From the Floor: Sustainability Voices from the Southeast

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 Roge