The Junior League of Mobile (Casi Callaway)

Issue Area(s): environment, leadership development

Overview

In the aftermath of the BP oil spill of 2010, Casi Callaway was already bringing her many skills—including her Junior League leadership training—to bear on her job as executive director of Mobile Baykeeper, a volunteer organization dedicated to the protection of Alabama’s Mobile Bay and coastal communities. With the help of hundreds of volunteers—including many Junior League of Mobile members—she directed a volunteer-driven monitoring program to help save the environmentally sensitive waters and tributaries of Mobile Bay, which drains the fourth largest watershed in the U.S. For the duration of the nearby crisis in the Gulf of Mexico, volunteers documented miles of Alabama's coastal shoreline, monitored for contamination, and called in the clean-up crews when they spotted oil or wildlife that had been affected.  

Community partners

• Junior League of Mobile volunteers
• Other Mobile Baykeeper volunteers
• Local and national environmental organization volunteers

How it works

Mobile Baykeeper is a nonprofit environmental group of more than 4,000 members with a common interest in preserving and protecting the beauty, health, and heritage of the Mobile Bay watershed and Alabama's waterways and coastal communities. Its priorities are clean water, clean air, a healthy community, a responsible government, and a healthy economy, and its activities depend on volunteers.

What’s the impact?

Widely acknowledged as one of the Gulf Coast’s most effective volunteer environmental advocacy groups, Mobile Baykeeper was formed in 1997 as West Bay Watch when a group of concerned citizens joined forces to fight the construction of a chemical facility at the Theodore Industrial Park, along Mobile Bay’s western shore. Casi Callaway, a Junior League of Mobile member, brings her extensive background in environmental action at the local, state, and federal levels to the job.