Ensuring Community Access to Clean Water, Clean Yards & Clean Shoes!

NAME: Yvette Little

LOCATION: Ellenton, FL

ORGANIZATION: Simply Green Solutions, LLC

As a small business owner, Yvette Little understands the challenges that face many environmental groups with big missions and small budgets. To help these organizations, Yvette founded Simply Green Solutions LLC, a company focused on building the capacity of local environmental groups to achieve their missions in cost-effective, strategic ways. Yvette promotes greener practices and offers easy to use methods that help corporations, government agencies, non-profits, and community leaders "lean towards green."

For her TogetherGreen fellowship, Yvette is targeting a unique audience for her conservation action project and bringing local partnerships together:  dogs in Manatee & Sarasota Counties!

Well…dog owners, that is. Yvette plans to expand the program, Pooches for the Planet, a pet waste education campaign managed by the Tampa Bay Estuary Program and Sarasota Bay Estuary Program. The goal of the project is to promote the proper disposal of pet waste to prevent harmful fecal coliform bacteria and excess nutrients from washing into the Bay. Yvette will work with local partners to promote educational outreach after developing shelter adoption kits around this issue, as well as gain sponsorship and media attention for the initiative.

Yvette is committed to framing issues in ways that get people motivated, as evidenced by the tagline for this initiative: Clean Water, Clean Yards & Clean Shoes!  By encouraging pet owners to pick up after their pets, Yvette’s approach does double duty: it benefits the watershed AND the community.

As a secondary part of her conservation action project, Yvette is facilitating various events and community outreach activities to pair water quality and water-wise usage/conservation together.  In partnership, the SCOPE SEE Water Committee is a citizens’ advocacy group for wiser water usage - - to help people in Sarasota County SEE water issues and SEE water solutions.  The SEE Water committee has created Connect The Drops, a campaign for wiser water usage using the “Water Equivalent of the Energy Efficient Lightbulb.”