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Environmental Partnership
Photo: Rae A. McNally, Puget Sound Partnership
Crowds line the coastline for a celebration co-sponsored by Puget Sound Partnership to provide residents with information about their role in helping preserve the health of the delicate ecosystem.
Restoring the Puget Sound Shoreline
Boeing employee helps state agency implement improved management system
A Boeing employee is using her program management skills to play a vital role in restoring Puget Sound, a biologically rich but ecologically delicate body of water in the Seattle area that has 2,500 miles of marine shoreline.
Boeing recently loaned Janelle Paglia, a 25-year Boeing veteran, to the Puget Sound Partnership. The state agency was created in 2007 by the Washington state governor and legislature to coordinate federal, state, local, tribal and private resources, and prioritize cleanup and improvement projects to reestablish a healthy Puget Sound.
Photo: Puget Sound Partnership
Visitors walk through the Nisqually National Wildlife Refuge, on the Nisqually River Delta in southern Puget Sound. The refuge was established in 1974 for the protection of migratory birds. Three thousand acres of salt and freshwater marshes, grasslands, riparian, and mixed forest habitats provide resting and nesting areas for migratory waterfowl, songbirds, raptors, and wading birds.
"Boeing is good at program management, and this is an amazing opportunity for me to share some of those methods, processes and tools with the Partnership for better strategy execution and tracking of metrics," said Paglia who is a business operations specialist on loan for about a year from the Environment, Health and Safety organization.
Boeing also donated $125,000 in grants to the Foundation for Puget Sound, a nonprofit organization that works closely with the Partnership to strengthen the understanding of Puget Sound issues in the community. A "One Boeing" grant is helping fund the new MyPugetSound online interactive tool, a gathering place for those working on Puget Sound issues. The second grant is financing Citizen Science projects in which volunteers work with scientists to observe, collect and record habitat and wildlife data along shorelines.
"Having Boeing as a partner has had a profound impact on our work," said Gerry O'Keefe, executive director of the Puget Sound Partnership. "We are deeply grateful. It is particularly generous for Boeing to loan us an employee who has the specialized skills to help us set up a management system that gives us an operating rhythm that we will use for years to come."
Paglia's assignment was the result of a meeting between Boeing and the Partnership, which wanted to learn more about improving its complex administrative processes, including coordinating a diverse array of partner agencies around an action plan for ecosystem recovery.
"Boeing and the Puget Sound Partnership, at a high level, do the same things: we rely on technology and science, and we coordinate and integrate tasks with multiple stakeholders to accomplish our missions," said Mary Armstrong, Boeing vice president of Environment, Health and Safety.
"Having Boeing as a partner has had a profound impact on our work. We are deeply grateful. It is particularly generous for Boeing to loan us an employee who has the specialized skills to help us set up a management system that gives us an operating rhythm that we will use for years to come."
—Gerry O'Keefe, executive director of the Puget Sound Partnership
"We invited Gerry to see how we visually display elements of our companywide strategic environmental plan and how we track progress against milestones," Armstrong added. "At that meeting it became clear that ecosystems, like airplanes, are highly complex systems, and that the tools we use could benefit the Partnership. Boeing supports the Puget Sound Partnership because we're impressed by how it bases decisions on science, how it focuses on actions that have the greatest environmental impact, and how it holds people and organizations accountable for results."
Two projects that are among current priorities for the Puget Sound Partnership include:
- Restoring 4,000 acres of shellfish beds in Samish Bay that 25 percent of the time are too polluted by farm animal waste for commercial harvesting. The Partnership is bringing together state and local decision-makers to implement strategies to improve clam and oyster harvestability.
- Establishing an innovative watershed mitigation and restoration program in Hood Canal. The plan would create a framework to compensate for environmental impacts by the seven-acre, over-water structure to be built by the U.S. Navy at Bangor Naval Submarine Base. The plan would streamline regulatory permitting for the Navy with greater flexibility for mitigation across a broader landscape and range of habitats.
Boeing, through its Global Corporate Citizenship organization, invests millions of dollars in charitable grants each year in five focus areas: education, health and human services, arts and culture, civic and environment.
"By partnering with environmental restoration and protection organizations like Puget Sound Partnership, we know that Boeing can be instrumental in helping bring about positive long-term conservation measures that protect and restore our critical natural habitats and assets to really make a significant difference for future generations," said Liz Warman, Global Corporate Citizenship's Northwest regional director.