Laura Thomas
Title: Sustainability Program Administrator
Organization: City of Largo, FL
Location: St. Petersburg, FL
Laura currently serves as the Sustainability Program Administrator for the City of Largo, Florida where she works to advance City initiatives to build a more sustainable and resilient community for all. Largo’s strategic focus on sustainability has allowed her to work with her exceptional team and develop the City’s first Environmental Action Plan, create new programs and community engagement efforts, and build an effective strategy to advance sustainability and resilience within both the organization and the community. She has led the creation of a city-wide composting program, the development of the City’s first Sustainability and Resilience Action Team, co-founded the Pinellas County Sustainability and Resilience Network, and continues to work on many regional efforts to advance efforts across communities in a collective and purposeful way.
Through her work, she is able pursue her passion to help individuals, teams, and communities better understand the intersectionality of the varied systems that result in community-level outcomes, ultimately reducing vulnerabilities and increasing resilience. She is dedicated to incorporating systems thinking into community planning to helping uncover the intricate connections between traditionally siloed fields of study, such as public health, environmental justice, hazard preparedness, and the built environment. She values community driven, equitable public administration that is based in real data and reflective of expressed community needs. Having briefly experienced homelessness as a child, she is particularly attuned to understanding how decisions made by those in power can impact the trajectory of our most vulnerable community members and provide insight as to how programs and processes might be improved. As a passionate environmentalist, She also strives to protect and restore the natural world while also improving the social and economic systems that lead to overall sustainability and resilience outcomes for the community. In 2018, this passion was honored by being selected as the Sierra Club of Florida’s Osprey Award recipient which is given to one public servant in the state who exemplifies the organization’s values. This is exemplary of her dedication to sustainability and she looks forward to continuing to advance her knowledge and understanding of the relationships between the built and natural world and community outcomes.
When not working, she is focused on finishing her graduate degree in Sustainable Management at the University of Wisconsin (virtually, of course), painting, hiking, reading, and spoiling her two dogs endlessly. She currently live in St. Petersburg, Florida with her husband, though they are originally from Richmond, VA, and they love their community.