When Cooley was leading WSU Beach Watchers of Island County, her admiring volunteers called her "The Energizer Bunny." That was a year ago, before the state leader of Puget Sound Recovery, David Dicks, spirited her away to headquarters in Seattle."I'm blown away," Dicks said when he visited Coupeville to speak at Sound Waters and saw the program Cooley was leading. Responding to a question whether the Beach Watchers' model could be expanded statewide, Dicks said, "I'll just tell you right now that's exactly what I've been thinking. Can we make this the model?"
Apparently he meant it, because within weeks he had hired Cooley to become Volunteer and Education Manager of the entire Puget Sound Partnership.
"Ruckelshaus loves this," Dicks said of the way volunteers in Island County are engaging their community. He was referring to William Ruckelshaus, chair of the PSP's leadership council and former administrator of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. "He believes this is the only way to solve a problem - with volunteers. I agree 100 percent. I'd like to think about some way to really highlight this as a success story in Puget Sound and take it Sound-wide in terms of telling this story. I want to go back and explain this to a lot of other people."
This year Cooley is back at Sound Waters to provide an inside look at what the Puget Sound Partnership is thinking and what she is doing to help implement its outreach and action strategies.
