"Strength & Sustainability"

Protecting the Bay Area - your community, every community - a perspective from Marin

This issue's Strength & Sustainability column features a perspective from Margot Biehle, a member of the Marin Group's Executive Committee and a founding supporter of this new Bay Chapter major-donor program. Future Yodelers will present views from Strength & Sustainability campaign supporters representing Alameda, Contra Costa, and San Francisco Counties. To share your reasons for supporting the Strength & Sustainability campaign, contact Chapter development director Bill Walsh at (510) 848-0800, ext. 309, or email bill.walsh -at- sierraclub.org

My name is Margot Biehle, and I serve as a volunteer on the Executive Committee of the Sierra Club Marin Group. Our Group takes the lead on critical conservation, land use, and other environmental efforts in Marin County. We take an active role in many local and state political campaigns.

I believe so strongly in the value of the work we are doing in Marin:

• working on a new Countywide Plan to ensure a sustainable future for Marin;
• protecting local treasures such as Point Reyes, Bolinas Lagoon, and other less well-known but equally valuable open spaces;
• warding off destructive development on East Marin's environmentally sensitive St. Vincent-Silveira Ranch;
• demanding accountability from developers who threaten habitat, critters, and quality of life;
• supporting political candidates who will push an environmental agenda;

and the list keeps going. We need to remember that when enough of us take a stand together on an important environmental initiative, we can win.

Currently, a core group of only 11 volunteer ExComm members (with limited staff support) handles all the Sierra Club's work in the county. Much of what we do will affect Marin's future for decades. To fully leverage the time and energy of our volunteer efforts, we are working with the Chapter to secure additional resources to dedicate at least one full-time staffperson to supporting our organizing activities. With a dedicated staffperson, we can be so much more effective at addressing additional critical concerns, and we will be able to communicate better with our local members and inspire them to get more involved. There would be more of us taking a stand together. And there would be more victories.

To win our current and future campaigns in Marin County, we will need more focused work and resources than any of our previous campaigns in the history of our Chapter. With your help, we intend to win them all.

It's always easier to ask people to give to a campaign that you believe in when you demonstrate your own commitment. That's why I said yes when I was asked by Michael Bornstein, our Chapter director, to contribute to the new Strength & Sustainability campaign. This new program is designed to significantly increase our Chapter's capacity to win urgent environmental battles here in Marin County and all over the Bay Area. I'm hoping that once our members understand how much we get done on such a small budget, and how much more there still is to do, they will respond in kind.

To make a contribution, or to find out more about Strength and Sustainability, contact Chapter development director Bill Walsh at (510) 848-0800, ext. 309, or by email at bill.walsh -at- sierraclub.org