Valerie Baron

As Senior Director of Technical Assistance at the Environmental Protection Network, Valerie leads EPN’s national technical assistance strategy and the team that works with EPN volunteers to support frontline communities, NGOs, and under-resourced state, local, and tribal agencies.

Valerie is an environmental attorney and policy leader with more than 15 years of experience in environmental justice, public health, and public policy. She comes to EPN from the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), where she worked for more than a decade. Most recently, she served as National Policy Director and Senior Attorney for NRDC’s Safe Water Initiative. In that role, she led efforts across several priority states to strengthen drinking water protections and ensure equitable lead service line replacement. She also partnered closely with frontline communities and advised city, state, and federal officials on implementation of the Safe Drinking Water Act. Before that, as National Policy Director of NRDC’s People & Communities Program, she led advocacy across issues impacting the built environment, including climate, housing, transportation, and environmental health. She first joined NRDC as an Equal Justice Works Fellow supporting frontline communities fighting environmental injustice in the food system.

Earlier in her career, Valerie was an attorney at the Environmental Integrity Project and a staffer on the U.S. House Energy and Commerce Committee. In Washington, DC, she was elected an Advisory Neighborhood Commissioner, where she successfully advocated for transportation and housing initiatives and spearheaded an effort to create the first program in many years to remove dangerous lead pipes. She was later appointed by the DC Council to its Lead Service Line Replacement Task Force and to the DC Water Stakeholder Alliance, on which she still serves. She has appeared as an expert in the media and before legislative and executive bodies. She was featured in Netflix’s You Are What You Eat and has been quoted in The Washington Post and on CBS News.

Valerie holds a J.D. from the University of Pennsylvania Law School, where she was a Toll Public Interest Scholar; a Master of Environmental Studies from the University of Pennsylvania; and a B.A. from Oberlin College.