Member Q&A: Bethany Shetterly Thomas
OEC member Bethany Shetterly Thomas wears a lot of hats. She is Board President and founder of Earth Day Oregon, co-founder of Ecology in Classrooms and Outdoors, and served on OEC’s Emerging Leaders Board (ELB) from 2015-2018. In all of her different roles, she’s been steadfast in her focus on protecting Oregon’s environment, and spreading love for our state’s great outdoors to Oregonians of all ages.
OEC recently sat down with Bethany to chat about her love for our state’s great outdoors, and her long history of impactful environmental work in Oregon. We dive into her formative experience with the ELB, her favorite natural places in Oregon, and why now is the time to get involved in environmental advocacy. Read on!
Tell me about yourself, what you do, and your connection to OEC?
I have always lived in Oregon. My connection to the outdoors was something that started when I was pretty young. My family would go hiking and camping, and then I got to go to Outdoor School as a sixth grader, which was a pretty formative experience. I went back during high school to teach at Outdoor School as many times as I could.
After college, my friend Sarah Woods and I started a nonprofit together called Ecology and Classrooms and Outdoors (ECO). We were colleagues at a local nonprofit that delivered environmental education to students. But due to their funding model, they were only able to visit the same classroom once a year. We founded ECO because we wanted ecology to be a regular component of a student’s elementary school experience. We wanted kids to get to explore and learn about the world around them so that they could come to love and care for their environment.
Over the years, we expanded to visit more grade levels. Now ECO serves K-12 students, through hands-on ecology lessons in classrooms and schoolyards for kindergarten through fifth grade students, climate focused curriculum in 6-12 grades, and through a specific program called Aves for Spanish speakers. I was inspired to get more kids outdoors by the experience I had at Outdoor School, but our programs differ in that, at ECO, they are much more frequent and can occur at every grade level. We’re celebrating our 20th anniversary this year!
In 2015, I heard about OEC’s Emerging Leaders Board (ELB). I wanted to know more about it. At that point, I’d been in the environmental education world in Portland for a while, but I wanted to get connected with people who were working for the environment in other capacities outside of education. The ELB was a fantastic place to meet other people who were doing exactly that. It was inspiring to be a part of something where everybody had the same ultimate goal in mind, but were all coming at it from a different direction. It was a really impactful experience, and I’m still in touch with my cohorts to this day.
What was your favorite project you did with the ELB?
At that time, OEC was doing a lot of work getting toxics out of kids’ environments. There was this cool project, where Senator Merkley’s office had been contacted by Oregon State University about these wristbands that you could wear that would detect any toxins in your environment. You would wear the wristband for a couple of weeks, and then send it to a lab where they’d run the tests and see what is in your environment. At this point I had three young kids, so I was pretty curious about what they were being exposed to. So myself and a few others in town got to wear these wristbands.
What did you find?
There was something called Galaxolide that was detected in everybody’s wristband. I had never even heard of it before. It’s a chemical used as a fragrance in perfumes, cosmetics and cleaning products. It’s one of those things that you kind of can’t avoid, even if you aren’t a person that uses fragrance in their cleaning products. It’s just still there. And then fire retardants were also pretty common in my and other people’s wristbands.
I felt lucky to be able to participate in that. It brought more awareness in my everyday life to thinking about what the kids and the rest of us are exposed to in the house, or wherever we go.
What about these days? What are your current ventures?
It started with an idea that had been percolating when I was at ECO. There was a little fundraising thing we would do, where I would call our business supporters on Earth Day and ask if they’d make an additional donation to honor Earth Day. And they usually said yes! Every time I did it, I was like, “You know, it would be easier if people just kind of expected this call.”
So 12 development friends and I got together and decided we’d run a pilot. We reached out to other organizations as well, and had about 22 nonprofits that said that they would participate in this thing that we were calling Earth Day Oregon. They each committed to reaching out to at least three businesses that had sustainability at the heart of what they did. Then we just kind of talked about each other in social media circles and newsletters and tried to get the word out that way.
At the end of 2021, we took Earth Day Oregon and turned it into a 501-c3 and hired an executive director, Kelly Stevens. Kelly took it to the next level. We’ve raised over $1.5 million for nonprofits across the state that have participated in Earth Day Oregon. It’s the same sort of philosophy and approach as the beginning, but much more formalized now.
What are some of your favorite natural places in Oregon?
One that comes to mind right off the bat is Ramona Falls, on Lolo Pass Road. I have memories of my brother and I hiking there with my dad. There are these rocks there that are really not all that big, but they felt like enormous boulders when we were small. They’re sheared in such a way that you could turn them into slides, so we would always climb up them and slide down. That was like a very memorable thing when I was young. I have boys now who are 16, almost 14 and 11. As they’ve grown up, we’ve taken them there so that they could slide down the rocks too. It’s a very meaningful place for me.
With so much turmoil at the federal level right now, can you speak to the role of organizations like OEC that focus on state-level work?
I love that OEC can act as a convener and a mouthpiece. This is sort of at the heart of Earth Day Oregon, too. This idea of working together, and doing more together, and that collective impact component. OEC recognizes and values its role as a bigger organization that is well respected, that people view as credible, that people will listen to and look to and turn to for advice and support. When OEC is able to uplift and partner with all these other organizations across the state, it just continues to bring forward its role as this credible leader and gives other organizations somebody to look to.
For folks who care deeply about the environment like you do, but haven’t taken that first step, why is now the time to get involved?
We just passed Trump’s first 100 days in office. So if you needed a number at which point you were going to take some action, that seems like as good of one as any! There are various levels at which you can get involved. One of the things I really appreciated about the ELB was the fact that, in community, you start to see how every individual action is important when everyone around you is helping move the needle. It’s easy to feel overwhelmed when the issue is climate or the environment. But by creating community, and by looking to those members in your community, you’re going to find hope, and inspiration to keep moving forward. Whether you’re at a point in your life where the most that you can do is write a $10 check once a year, or if you have time on your hands to volunteer, it’s important to remember that every action is moving us forward. Together, we get more done.
OEC’s work to advance meaningful, lasting environmental progress is made possible by people across the state who care about safeguarding Oregon’s future.
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