What a delight to work with Pam Sammarco! She is smart, funny, warm, extremely capable, completely reliable, a top professional in her field, meticulous about important details and not hung up on the small stuff. When I met Pam for the first time at a Clean Energy workshop held by NJHEPS, the non-profit I serve, I was so impressed with her ability to grasp our needs and suggest useful strategies that I called Dr. Tom Bryant, co-chair with me of our Sustainability Education Team, to come meet her. We three sat down in a spacious student lounge at Stephens Institute of Technology with a great view across the Hudson to New York City. After two hours of great strategizing together, Pam had joined us as a full partner in a new initiative.
“Pam played a key role in developing a strategy to create “communities of practice” (on-line & face-to-face) to advance our work in such areas as Healthy Food and Sustainable Food Systems, Environmental Justice and Higher Education in New Jersey, Technology Transfer and Marketing New Sustainability Products, and one of Pam’s areas of particular expertise, Behavior Change Toward Sustainability. Pam’s outstanding organizing skills were put to good use in planning and leading a very successful workshop to launch the initiative with over 100 college and university faculty and administrators from the NJ/NY metropolitan area.
Pam brings a rare combination of gifts to the field of sustainability: a profound understanding of sustainability in its interrelated economic, social, environmental and health dimensions; passion, clarity, and solid information in getting her message across; empathy and persuasiveness with a wide variety of audiences in academia, business, government or education including students; and organizing skills— all of which work together to make Pam a powerful change-agent for sustainability in the lives of many.”