Network Innovation Grant

Soak It Up! Preventing Oil Spills and Leakage from Recreational Boating

$5,000 awarded to Los Angeles Sustainability Collaborative in 2012

Fellow(s): Colleen Callahan, Leslie Abramson, Caitlin Crain, Linwood Pendleton, Rafe Sagarin, Karleen Boyle Sudol

Topic(s): Coastal & Marine Conservation

Switzer Fellows are members of a Technical Advisory Committee to the Soak It Up! project involving several California-based NGOs, including the Los Angeles Sustainability Collaborative. The Collaborative produced a briefing paper entitled, "Soak It Up!: Strategies for Sustainable Recreational Boating and a Clean California Coastline", which highlighted the problem of oil pollution from recreational boats, and described potential policy or institutional solutions. Switzer Fellows contributed technical review of the report and are helping to disseminate results to key stakeholders in California and elsewhere, and advising on key messages for a promotional video and social media campaign. Colleen Callahan, the lead Switzer Fellow on the project, is on the board of the Los Angeles Sustainability Collaborative and is Deputy Director of UCLA's Luskin Center for Innovation. Click here for a link to the briefing paper on the LA Sustainability Collaborative's website.

Meet the Fellows on this Project

Colleen Callahan

2009 Fellow

Colleen Callahan is co-executive director of the UCLA Luskin Center for Innovation, which unites the intellectual capital of UCLA with forward-looking civic leaders to advance environmental sustainability through scholarship, research, and...

Leslie Abramson

2008 Fellow

Leslie currently is the Advisory Council Coordinator at the Gulf of the Farallones National Marine Sanctuary in San Francisco. She is the recipient of a Switzer Leadership grant this year, to coordinate a stakeholder process focused on...

Caitlin Crain

2005 Fellow

Caitlin Crain is a coastal ecologist, studying the dynamics of coastal ecosystems to better protect and restore resilient, functioning systems that benefit nature and people. She specializes in coastal wetlands and the multiple stressors impacting their health and function including sea-level rise and climate change. She works at landscape scales and with the diverse human communities that are impacted by coastal climate change.

Linwood Pendleton

1994 Fellow

I am the ED of the Ocean Knowledge Action Network and the Science Director for the Moonjelly Foundation. I facilitate a close community of people from around the world who want to share knowledge about co-designing ocean science for a healthier and more diverse ocean. At Moonjelly, I work with our Indigenous and local partners to create new ways of applying bottom-up, trust-based philanthropy to fund traditional and local knowledge collection as well as Indigenous researchers and scientists.

Rafe Sagarin

2000 Fellow

Rafe Sagarin was a research scientist with the Institute of the Environment at the University of Arizona in Tucson, AZ and the Program Manager for Oceans at Biosphere 2, where he was working to transform Biosphere 2's ocean biome into a...

Karleen Boyle Sudol