David Schogel, a retired social worker, and an active member of the Center in the Park/Senior Environment Corps, was named one of 24 Fellows in the Environmental Leadership Program Delaware Valley Regional Network Fellowship Program for Emerging Leaders.

Each year, the Delaware Valley Regional Network selects a new class of regional fellows to join ELP's community of environmental professionals from diverse backgrounds, sectors, and areas of expertise. The year-long Regional Fellowship offers unique networking opportunities, intensive leadership and skills training, support, and time for personal and professional reflection.

The Fellowship provides an opportunity for talented individuals to have a unique and substantial impact on environmental and social progress in the Philadelphia metropolitan region through collaboration with other emerging leaders.

This innovative program is designed to build the leadership capacity of the environmental and social change fields' most promising emerging practitioners in the greater Delaware Valley area.

The program defines emerging leaders as practitioners who are relatively new to the environmental and social change fields with approximately three to ten years of experience and define "environmental" broadly to include public health, transportation policy and planning, economic development, and broad-based community organizing.

The program includes Bucks, Chester, Delaware, Lehigh, Monroe, Montgomery, Northampton, or Philadelphia Counties in Pennsylvania; all counties except Bergen, Hudson, Morris, Passaic, Sussex, or Union Counties in New Jersey; and, Kent, Sussex or New Castle Counties in Delaware.

Through the Environmental Alliance for Senior Involvement, Schogel has become a certified chemical trainer for water quality testing; with this certification, he recruits other senior citizens to help teach water monitoring and stream assessment to school children.

Schogel is also a PaSEC tour guide for Saylor Grove Wetland and has helped his SEC group to write a proposal to do stream restoration at the historic Rittenhouse Town. Through Philadelphia Green's Garden Tenders and Tree Tenders Programs, he is a founding member of the Hansberry Garden & Nature Center in Germantown where he is currently working to create a sustainable 4H club.

Other Fellows named by the Environmental Leadership Program include:

· Khiet Luong is the watershed/Environmental Advisory Council programs associate at the Pennsylvania Environmental Council Southeast PA office. His responsibilities include working closely with the Watershed Team and EAC Network Director to support and guide ongoing projects, including watershed partnerships, watershed plan implementation, stormwater management, and other water resource issues;

· Leanne Krueger-Braneky is executive director of the Sustainable Business Network of Greater Philadelphia, a nonprofit network that helps local, independent businesses thrive while they build an economy that values people, the planet and prosperity for all;

· Soledad Alfaro-Allah is the education coordinator at Awbury Arboretum in the Germantown section of Philadelphia;

· Susan Yi is an environmental engineer for the Philadelphia Water Department in the planning and engineering division conducting a pilot scale research project to optimize water treatment control operations; and

· Marcus Johnson is a design services coordinator at the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society.

For more information and a list of the Class of 2007, visit the Environmental Leadership Program and Pennsylvania Senior Environment Corps webpages.

5/4/2007