ITHACA, N.Y. -- Aiming to help resolve economic development, community health and other local issues, the Community Development Society, a national organization for community development professionals, will hold its 35th annual conference at Cornell University, July 20-23.

The conference will feature a July 21 keynote address by the Rev. Calvin O. Butts III, pastor of the Abyssinian Baptist Church in New York City and president of The College at Old Westbury, Long Island. Butts will speak at 9 a.m. in the David L. Call Auditorium of Kennedy Hall.

Butts has been involved in community development initiatives through his church, as well as academic and professional boards. He works on combating homelessness, providing senior citizen and youth empowerment, raising cultural awareness and ecumenical outreach.

More than 400 community development leaders and professionals from across the nation are expected to attend the conference, which will feature workshops, seminars and research presentations. Professional development workshops will concentrate on intercultural communication, youth involvement in community development and community health.

The conference will include field trips to natural gorges in the area and to Cornell's Lake-Source Cooling facility, with a focus on quality of water and water usage. There also will be a tour of the Main Street Project, a revitalization program in Trumansburg, N.Y.

Conference sessions will cover topics such as building economic capacity in local communities, sustaining rural development, bolstering literacy education, improving universal access to housing and transportation, planning rural land use, developing mixed income communities, strengthening community integration and congregate housing for the mentally ill, and organizing communities for disaster response.

Cornell's Community and Rural Development Institute organized the conference, which also is being hosted by Cornell Cooperative Extension, and Cornell's College of Agriculture and Life Sciences and College of Human Ecology. Sponsors include: Fleet Bank, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia, Ohio State University, the New York State Energy Research Development Authority, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Nextel, and the Rural Policy Research Institute.

For further information, visit this Web site: http://www.cds2003.org.

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EDITORS: You and your reporters are invited to cover any part of the conference. For media credentials, please contact Blaine Friedlander, Cornell News Service, at (607) 255-3290.