About Allison Burbach (Spencer Mottley)

     This week's Wednesday for Work speaker, Allison Burbach, began her environmental involvement 

while attending college as an environmental biology student here at Christopher Newport University.

Some of her extracurricular involvements on campus included leading the Recycle Right Project,

managing the Fear to Hope Project and being a sustainability fellow. One of her most significant

sustainability- related achievements here at CNU was making recycling more accessible on campus. She

stated when she was a sophomore. There were only two recycling cans in all of Forbs Hall, and by the

time she graduated, the number of cans in the hall increased many times over what was previously there. 

Today, Allison works as an Environmental Communication Manager at Green Fin Studio. Her

role in the company is to bridge the gap between science and what policymakers and the public need to

know, she makes scientific reports more accessible and understandable to the general public by

synthesizing and translating scientific findings and data, as well as through data visualization.

One important piece of advice Allison has for persuading people to care about and take action to

improving the environment is to know your audience and their values. This allows you to tailor your

message to resonate with your target audience. "When you speak to everyone, you speak to no one."

(Meredith Hill). In addition to persuasion, Green Fin Studios also creates videos and story maps to make

content that resonates with people, and does collaborative facilitation to bring stakeholders together to act

on environmental issues. Currently, in Allison's career, she is engaging in several regional and national

environmental initiatives. These include working with VIMS to get ghost crab traps out of our waterways

and improve regulations around trap-based fisheries, working with the Southern Maryland Conservation

Alliance to conserve agricultural and forest land through persuading people to donate some of their land

to conservation easements, and working with VDOT to create more butterfly habitats along highways.

After she gave her talk, I was left with a question and an answer to that question. The question was how

does VIMS find ghost crab traps in our waterways that are no longer attached to a buoy? She said that

VIMS actually has sonar scanning technology that allows them to find these hard-to-locate ghost traps. 

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