I’m contacting you today on behalf of Audubon to inform you of the TogetherGreen Fellowships that have recently been awarded to forty of the nation’s most promising conservationists, two being from Portland, Oregon! TogetherGreen wants you and your readers to meet these Fellows who will create a positive environmental change in your community. Two Portland, Oregon advocates are the proud recipients of a new national fellowship designed to advance the work of individuals with outstanding potential to help shape a brighter environmental future. Marcelo Bonta and Tony DeFalco are two of only 40 people selected from competitors nationwide for the TogetherGreen Conservation Leadership Program, part of a new conservation initiative of the National Audubon Society with support from Toyota.
Fellows receive specialized training in conservation planning and execution, the chance to work and share best practices with gifted conservation professionals, and assistance with project outreach and evaluation. Each Fellow will also receive $10,000 towards a community-focused project to engage local residents in conserving land, water and energy, and contributing to greater environmental health. Bonta and DeFalco both want to better engage everyone in the environmental movement. To achieve that, Bonta will use his fellowship to create a series of dialogues, entitled, Diversifying the Environmental Movement Forum, which will examine diversity issues in Portland’s environmental movement. DeFalco will focus his efforts on partnering with Verde, a social enterprise organization that trains and employs low-income Latinos to do green landscaping, to create a new enterprise, Verde Energy. In efforts to create green jobs for everyone, including communities that have been traditionally
underrepresented in the mainstream environmental movement, Verde Energy will train and employ low-income Latinos and Native Americans in the Portland metro area in the green energy sector.
The efforts of the Fellows will aid people and wildlife around 39 cities in 24 different states—a full list can be found at http://www.togethergreen.org/fellows.
I’m writing to you today to see if you would be interested in helping TogetherGreen by informing your readers about these remarkable Fellowships that have been awarded in Portland. I would be more than happy to provide you with any further information you may need. Thank you so much for your time and I look forward to hearing your thoughts.
Best,
Lorraine
Visit TogetherGreen for more information:
http://www.togethergreen.org
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