History Of The SELP Conference
In 1988, nineteen state environmental advocacy organization leaders came together in Washington, D.C. for the first annual state environmental leadership conference. They shared experiences about advocacy in their state legislatures, the challenges of representing coalitions working on statewide issues, and the day-to-day complexities of serving as Executive Directors of state-level nonprofit advocacy organizations.Out of this first conference and subsequent ones that followed in California, Utah, Colorado, New York, Arizona, Tennessee, Washington, and Missouri, came innovative ideas and energy, which resulted in the creation of organizations such as the Environmental Support Center (ESC), the Clean Air Network, and the Clean Water Network. Executive Directors talked to one another about their experiences and provided support to new directors, which helped strengthen state advocacy in general. Organizational training by experts in various fields strengthened management skills and helped groups retain their directors and consequently other staff. Through informal networking opportunities around policy issues, these leaders were able to identify anti-environmental trends such as the proliferation in use of the environmental audit privilege, and participate in high-level strategic discussions about effective reactions to these trends. In many cases, one state's shared expertise in a particular issue area gave other states a head-start in tackling emerging issue. Because many SELP participating groups are coalitions, their attendance at the conferences also gave a collective voice to the thousands of environmental organizations engaged in grassroots efforts not based in Washington, D.C.