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2008 Employee Recognition Award Recipients
Presented May 2, 2008, San Francisco
Behind the Scenes Hero: Ron Ranum
Ron is our Associate Director of Membership Development and has been with the over 14 years. He runs the renewals and reinstates programs and is the one responsible for influencing people to renew their memberships every year, as well as bringing people whose memberships have lapsed back to the Club.
His programs produce $17 million annually for the Club. Ron has improved the responsiveness while at the same time reducing the costs so that more money can go towards Sierra Club's programs and initiatives. He works tirelessly at the incremental details that are critical to a successful renewals program and is always looking for tests to run to see if they garner a better response or a higher dollar gift.
Ron is tireless in his efforts and genuinely cares about Sierra Club and takes pride in his ability to help Sierra Club achieve their goals. He doesn't bring attention to himself or this financially critical program; he just keeps doing a stellar job and is constantly looking for ways to improve his program. He is perfect as our Behind the Scenes Award winner.
Larry Mehlhaff Award for Excellence: Orli Cotel
Oril Cotel, our National Publicist in Media and Communications department, has taken our name recognition to a new level and revolutionized the Sierra Club's public image by developing new strategies, creative ideas, and programs, and building relationships with reporters at America's leading communications outlets - including newspapers, magazines, TV and radio stations and new media outlets like the blogs and I-tunes.
She developed popular phone trainings on everything from how to pitch stories to making TV-friendly events and she traveled across the country training others. She also developed and implemented the successful Mercury testing program, where women around the country, including columnists, tested themselves for Mercury and educated their friends about Mercury pollution and health.
Orli has radically increased the Sierra Club's coverage in top magazines and secured several stories in the New York Times Style section about green living.
She built a national NBC-TV relationship that gets The Club more than 60 nationwide hits every time we record a monthly segment with them. She has gotten the Club special opportunities with Oprah, CNN, the Today Show, Good Morning America, and even gave a nationally-televised Everglades Tour this Earth Day for the CBS network.
Her innovative "Green Holiday" tips generated hundreds of media hits and thousands of web hits for the Sierra Club at the end of last year. She has dramatically increased public awareness of articles and features in Sierra Magazine, Sierra Club Books and Sierra Club Productions. And in 2006, knowing nothing about producing or hosting a weekly radio program, she launched Sierra Club Radio where she connects the Sierra Club brand to celebrities and newsmakers as diverse as Alice Waters, Florida Governor Charlie Crist and the Bare Naked Ladies - and gets our name and work into ears and I -Pods of hundreds of thousands of people!
Mike McCloskey Award: Mariana Chew
As a single mother of two young girls, Mariana Chew Sanchez knew she had to do something about the toxic pollution coming from the ASARCO lead and copper smelter in El Paso, Texas. The plant is one of the largest producers of lead contamination on the border, having spewed arsenic, lead, and other contaminants into residential neighborhoods of El Paso--and its Mexican sister-city right across the border, Ciudad Juarez--for more than a hundred years.
Working with Sierra Club's Environmental Justice program, she began making connections throughout El Paso, bringing together other moms, Steelworkers, scientists, and residents to show the seriousness of the lead contamination problem and the need for ASARCO to clean up its act. Mariana's tireless efforts reached a huge victory when a state judge recommended that the ASARCO plant not receive a renewal on their permit to pollute.
Mariana's environmental justice efforts have helped keep the smelter closed in El Paso, and her international efforts are just as remarkable. Mariana literally put the Mexican communities suffering from ASARCO's pollution "on the map." When the 19th-century facility applied for its permit renewal to begin polluting again, they submitted with their application a map of the region from the 1920's. That map showed the smelter site, the El Paso community, the river on the border, and nothing else. Mexico - just a matter of yards from the smelter - was blank, implying that there were no people or sensitive lands there to consider. Having grown up in Ciudad Juárez, Mariana knew this was outrageous and set out to organize the Mexican communities to protect themselves from the smelter's health hazards.
Thanks to Mariana's work, the community's hopes of keeping the smelter closed forever are still alive. The contested case process for this permit has now gone on longer than any previous such case, thanks to Mariana's community-led efforts.
Virginia Ferguson Award: Lillian Miller
Lillian Miller is our Outreach System and Labels Desk manager. She has worked at the Club for many years helping volunteer leaders and activists to access their member and leader information, labels, political orders, update their leader lists and trouble-shoot any number of issues related to lack of knowledge about computers, lists, and permissions. She is has also been involved for a very long time in a transition in data access from MUIR to HELEN -- and been part of the change in a helpful and thoughtful way.
Lillian has helped serve as the volunteer interface - understanding their needs and concerns and then worked on a cross-functional project with a variety of stakeholders to create an entirely new system. She has been part of the design of training to transition, first staff and then volunteers to the new system. Lillian is responsive to the needs of volunteers and able to stay flexible and friendly in the face of change. Lillian's congenial attitude, extraordinary spirit, and unquestionable integrity makes her performance an inspiration to the rest of the staff.
Special Achievement Award: Owen Bailey
2007 was a tremendous year for the California coast and Sierra Club's current Associate Advancement Director for the Entertainment Industry and former BEC staff member, Owen Bailey, deserved a lot of the credit. Sierra Club played the lead role in orchestrating two major statewide victories for coastal protection and Owen played the lead role in both. His work organizing in Monterey County resulted in the protection of 17,000 threatened Monterey pine trees otherwise doomed to be chopped down for a golf course. His work organizing in Ventura County and Malibu, culminating in a historic and diverse turnout at a pair of critical hearings, stopped the planned construction of a massive and polluting Liquefied Natural Gas terminal off the coast.
Owen employed clear-headed, strategic thinking and plain old fashioned hard work to bring about the victories. Turning out members, generating media, educating decision makers and greatly expanding our network of supporters, Owen worked tirelessly for several years on both projects. In the LNG fight, he successfully worked to involve and energize the majority Latino community to participate and created a supporter base that was truly representative of the community. He inspired countless activists to get involved in the bread and butter activities that define grassroots success - phone banks, door knocks letters to the editor, etc. - and built relationships to help guide new activists to become experienced hands and established activists to become leaders. Owen's style is to lead activists by example and he is a wonderful representative of the Sierra Club.
20-YEAR EMPLOYEES
Congratulations to our colleagues who have each completed 20 years of service at the Sierra Club.
Chris Douglas
Chris began working with the Sierra Club back when there were only about 250 employees. In those days, the Club had no networks, everyone dialed-up to get email at about 50 letters/second, many staff did not even have computers, and the few laptops came from Radio Shack. Chris' role in providing IT support for both DC and the field has changed quite dramatically over the years, especially with the advent of the internet. The growth of staff and their reliance on technology has increased, making his role ever more important. Through all the changes, Chris' attention to detail and his focus on providing the best support possible has remained consistent. Everyone counts on Chris in moments of technologically-induced despair, and he can be trusted to help people get their jobs done. Outside the office, Chris is a dedicated dad and very involved with both Boy Scouts and his church community.
Lawson Legate
Lawson's 20 years with the Southwest Office is just a part of his Sierra Club career, which includes time in British Columbia and Oregon as an environmental activist and grassroots leader. Lawson adopted Utah's Red Rock wilderness and never looked back. He's been there doggedly seeing through the addition of new acres to the proposal, holding off proposed ORVs, roads, and oil and gas wells, and even seeing significant pieces of the vision receive permanent protection through wilderness and national monument designation. Lawson also oversees the highly successful campaign to save wetlands and bring energy efficient mass transit to Utah's Wasatch Front communities, and he has worked on developing the Club's campaigns for renewable energy solutions and environmental justice in New Mexico and El Paso. Although someone who can skillfully weave his way through the halls of Congress or the Utah Legislature, Lawson still seems most at home giving testimony in favor of saving the habitat of the Great Salt Lake while dressed in an eagle costume (and there is a picture of this).
Carl Zichella
Carl joined the staff of the Sierra Club in 1987 as the Associate Midwest Representative, later becoming the Regional Staff Director for the Midwest Region. Carl led our lobby efforts with the Midwest congressional delegation on energy, clean air, forest planning, wilderness and other public lands protection. He spearheaded our electoral work in the region including the campaigns of President Bill Clinton, Senator Feingold, Senator Wellstone among the many races he worked on. Carl took his energy and skills to the California in 2000 taking over the helm of the CA/NV/HI field region. Here Carl built a great team of folks and led our work to protect California Coasts, protect our wild areas, and make us a leader on advancing renewable, clean energy resources in the West. Carl takes special pride in his work to build good relationships and coalitions with the labor and Hispanic communities. Besides Carl's great smarts, organizing skills, and energy he brings an inimitable blend of the tough-guy New York construction worker and the Tibetan Buddhist meditating vegetarian to his work. This great blend of style and approach makes him a tremendous advocate and leader for the Sierra Club, and at the 20 year mark, is just getting started.
Martha Geering
Martha Geering is our beloved Art Director of Sierra magazine and Martha knows art--and how to use it to convey ideas. She can make a few columns of gray text into a splendid magazine feature article or a pile of dull statistics into a compelling info-graphic. She is alert to trends without becoming trendy. She understands the editorial as well as the art side of the business and can communicate with people of either persuasion. Every page of Sierra magazine reflects the vital, exuberant struggle between Martha's playful artistic adventurousness and her years of experience -- youthful risk-taking meets sage creative intuition. The designs that result are always first rate and frequently brilliant. She is well-respected by design professionals and appreciated and admired by Sierra's staff. And she's very cool.