Smiling (again)

Thursday, June 21, 2012 12:13:36 PM.  Suburban, Female, 38, $50,000 to 99,999, Hispanic or Latino, Bachelor’s degree, Employed- accountant – finance, not professionally involved in biodiversity issues, not a member of an environmental organization, heard about this program on craigslist.

I ran to the other end of our floor where Rose sat, carrying a big grin on my face.  “We have our first applicant!” I remember shouting even before entering the room.  “Yay!” she replied back, lifting her head up, pausing for a moment from her furious keystroking to extend her hand, returning my moment of bliss with one of her own.

The wheels were now in motion, finally.  The machine that took more than nine months to build at the factory floor, emerging from the weekly conference calls to the December 8^th meeting at the Museum of Science Boston, to the Copenhagen training trip in March on to the official kick off on June 5^th at the Koshland Science Museum, weaving in an eclectic collective from Boston to LA and many points in between, finally yielded its first product – an applicant for the World Wide Views on Biodiversity Forum in Washington, DC.

Two hundred and thirty two applications, one hundred and ninety eight selected, one hundred and eighteen confirmed, eighty-five at the door on the morning of September 15^th.

The grin that lost its way in the midst of days, weeks and months of anxiety ridden moments, thousands of emails, countless phone and conference calls, meetings, trips to schools, libraries, cafes, community meetings, farmers markets, county fairs, soup kitchens, free clinics, professional conferences, musical performances, metro stops — finally found its way back again.

Pictured above from left, Brian Milchak from Virginia Tech—who picked up where Rose Egelhoff left off before returning to her junior year at Pomona, Lisa Queen—who took us to DC’s hardest to reach places and people, me and my partners in crime, David Tomblin from Virginia Tech, and Jeanne Troy from the Koshland Science Museum.