Fast Five with EGLE’s community engagement specialist

What’s your background? Are you the first community engagement specialist at EGLE?

• Like many environmental professionals, my career path hasn’t been linear. I’m originally from Minnesota and began my professional life with Minnesota GreenCorps (an AmeriCorps program similar to MI Healthy Climate Corps), serving in a city planning department in southern Minnesota. Afterward, I spent several years with the small-but-mighty nonprofit Minnesota Brownfields working on brownfield redevelopment education and outreach.
• That work led me to pursue a master’s degree in environmental planning and design at the University of Georgia (go Dawgs, sorry!), followed by a few years in Washington, D.C., working as an urban planner for the City of Alexandria, Va., where I focused heavily on community engagement while updating neighborhood comprehensive plans.
• During COVID-19, I returned to Minnesota to work for the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency (MPCA), EGLE’s sibling agency there, first as a GIS analyst and later as its first brownfields outreach coordinator. A personal relationship eventually brought me to Michigan, where I worked with Delta Institute and the Kansas State University Technical Assistance to Brownfields Program. I have now been with EGLE for a year.
• I’m not the first community engagement specialist EGLE has had. A year before I started, EGLE had a community engagement specialist named Lisa Herron. She laid the groundwork and built many relationships across the state that I’ve been building upon. I met with her early in my journey at EGLE to get the gist on the relationships she built to get my own work off the ground.

What are your duties as EGLE’s community engagement specialist?

• I think of my duties as EGLE’s community engagement specialist as both internal and external. Internally, I provide guidance and technical assistance to EGLE program staff who are working on something community-facing or that requires community engagement. This includes helping coordinate public hearings and informational meetings, providing guidance on engagement best practices, and developing resources and processes for public participation.
• My external duties help me keep a finger on the pulse of what environmental or sustainability work is happening in communities around the state, and what EGLE should be aware of. These external duties include attending and staffing community meetings, developing tools to make EGLE’s outreach easier to access, and meeting one-on-one with community organizations and leaders. I also speak at events and conferences, as appropriate.

What are your goals?

• My goals include further development of guidance and resources for staff, coordinating community learning sessions around the state (ask me about these if you’re interested!), creating opportunities for staff to talk about their work with the community, adding more organizations to the Community Based Organization Database, and increasing transparency between the work we do and how the residents of Michigan understand our roles.

What has your experience been so far as you’ve worked on outreach events?

• My experience has been very varied! I’ve attended events around the state, ranging from staffing a table at the Upper Peninsula State Fair in Escanaba, to providing technical assistance at contentious public hearings, to partnering with the Air Quality Division to coordinate a community learning session in Detroit, to speaking with students interested in environmental work in Albion, and each engagement touchpoint has provided a different learning experience. One of my main findings is that environmental work is deeply personal, and ensuring that EGLE’s work is accessible and clear to communities helps people understand what’s going on in their backyards.

How does EGLE compare to other states when it comes to environmental outreach?

• During my time at the MPCA, I admired EGLE’s outreach work from the outside for several years! In my role here so far, I’ve heard from several states about the great work our outreach team does. This work started long before I got here, and I want to give kudos to our outreach section and other program staff who work directly with communities, local governments, private sector companies, and beyond to make EGLE’s work approachable and accessible.
• Other states are doing great work, also, and we can all work together to learn from each other. I’ve communicated with EPA Region 5 states and beyond and have had conversations with community engagement staff to learn from their work. Each state has unique challenges, and collaborating across state lines helps us all build best practices.