David Foster is the executive director of the Blue Green Alliance, the fast-growing national partnership between labor unions and environmental organizations dedicated to expanding the number and quality of jobs in the green economy.

Foster sits on the Advisory Committee of the Alliance for Climate Protection, chaired by former Vice President Al Gore. He is also co-chair, with Mayors R.T. Rybak of Minneapolis and Christopher B. Coleman of Saint Paul, of the Mayors' Initiative on Green Manufacturing. Foster serves as adjunct faculty at the Carlson School of Management at the University of Minnesota, teaching on the challenges to industrial unions in the global economy. He has also taught in the Masters in Advocacy and Public Policy at the University of Minnesota-Duluth.

From 1989-2006, Foster served as Director of United Steelworkers District 11, a 13-state region spanning from Minnesota to Washington State and Alaska. The district's diverse membership of 43,000 includes iron ore and other mineral miners, steel, aluminum, tire, oil and gas workers, and health-care employees. From 1990-2006, he served on USW's International Executive Board governing union affairs in the U.S. and Canada. His responsibilities included negotiating with many of the country's largest steel, iron ore and aluminum companies.

For the past 20 years, Foster has been among the labor movement's leading environmental advocates. He was chair of the USW's International Executive Board task force on environmental policy and he has vigorously worked to bridge the divide between workers and environmentalists in the Northwest and throughout the U.S. In 2008, David Foster was one of two inaugural winners of the Peter A. A. Berle Environmental Integrity Award, along NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies Director James E. Hansen, recognizing demonstrated courage and integrity in defense of the environment by public officials and private citizens in the United States. In 2004, Foster was awarded the Jane Lehman Bagley Award from the Tides Foundation for his work building labor-environmental coalitions in the United States.

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