The Coalition to Restore Coastal Louisiana has decided to push back our Stewardship Awards event. The deadline for nominations will be shifted to January, and we will celebrate award winners at an in-person event in May. This move made sense for several reasons. Many south Louisiana residents are too preoccupied with immediate needs – food, water, gas, electricity, housing – to commit capacity to award nominations. At the same time, we have seen heroes step up in the aftermath of this storm, and we believe that any coastal awards ceremony that does not recognize them would be incomplete if not irrelevant. There will be time for accolades, but now is not that time.

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Nominate your favorite coastal steward

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Restoring and protecting the natural treasure of Louisiana’s coast is a duty embraced by many people with diverse backgrounds. They are volunteers, students, researchers, sportsmen, governmental and business leaders, and sometimes simply coastal residents who care enough about the future of our state to take action.

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Every year the Coalition to Restore Coastal Louisiana is proud to honor these individuals and organizations demonstrating extraordinary commitment with a Coastal Stewardship Award. These awards are CRCL’s highest form of recognition for those who go above and beyond for our coast, and we need your help to discover worthy candidates for the honors.  Two special awards will be given in 2022 -- one for stewardship during and after Hurricane Ida and one for stewardship during and after Hurricane Laura.

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CRCL’s Coastal Stewardship Awards recognize individuals and groups that have made significant contributions to the conservation and restoration of Louisiana’s coastal wetlands.

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Nominate your favorite coastal steward today! 

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Nominations deadline has been extended to mid-January.  More information to come.

Award Categories

• Coastal Stewardship, for valuable commitment to the conservation and restoration of coastal Louisiana.

• Youth Coastal Stewardship, for valuable commitments by those 18 and under.

• Lifetime Achievement in Coastal Stewardship, for the highest level of commitment to the conservation and restoration of coastal wetlands over a lengthy career.

• Hurricane Ida Award: This is a special award for outstanding coastal stewardship during and after Hurricane Ida, one of the strongest and most devastating storms ever to hit Louisiana.

• Hurricane Laura Award: This is a special award for outstanding coastal stewardship during and after Hurricane Laura, which caused catastrophic damage to southwest Louisiana in 2020

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Soon we will not only honor the 2021 Coastal Stewardship Awards Winners, but also the 2020 Coastal Stewardship Awards Winners. We are excited to finally be able to celebrate these amazing coastal stewards.  

2020 Coastal Stewardship Award Winners

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Coastal Stewardship Award

Laurie Cormier is the program coordinator and coastal zone manager for the Calcasieu Parish Police Jury’s Division of Planning and Development Grant Department. Cormier serves the parish as an assistant planner and mitigation specialist, is the administrator of the Parish’s Local Coastal Zone Management Program, and is one of the two western Louisiana representatives on the Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority. Cormier also serves as the administrative coordinator for the Chenier Plain Coastal Restoration and Protection Authority. The CPCRPA is the levee board with members from Calcasieu, Cameron and Vermilion Parishes. Ms. Cormier helped to set up the Chenier Plain Alliance, an enormous coastal eco-region sprawling from southwest Louisiana and southeast Texas. She is co-chair of the environmental affairs committee for the SWLA Economic Development Alliance and was instrumental in the development of the Louisiana Southwest Informational Floodplain Team, the newest Louisiana Community Rating System user group, which serves as a forum for sharing ideas, best practices and developing tools for managing floodplain/coastal development.

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The Meraux Charitable Foundation, represented on the evening by Chris Haines, has been a significant supporter of coastal restoration for over a decade, providing innovation, enthusiasm and generosity. The Meraux Charitable Foundation has a long record of investment and support of coastal initiatives. The foundation originates and supports new ideas, connects coastal stakeholders with decision-makers and NGOs, consistently and constructively participates in restoration processes as a key stakeholder, and provides an extraordinary physical space for dozens of coastal meetings and events every year.

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Jacob Neu grew up fishing, crabbing and shrimping along the Louisiana coast. He works at Sellers and Associates, an engineering consulting firm, on various types of municipal infrastructure projects, structural engineering projects, and projects related to preserving the recreational use of Louisiana’s coastal areas.

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John Nyman is a professor in LSU’s School of Renewable Natural Resources who has published more than 80 journal articles addressing wetlands. From west of Calcasieu Lake to the mouth of the Mississippi River, he has worked with and learned from graduate students, hunters and fishers, landowners, and employees of NGOs, and state and federal agencies.

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Natalie Snider is the senior director of the Environmental Defense Fund’s coastal resilience program. She works to ensure sound science is used to plan, design, implement, and adaptively manage projects and policies, with a focus on system dynamics to meet the challenges of climate change to our coastal ecosystems and communities. Snider also serves on the executive committee of Restore the Mississippi River Delta, a coalition of local and national conservation organizations working to restore Louisiana’s vanishing coast.

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Amy Wold is the director of communications at The Water Institute of the Gulf. She is responsible for working with research teams to provide quality reports and deliverables to clients and translate technical science issues for policymakers, industry representatives, and the public. Prior to that she was a newspaper reporter covering science, environmental, and coastal issues both on the West Coast and in Louisiana. She wrote award-winning stories in Washington state on estuary environments and fishery resources. After coming to Louisiana, she covered coastal restoration, flooding protection, and the increasing amount of research on Louisiana’s coastal land loss problem. She worked at The Advocate newspaper as an environmental reporter for more than a decade. In that time, Amy got the chance to cover some of Louisiana’s major news events, including Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, Hurricanes Gustav and Ike, and the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill.

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Previous Winners

For a list of previous winners of Coastal Stewardship Awards, click here.

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Sponsorship Opportunities 

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The 26th Annual Stewardship Awards offers unique sponsorship opportunities. We take great pride in creating a memorable event for our coastal champions, and we want you to be a part of it. Our sponsorship prospectus is here. Contact CRCL for more information, marissa.wendte@crcl.org or 504.264.6749.

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