Paths for Panthers in St. Petersburg
My name is Natalie and I just wrapped up my fall campaign based in St. Petersburg, FL. I had the pleasure of testing my skills on the Paths for Panthers Campaign with FloridaPIRG Students.
When we first started talking to neighbors and community leaders months ago, many people didn’t realize that fewer than 200 Florida panthers remain in the wild. Now, we have demonstrable statewide support for wildlife crossings in Florida. I cannot believe that just a few months ago, I was just learning the preliminary skills to organize a campaign.
I was born and raised in Baltimore, Maryland. Despite living the city life, my parents taught me to have a deep love and respect for nature. In addition to their jobs being rooted in conservation and environmental protection, they made sure to take me camping, kayaking, hiking, etc. I entered college at American University as a Political Science major with the goal of becoming an attorney. I loved the environment and wanted it to be a part of my career, but it was not a priority for me at the time. That was until I started working on a regenerative farm in Maryland during the summer between my first and second year. This completely changed my priorities as I saw how much our food system impacted our planet. It all started to feel so backwards to me and I couldn’t understand why we hadn’t been farming regeneratively for years. Working locally also taught me the power of community and how much we can get done as a collective. This is when I switched my track. I stayed as a Political Science major, but knew I wanted to get out of academia, get my boots on the ground, and focus on saving this planet.
Following August training, I moved to Florida to support FloridaPIRG’s goal of generating grassroots support for wildlife crossings in order to get Representatives within the Florida Legislature to pass a bill allocating more funds to the Florida Department of Transportation to build said crossings. This was especially important for the state animal, the Florida Panther as their leading cause of death is collisions with vehicles. With less than 200 of these keystone species left in the wild, every panther death is one step closer to a detrimental change to the Florida ecosystem.
With the team of over 40 volunteers I built over the course of the semester, we were able to:
Host 7 major visibility events that educated over 1000 students and community members.
Collect nearly 1000 petitions from Floridians across the state.
Partner with over 10 local organizations to educate the community and have an additional 48 sign ons to our cause.
We attended Beach Cleanings in Partnership with Keep Pinellas Beautiful, taught elementary students about wildlife crossings with the Edible Peace Patch Project, hosted a screening of The Path of the Panther, and were able to get news coverage 3 times in multiple news sources including the Tampa Bay Times. I am personally most proud of the team of students at the University of Florida St. Petersburg Campus, who started their own club around this issue and will be continuing the work we did in years to come.
