In recognition of Colleen Hickey’s 32 years of service to NEIWPCC at the Patrick Leahy Lake Champlain Basin Program (LCBP), the Lake Champlain Resource Room – located within the ECHO Leahy Center for Lake Champlain – has been renamed the Colleen Hickey Lake Champlain Resource Room.
The dedication was announced by Julie Moore, secretary of the Vermont Agency of Natural Resources, on behalf of the Lake Champlain Steering Committee during a retirement celebration for Hickey at the ECHO Center on July 31. Friends, family, staff, partners, and environmental leaders from the region joined Hickey to celebrate her influential career as education and outreach coordinator for the LCBP.
During her tenure, Hickey focused on coordinating media outreach, school programs, educator trainings, and public outreach programs that improved understanding of the Lake Champlain watershed. She played an integral role in establishing the Champlain Basin Education Initiative and its signature teacher training program, Watershed for Every Classroom. She helped get lake issues into homes around the region with the award-winning weekly TV news segment, Champlain 2000 (later renamed Champlain Connection). Hickey was a major collaborator in the effort to launch the Lake Champlain Resource Room, and supervised the LCBP staff who provided lake interpretation to visitors for more than two decades.
Hickey also helped facilitate the Lawn to Lake collaborative since its inception in 2006, first focusing on Don’t “P” on Your Lawn – a campaign to reduce the application of phosphorus-based fertilizers to lawns in the watershed – and later integrating the Raise the Blade campaign, which encourages people to let their grass grow longer to protect water quality.
Supervisor to seasonal education and outreach stewards since 2019, Hickey advanced environmental careers for numerous individuals – including several who went on to join the program in a full-time capacity. She has been a mentor to the LCBP team, and an advocate for and collaborator to countless watershed organizations throughout the region.
Learn more about Hickey’s early career and accomplishments during her tenure with NEIWPCC at the LCBP in this article.