Sierra Club Friends – On behalf of the staff of the Sierra Club’s Southeast Office, I would like to welcome Jill Mastrototaro as our new Senior Regional Representative – Manager (Northern Gulf Coast). Jill will manage the delivery of our programs within the states of Alabama, Louisiana, and Mississippi. She will begin her service to the Sierra Club effective March 10 and will be based in New Orleans, LA. Our office in Baton Rouge, LA will then be closed.
A native of Connecticut, Jill has also spent the past decade residing in the New Orleans, LA area. Over the past eight and a half years Jill has led advocacy and outreach efforts for the Lake Pontchartrain Basin Foundation in southeast Louisiana’s 10,000-square mile watershed.
Jill’s experience includes monitoring and lobbying state and federal laws including the Clean Water Act and the National Environmental Policy Act, spearheading a coalition to protect cypress forests, launching a campaign on sprawl using multiple media outlets, leading the state’s first effort to quantify wetland loss from unplanned development, and creating and implementing regional strategic conservation plans.
Her successes include leading a broadly based coalition in getting Wal-Mart to stop the purchase and sale of cypress mulch harvested or manufactured in Louisiana, thwarting proposals such as cell towers, subdivisions, or a 10,000-acre airport in ecologically sensitive areas, protecting already stressed waterways from receiving millions of gallons of wastewater effluent, and mobilizing hundreds of volunteers to protect natural resources.
Jill has authored a myriad of resources such as, A Citizen’s Guide to Protecting Wetlands in the Pontchartrain Basin, and more recently, Growing Smarter: Guidelines for Low Impact Development in the Pontchartrain Basin, which have engaged and trained thousands of citizens. Jill is the founding Vice-President of the Land Trust for Southeast Louisiana, the only grassroots-based, land conservation group active in the state, and she chairs the Land Committee, negotiating land acquisitions and to-date securing $100,000 in endowment funds. She also is working to create a regional Gulf Coast network of land conservation groups. Jill serves on the board of Smart Growth for Louisiana, a non-profit working to encourage responsible land use throughout the state.
She holds a Masters Degree in Environmental Policy from the State University of New York – College of Environmental Science and Forestry (Syracuse, NY) and a Bachelor of Science Degree in Environmental Science from the University of Rochester (Rochester, NY).
We hope that you will join us in welcoming Jill to the Sierra Club family.
Thanks!
Regards – Jim Price, Southeast Staff Director, Sierra Club
