Catherine Coleman Flowers is the founder of the Alabama Center for Rural Enterprise Community Development Corporation (ACRE). ACRE seeks to address the root causes of rural poverty. She also serves as the rural development manager for the Equal Justice Initiative and as director of Environmental Justice and Civic Engagement for the Center for Earth Ethics at Union Theological Seminary. In addition, she serves as Duke University’s Franklin Humanities Institute practitioner in residence. Her goal is to expose the Third World conditions where rural people live amongst raw sewage. She has characterized this as “America’s Dirty Secret.” Flowers has a master’s degree in history and recently coauthored a peer-reviewed study with scientists from Baylor’s National School of Tropical Medicine that exposed evidence of hookworm and other tropical parasites in the United States.