ELP News: Organizational Update
From the Executive Director, Paul Sabin
The seeds we have sown over the past five years at ELP are bursting into a dazzling bloom of activity by the 110 talented ELP fellows now in our ELP community. At the same time, ELP is expanding through regional programming, starting with the success of our first Regional Network in Philadelphia.
An important new development in ELP's work over the past year, Regional Networks enable us to build on the national fellowship to serve a broader constituency of emerging environmental leaders and spark new ideas and solutions to pressing environmental problems in regions across the country. Emerging leaders in each region we target will be selected as ELP Associates to receive leadership development and skill training and connect to a unique diverse community. As our successful Philadelphia Regional Network six-month pilot project comes to a close, we're looking ahead toward additional support for ongoing Philly work, as well as creating new regional networks in metropolitan areas across the U.S.
Even as ELP expands, we continue to cultivate national leaders through our flagship Fellowship Program. In recent months, many ELP fellows have moved into new leadership positions in their professional lives, where they can put into practice what they've learned through ELP. Pegeen Hanrahan was elected mayor of Gainesville, FL in March on a smart growth and new urbanism platform, and will begin her three-year term on May 20. Renee Hoyos was appointed executive director of the Tennessee Clean Water Network, a statewide advocacy organization. And Cassandra Carmichael recently became the new eco-justice program director at the National Council of Churches, a connection she made while implementing her Activity Fund project. Cassandra already has initiated a new eco-justice fellowship program, modeled on the ELP fellowship, to reach 20 emerging leaders working on faith and environmental issues.
ELP fellows have made creative use of the ELP Activity Fund in the past year to develop personal leadership skills in a way that enables them to accomplish tangible environmental goals. Swati Prakash attended communications training last year to develop her skills working with the popular media. This training helped Swati garner four TV news stories on her urban public health work. Swati also wrote an op-ed for New York Newsday and, with ELP fellow Julie Sze, published an article on genetics research and communities of color in Environmental Health Perspectives magazine. Richard Cudney Bueno is producing a video documenting small-scale hookah diving fisheries in the northern Gulf of California, Mexico. The community-based management and conservation efforts undertaken by the divers, which Richard has helped facilitate, recently won Mexico's prestigious National Conservation Award.
With two classes of senior fellows, we have begun to focus more resources on developing a lively Senior Fellows Network, including a new internal peer mentoring program and our first Senior Fellows Gathering, to be held on October 14-17, 2004 in West Virginia. Senior fellows also have become an integral part of ELP's fellowship program. Four senior fellows have joined ELP's board of trustees, and many others have served in the past year on the Activity Fund awards committee and fellow selection committee.
Other ELP initiatives beyond the fellowship program also continue to grow. The Environmental Leadership Collaborative, coordinated by ELP, is publishing a State of Environmental Leadership Development Report this spring. The report compiles information about collective lessons learned, and strategies used, by the environmental leadership organizations that participate in the Collaborative. The report also will discuss the need for additional investment in environmental leadership development.
We also expect to publish the ELP Diversity Storybook and Resource Guide in the next few months. The publication will help catalyze discussion and action in the environmental field by using the power of stories to convey personal and professional experiences with diversity. The diversity storybook will feature essays by the ELP community to raise awareness of how people working in the environmental field are affected by racism and ethnic prejudice, as well as other forms of social discrimination. The resource guide will include profiles of other environmental diversity initiatives.
We are particularly grateful to the Barr Foundation, Geraldine Dodge Foundation, National Fish and Wildlife Foundation, Prospect Hill Foundation, V. Kann Rasmussen Foundation, and Surdna Foundation, which made new grants in the past six months to support ELP's work. We also thank the many people who helped ELP double gifts from individuals last year for the third year in a row, to more than $100,000. As we work to nearly double that support again in 2004, we thank you for your commitment to developing a vibrant and diverse community of environmental leaders for the future.
|
