Markie is the Organizer of Toledoans for Safe Water, a nonprofit grassroots organization in the Toledo area “working to establish a Bill of Rights to protect Lake Erie and the communities that rely on its health and viability.” Starting out as a signature-collecting volunteer, Markie now runs the entire enterprise, from organizing community events and writing press releases to lobbying the city government to pass clean water legislation.
Transcript
My name is Markie Miller, I am an organizer with Toledoans For Safe Water, and we're the grassroots group that's behind the Lake Erie Bill of Rights effort here in Toledo. Started out just as an organizer, helping to put the language together and I helped collect signatures. Over two years I think I collected 800 signatures and we all did varying amounts. And I became sort of the spokesperson for the group and I get to talk to media, I do interviews all the time, I give presentations, write press statements, and just try to help organize the group and keep us moving. My full time job is grant writing for a legal non-profit, and so I am up in the morning doing research, doing writing, and then fielding phone calls and emails that come in about our organizing and trying to set up times to meet with people, to network with people, watching what's going on, getting developments about, well this brief just came in, this ruling just came in, what are we gonna do? And then it's shift gears, change hats, try and get a press statement together, try and organize when we're going to give this out, is there an action that we need to follow up with? And usually it's conference calls all night with different networks that are statewide, that are nationwide, talking to reporters from all over the world and just trying to get the word out as much as we can and talk to people who are interested in us. And a lot of our work is outreach and networking, trying to talk to other communities who are facing some kind of immediate threat to their water source or to their environment, and working with them to say this is what we did, this is what you can do. And helping them, and trying to give them some guidance in what they can do as well. We've been invited to different states to go and talk, we were invited to talk to the United Nations for Earth Day this year. So the door has really been opened up.
Download transcript