April: Sarah Palmisano

SUSTAINABLE CITY FELLOW
The City of Pittsburgh

Sarah’s work as an SCA Sustainability Fellow in the Mayor’s Office of Sustainability and Energy Efficiency generally falls into four categories: education and outreach, continuing personal education, internal work, and volunteering.

Education and outreach work includes things like hosting or tabling at appropriate events, symposiums, or conferences as a representative of the Mayor’s Office or the SCA. Education and outreach for April: City-County Building Tree Giveaway to help TreeVitalize reach the goal of planting 20,000 trees by 2012 and to educate on the importance of urban trees (1,000 trees given away, 2,000 people attended event); Frick Environmental Center Earth Day Celebration Tree Giveaway (1,000 trees given away, 900 people visited our table, 40 signed up to receive sustainability updates from the City); tabled at Job Corps Sustainability Fair to share what the City is doing to “go green” and learn about what they are doing as well (20 organizations and 200 students attended); tabled at Party For the Planet at Pittsburgh Zoo and PPG Aquarium (300 people visited our table); attended Root for Trees Rally meeting to help organize the upcoming event.

Continuing personal education includes attending various conferences, symposiums, workshops, or classes to increase awareness and understanding of a wide variety of sustainability and environmentally-related topics. Personal education for April: Women’s Health and the Environment Conference; Wet Weather Symposium; Western Pennsylvania Conservancy Gateway Island Medians brainstorming session to review ideas for redesign of gateway medians downtown Pittsburgh.

Internal work describes work being done within the Mayor’s Office to incorporate sustainability into City operations and services. Internal work for April: attended Environmentally Preferred Purchasing Post Agenda (outcome: ordinance passed); attended Sustainability Commission meeting (outcome: ideas for Climate Action Plan version 2 municipal recommendations); attended PEDA grant informational meeting; implementation and tracking of the hard-to-recycle bin in City-County Building (collected 284 alkaline batteries, 5 cell phones, 16 ink/toner cartridges).

Volunteering is anything that she finds fun and worthwhile to help a good cause or a good friend after hours! Volunteering for April: GTECH Larimer vacant lot clean-up to prepare for sunflower planting.