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From the Floor: Sustainability Voices from the Southeast

Recorded Live at the Southeast Sustainability Directors Network Annual Meeting (2026)

Here's what nobody tells you about climate work: the people actually doing it are extraordinary. I'm talking about the ones who show up inside city halls, county offices and in the field every single day and make it their job to protect their communities from what's coming. This episode is about them.

We showed up to the Southeast Sustainability Directors Network Annual Meeting as a sponsor, and we brought a portable podcast studio (a recorder, a mic, and a folding stand) because we knew if SSDN got these people in a room, we needed to capture it. The SSDN is a peer learning community for the practitioners. These are sustainability directors, resilience managers, and program officers embedded inside local governments across the Southeast. They are not lobbyists. They are not theorists. They are the people doing the work.

We asked everyone the same three questions: Where are you from, and what are your residents actually dealing with right now? What is your municipality doing to respond? And what's a win? Something that worked. Something that gave you hope. Eight people sat down with us. Eight different geographies, eight different sets of pressures, eight different proof points that this work is worth doing.

Kayla Caselli is the Sustainability and Resilience Officer for the City of Tampa, Florida, and that title alone tells you something. Tampa sits on one of the most beautiful and most vulnerable estuaries in North America, and Kayla is helping the city prepare for what sea level rise, intensifying storms, and urban heat mean for real people in real neighborhoods. Tampa Bay is under pressure from every direction at once. Kayla talks about the tension between the urgency you feel and the pace at which institutions actually move. It's a tension that will resonate with anyone in this work.

Nicole Schaneville is the Sustainability and Resilience Supervisor for the City of St. Petersburg, Florida. St. Pete has become nationally recognized for being genuinely forward-leaning on climate: ambitious emissions goals, serious resilience infrastructure investment, real commitments to flooding and coastal protection. Nicole lives in the operational engine of that commitment. She can tell you exactly what's happening on the ground, what's working, and what isn't. She is the person making strategy real.

Maeven Rogers is the Sustainability and Resilience Director for the City of St. Petersburg, the person setting the vision that Nicole and her team execute on. Where Nicole works inside the mechanics, Maeven is navigating the political landscape: city council, partnerships, and the constant competition for budget resources. Maeven brings the broader view of what St. Pete is trying to become, and why that ambition matters especially for the communities that have historically been left out of resilience conversations. Hearing Nicole and Maeven back-to-back, you can feel the coherence of what a well-aligned team looks like.

Sara Kane is the Sustainability and Resilience Manager for Sarasota County, which stretches from an urban core out to barrier islands facing some of the fastest-changing coastlines in the country. Storm surge, erosion, flooding: these are present-tense realities in Sarasota, not future threats. Sara is constantly translating between what the science says is needed and what communities are ready to embrace. She raises something that ran through every single conversation we had: the gap between the communities with resources to prepare and the ones who don't. Equity is not a side conversation. It's the work.

Carrie Black is the Chief Sustainability and Resilience Officer for Orange County, Florida (the Orlando metro), and the context here is everything. Roughly 1.5 million residents, one of the fastest-growing counties in the country, tens of millions of tourists every year, and all the energy and water demand that comes with a massive hospitality economy. Orange County is a reminder that sustainability challenges are not only about coastlines. They're about growth, heat, water, and building a county that can actually sustain itself long-term. Carrie is navigating all of it at once.

Diego Cancel is the Sustainability and Resiliency Supervisor for the City of Coral Gables, a city that sits in Miami-Dade County and lives at the front edge of climate exposure in the United States. King tide flooding, saltwater intrusion, Biscayne Bay watershed pressure: these are not abstractions in Coral Gables. By necessity, this city has become a laboratory for adaptation, and what Diego has learned there is applicable far beyond South Florida. When you have no choice but to get practical, you get very good at practical.

Tobin Freid is the Sustainability Manager for Durham County, North Carolina, and she brings the kind of measured, experienced perspective that only comes from doing this work for a long time in a place being challenged from multiple directions at once. Durham's story is the urban equity story: a rapidly growing city where environmental burden and environmental benefit are not distributed equally, and where doing this work right means centering the people most affected. Tobin is one of the clearest voices in this episode on what it means to stay committed for the long haul.

George Santucci closes us out as the Sustainability Manager for the Town of Boone, North Carolina, a small Appalachian mountain town at 3,300 feet elevation, home to Appalachian State University. And before you wonder what a small mountain town has to do with any of this: the mountains are changing faster than most people realize. Extreme weather events, wildfire smoke, water resource pressure, and the constant churn of a university population that turns over every four years. George is proof that this work isn't reserved for big coastal cities with big budgets. Every community has something at stake, and every community has something to offer.

If we had to distill eight conversations into themes, here's what we heard. Urgency without panic: every one of these people has internalized how serious this is, and not one of them has checked out. That combination is rarer than it should be, and it's what leadership in this moment actually requires. Equity is not optional: the communities most exposed to harm are almost always the communities with the fewest resources to respond, and the best programs are built with that truth at the center. And wins are possible: we asked everyone for one, because proof matters. Every single person had one.

The Southeast Sustainability Directors Network exists to build the kind of peer learning and trust that makes this work survivable. If you want to know more about them, visit southeastsustainability.org.

Guests in this episode: