by Terri Folsom with input from Derek Brockbank
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We have a National Sierra Club Award winner living right here in Missouri!!
Student Sierra Club leader Charlie Fredrick was awarded the Joseph Barbosa Earth Fund Award at the 2005 Sierra Summit. This award recognizes a Sierra Club member under the age of 30 for environmental activism and leadership. Charlie has helped to organize a network of environmental activists in the Midwest for the Sierra Student Coalition (SSC), the student run arm of the Sierra Club.
Charlie Frederick has been the SSC Midwest regional coordinator for the past year, and has been on the Executive Committee since June. As Regional coordinator, he has developed new activists, new leaders and new SSC groups across the Midwest. In addition he has brought coordination to the region, and allowed student activists in Missouri and across the region to network with each other — getting new ideas and learning new skills from their correspondence. While he has worked on number of issues, and helped connect students to issues that they want to work on, he has focused on the “Victoria’s Dirty Secret” campaign. This campaign, started by Forest Ethics (with whom Charlie now works), is working to make Victoria’s Secret — arguably the country’s most famous catalog — stop using paper from endangered Canadian boreal forest. Corporate campaigns, while infrequent for the Sierra Club, are a staple of student organizing as it allows youth to leverage their power as a highly targeted consumer market and often has fun, “sexy” campaign actions. They are some of the few campaigns that we have actually seen real progressive victories in the past five years.
Early this past November Charlie spoke at one of the many press conferences he organized around the country in Columbia, Missouri. He is shown in this picture speaking shortly after the “21 Thong Salute” was launched in Speaker’s Circle on the University of Missouri campus. The campus publication, The Maneater, published a great story as well as the Joplin Independent, an on-line publication.