There are 17 National Council Members from Florida to Massachusetts to Michigan who are the youth leadership of our organization. We don't have any adult executive director or any figure in the shadows giving orders to SEAC - we are an authentically youth led and run organization. I am excited about this new year and the opportunity we have with the amazing people listed below giving direction and setting vision for SEAC!

Read all about our National Council Members:

Alessandra Castillo
I was born and raised in Wethersfield, Connecticut, and I´m currently a senior at the College of Charleston, in Charleston (Cofc), South Carolina, where I study Political Science and Spanish. Since entering university, I have been working hard with the Alliance for Planet Earth, CofC´s environmental group on campus issues, as well as issues affecting all of the lowcountry. Consistently collaborating with our state and regional networks, through the Southern Energy Network we´ve been able to help with a variety of causes from anti-coal and anti-nuke work to mountain justice. My motivation to play an active role in the environmental movement is my love for mother Earth, as well as to bring environmental justice to all. I have seen in my life, being Cuban and living in Chile that a lot of the environmental movement is done by upper middle class whites, for upper middle class whites. Although things had to start somewhere, it´s long overdue that everyone seek the environmental justice they deserve, to sustain their lives and futures, no matter how society has labeled them.

Bethany Lumbert
Bethany Lumbert is a third year undergraduate student at Michigan State University studying Comparative Cultures and Politics with an emphasis on gender studies and environmental policy. She has been involved in the youth Climate Movement since here freshman year at college in 2007 when she attended Powershift 2007. Her involvement and organizing within the youth climate movement has been affiliated with the Michigan Student Sustainability Coalition.

Her academic and personal interests include exploring the connections between cultures, politics, social movements, gender and environmental justice. She has been actively working on the Tampaction campaign with fellow SEAC organizers for the past year and is looking forward to helping environmental justice issues become more visible within Michigan.

Chris Venegas
Christopher Rolando Venegas-DeGeorgio is a 23 year old double majoring in philosophy and environmental science at Central Michigan University and has served on the SEAC NC since January of 2008. Chris has been working locally on the Campaign for Fair Food with the SFA since 2006, the Campus Climate Challenge, Transportation Challenge and many other tasks through the CMU Student Environmental Alliance over the past several years, and has been active in the cooperative business movement for two years as an active member of GreenTree Cooperative Grocery. A Chilean-American born in Montana with both parents working for the USDA, Chris was brought up enjoying Natural beauty and continues to do so hiking, canoeing, snowboarding, cross-country skiing, and camping. He lives for drumming, expression, environmental and social justice, and the promotion of sustainable communities. He is currently devoting most of his time to the creation of the horizontally lead Non-Profit, the Mount Pleasant Food Project and is serving as an intern for their first big endeavor "Campus Grow!" that is 30,000 sqaure feet of vegetable gardens on CMU campus. This chap idolizes urban gardening, permaculture and forest gardens, post-rock, and cycling.

Dana Kuhnline
Dana studied linguistics and poetry through to her MA at Truman State in Northeast Missouri. She worked with the V-Day campaign as well as a myriad of environmental issues and general agitation for social justice. After moving to West Virginia to work with cultural preservation and arts advocacy she became involved in Mountain Top Removal and other coal issues, which led her to SEAC, where she is today, sitting at a desk typing this. !

D.C. Swinton
D.C. Swinton is a senior at Winthrop University in Rock Hill, SC. He just joined the fight ,full-force, for environmental change in the spring of 2008 upon switching to a major in environmental studies. D.C. is a devoted member to South Carolina's student environmental network, SCASCC, and is looking forward to progress at not only the state and local level, but the national level as well.

Deirdre Lally
Deirdre is a student of Labor Studies & Organizing at UMass Boston. She spends most of her year in Boston, MA going to school learning to challenge big bosses and multinational corporations, and enjoys organizing the community against evictions and bio-terror labs (www.stopthebiolab.org). She also does local climate/community justice work with Rising Tide. To survive long brutal New England winters, Deirdre lives in a big co-operative to build the anti-hierarchical, non-oppressive, sustainable future we hope to achieve. She has been a Regional Coordinater and National Council member with SEAC since August 2008 and has enjoyed it well and learned alot! Back home on the farm in Pennsylvania, she enjoys playing in the forests and resisting natural gas drilling in the Marcellus Shale. In her spare time, she likes to train for and organize direct action and civil disobedience, learn histories you don't hear in school, and street medic at big mobilizations =)

Fred Hillenbrand

Gonzalo Vizcardo
Gonzalo Vizcardo is from Caracas, Venezuela and is a student at the University of Miami. He has been involved with Fort Lauderdale Food not Bombs since its start in 2006, the Southern Energy Network, and United Student Against Sweatshops. He has written articles for Z magazine, South Florida Sun-Sentinel, and others. He enjoys 60s french music by Georges Moustaki, Gilbert Becaud, and Joe Dassin and riding his bike along south Florida's coast and is currently translating a book about Spanish anarchists before the civil war into english.

Heather Sprouse
Heather Sprouse is a twenty year old who started organizing with the Sierra Student Coalition at Marshall University, where she studies Sociology. During this time she was also involved with the Charleston Area Youth Environmental Network (CAYEN) in Charleston, West Virginia and later the West Virginia Youth Action League (WV-YAL). Predominantly involved in the fight against mountaintop removal coal mining, most of her work centers around the preservation of communities and cultural diversity. When not in school or working, she loves to play outside, swim and read good books.

Marci Baranski
Marci is a student at Michigan State University studying Biochemistry and Environmental Policy. She is an organizer for the Michigan Student Sustainability Coalition and the Trek to Re-Energize America; a bike ride to Washington, D.C. for climate change awareness in support of strong climate legislation. Marci is helping revitalize SEAC's Tampaction campaign and works to bring a social justice perspective to environmentalism. Recently returned from Bangladesh, her experiences abroad and as a female activist have helped shape her identity as an ecofeminist. After graduating next year Marci hopes to enter a graduate program in Environmental Engineering.

Marcie Smith
Marcie Smith is a graduate of Transylvania University with a B.A. in International Affairs and French, and a concentration in Environmental Studies. In addition to her role as a SEAC National Council member, she is a policy director for SustainUS and an Associate Fellow with the Institute for Environmental Security.

In 2006, Marcie founded Transylvania's environmental action group, TERRA, which has gone on to receive national media attention for its work advancing environmental justice in Kentucky. In 2007, she helped found the Kentucky Student Environmental Coalition, one of the first coalitions of its kind in the U.S. She was a U.S. youth delegate to the UN Climate Change Convention with SustainUS in 2008 and will be returning to the Copenhagen talks in December 2009. Within this role, she focuses on negotiations surrounding the reduction of emissions from global deforestation in the developing world and adaptation mechanisms.

In 2009, she was solicited to testify before Congress on the need for bold, just federal climate legislation, the impacts of mountaintop removal coal mining, the security implications of climate change, and the need for constructive U.S. leadership in the UNFCCC negotiation process. In addition to her advocacy work, she has interned for Congressman Ben Chandler in the U.S. House of Representatives, has initiated independent research on the coincidence of ecoviolence and gendercide, and has studied ecology, local environmental law, and mining code modernization in Madagascar.

Currently, she is living in North Carolina, learning about organic farming and local food grids.

Sarah Lechota
My name is Sarah and I am a super senior at Central Michigan University. I am majoring in Psychology and my minors are Communication Disorders and American Sign Language. I also have a Associates degree in early childhood development. I hope to find a research job so I can study the relationship between learning disabilities and the environmental factors.

My work with the environmental movement has been mostly focused on my campus with the Student Environmental Alliance and statewide with the Michigan Student Sustainability Coalition. I have been involved in a variety of actions and trainings through these organizations and I have continued to expand my knowledge and skills. On campus, I have currently taken a senate position in the Student Government Association and plan to use this position to make great strides to continue the efforts to green our campus. We have been working to continue to raise awareness about sustainability on campus and what that looks like for students on campus, I hope to make great strides this year!

Yasmin Kenney