This year, the Gulf Resilience Community of Practice planning team gave a special commendation to Stephen Deal for his 10 years of service as awards chair for the Spirit of Community Awards. Since joining the Mississippi-Alabama Sea Grant Consortium in August 2014, Deal has been an active member of the Gulf Resilience Community of Practice’s planning team.
Early into his time as a planning team participant, Stephen became involved with administering the Spirit of Community Award. The award is given to recognize deserving individuals, jurisdictions and community organizations that do an exemplary job of conveying environmental challenges and undertaking various projects and endeavors to improve local environmental resilience. There are no repeat winners, which means Deal actively works with planning team members to recruit prospective nominees and determine their eligibility for an award. He has become very familiar with the award process, its history and how it serves the larger goals and objectives of the community of practice.
“It’s a privilege to be recognized,” Deal said. “I have been honored to lead the awards process for 10 years and recognize the countless individuals and communities who go above and beyond to make the Gulf a more resilient place.”
Over the years, Deal has led many different award ceremonies and has overseen the addition of another award category to the Spirit of Community: the community champion award. During that time, the Gulf Resilience Community of Practice has had to adapt to a pandemic and Hurricane Ian in 2022. In the midst of these challenges, Deal has worked to ensure that the award process proceeded as smoothly as possible, whether the awards were given at an in-person ceremony or via a Zoom webinar.
In addition to recognizing winners at the annual conference, Deal performs other duties to ensure that the process flows smoothly. These duties include updating the awards nomination forms, gathering nominations, managing the awards voting process and informing the winners. Once the awards ceremony concludes, he works with planning team members to write articles and organize press releases that highlight the award winners and the work they have done.
For more information about the Gulf Resilience Community of Practice is available online.
Meet the author
Tracie Sempier, Ph.D.
Resilience Engagement Lead
Tracie Sempier serves as the resilience engagement lead at Mississippi-Alabama Sea Grant. She engages with communities to help them become more resilient and works to decrease negative impacts of... Read more
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