New Year, New Face, New Direction!

It’s been a busy year already especially if you’re the newest member of the UF/IFAS team in the Pinellas County Extension office. Let me introduce myself – my name is Ramona Madhosingh-Hector and I joined the team on January 4th as an Urban Sustainability Agent.

I’ve worked in the coastal arena for almost five years and I am familiar with the challenges facing coastal communities. Although not a native Floridian, my expertise with island environments makes me well suited to living in and meeting the challenges facing Pinellas County. I’ve worked actively with federal and state government to implement and direct national and state directives for coastal management in the State of Florida and my experience with federal and state legislation relating to coasts, estuaries and urban planning will be an asset in my current job portfolio.

As a member of Extension’s Sustainable Living program area, I will work with the Pinellas County Planning Department to update the county’s Land Development Regulations (code) and align it with the sustainable policies in the county’s Comprehensive Plan. I will also work on strengthening the county’s green commitment through certification at the GOLD level via the Green Local Government designation program offered by the Florida Green Building Coalition.

I will become a regular contributor to the online writing forums here at Pinellas County Extension but I wanted to take this opportunity to leave you with a few words of wisdom as it relates to earth’s resources and our responsibility to sustainably manage them for succeeding generations.

"However fragmented the world, however intense the national rivalries, it is an inexorable fact that we become more interdependent every day. {…} The sea, the great unifier, is man's only hope. Now, as never before, the old phrase has a literal meaning: We are all in the same boat."
— Jacques Cousteau, quoted in "National Geographic" [1981]

"When we tug at a single thing in nature, we find it attached to the rest of the world”
— John Muir

Glad to be aboard!

Ramona Madhosingh-Hector
M.S.P. Urban and Regional Planning (FSU)
M.S. Environmental Science (FAMU)
B.S. Agriculture (UWI, Trinidad and Tobago)