series of Wood Heat Design Challenge, a competition to automate the wood stove, so that wood heat could be an affordable and far cleaner energy solution for low- and middle-income households outside of urban areas. a on renewable heating. In 2021, the group began partnering with the US Forest Service to fund firewood banks which like food banks, serve low-income and tribal communities nationwide. More information is at www.forgreenheat.org.

Ackerly was the President of the International Campaign for Tibet for 10 years and worked for ICT for a total of 21 years. He wrote many reports on Tibet, including: Forbidden Freedom: Beijing’s Control of Religion in Tibet; The Suppression of a People: Accounts of Torture and Imprisonment in Tibet; Nuclear Tibet: Nuclear Weapons and Nuclear Waste on the Tibetan Plateau; A Season to Purge: Religious Repression in Tibet, and Jampa: The Story of Racism in Tibet.

He worked closely with the U.S. Congress and United Nations bodies to address the crisis in Tibet and conducted 5 fact-finding trips to Tibet to investigate conditions. Mr. Ackerly attended Dartmouth College and the Washington College of Law and researched the Romanian dissident movement at the University of Bucharest from 1978-1980. Prior to joining ICT, John practiced civil rights law in a private firm in Mississippi that worked on cases for the Center for Constitutional Rights.