Learn about Big Sugar

WHEN
December 5, 2016
SPEAKER
Cris Costello

Cris has been organizing the grassroots for the Sierra Club since May 2007. She is the lead organizer for the Sierra Club Our Wild FloridaCampaign, which encompasses the Everglades Restoration, Red Tide, and the Stop Sugar Field Burning campaigns.

She coordinates the Sierra Club’s water quality campaign to prevent harmful algal blooms in both coastal and inland waters in Florida by eliminating point and non-point sources of fertilizer, sewage and animal manure pollution. Cris works with partner environmental organizations, local government staff and officials, homeowner associations, and landscape maintenance professionals around the following issues: Everglades restoration, springs protection, local and state-level urban fertilizer management policy, and water quality standards for Florida’s fresh and estuarine waters.

In November 2013 Cris organized the Citizens’ Clean Water Summit in Orlando, where 253 activists from 121 organizations gathered to make plans for a higher level of collaboration among the state’s water quality and water quantity advocacy community. Cris coordinates the result of the Summit, the 156-partner 

Prior to joining the Sierra Club, Cris was a rural and urban grassroots community organizer, a Peace Corps Volunteer in Honduras, an organizer and negotiation/arbitration specialist in a seventeen year career in the labor movement, and a consultant to the Gulf Coast Community Foundation in Venice, Florida. She holds a Bachelor of Arts degree from Grinnell College in Grinnell, Iowa.