Mary Ellingen, interview featured here, is a staff attorney at The Advocates for Human Rights in Minneapolis. Mary specializes in the Women's Program at The Advocates, and has done a lot of work in the area of domestic violence; the Women's Program has really made tracks in assisting countries with reforming their legal systems to better protect women in their private environments. In this interview she offers us some insight into her early feminist motivations that brought her here, as well as a number of unique challenges that women's issues and their advocates face.

Since 1995, many communities across the United States have begun or joined “Bucket Brigades,” programs that instruct communities near industrial polluters how to build and use simple air monitoring devices, or “buckets.”  In the absence of strong environmental laws, standards, or environmental enforcement bodies, buckets give communities the means to independently monitor the air quality of their neighborhoods and provide them with the evidence to affect environmental and industrial policy change.