Wellesley College Student Honored for her Commitment
to Environmental Issues

WELLESLEY, Mass. -- Wellesley College junior Leslye Penticoff of Moscow, Idaho, is taking ideas from the classroom and putting them to work throughout the world — from Copenhagen to Argentina to Idaho.

Wellesley junior Leslye Penticoff is pursuing sustainable development work in La Plata, Argentina, this summer. Her work is funded by a Morris K. Udall scholarship, awarded for her commitment to environmental issues.

The daughter of Anne Cheadle and Rick Penticoff, she has recently been honored with a Morris K. Udall scholarship for her commitment to environmental issues.

Penticoff is one of 45 students from around the United States to participate in the Global Engagement Summer Institute at Northwestern University in Chicago. She spent 10 days training in community development and organizing before the teams were dispatched to sites around the world. The scholarship will fund her summer work in La Plata, Argentina, where she is part of a four-person team working with a local non-governmental agency, Biosfera, and the Foundation for Sustainable Development.

“Our goal is sustainable development, in the economic and environmental sense, so to that end we're working to finish a solar water heater project at a community center in a marginalized immigrant neighborhood,” she said. “The water will make the center much more sanitary and comfortable for the dozens of people who use it every day.”

This fall, Penticoff will study abroad in Copenhagen, Denmark, and participate in “COP 15: The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.” The UN delegates will meet in December to draft an international environmental protocol that will replace the Kyoto Protocol when it expires in 2012. She will take seminars on international climate policy and organize support for the conference, before representing Biosfera at the convention.

Penticoff, an environmental studies major at Wellesley, is interested in national and international environmental policy. The interdisciplinary nature of the field has led her to pursue courses that examine threats to biodiversity or tackle international diplomacy more generally.

“I am also interested in the justice issues that arise when environmental degradation disproportionately impacts the poor, underdeveloped and women the most,” she said.

Following graduation, she plans to pursue sustainable development work and political organizing before pursuing a master’s in environmental policy administration and a law degree.

At Wellesley, she serves as the outreach coordinator for Wellesley Energy and Environmental Defense (WEED), as WEED liaison to the Sustainability Advisory Committee, as campus coordinator for Massachusetts Powershift, co-founder of Responsible Endowment Action, and as the Severance eco-rep. She has worked as a farm assistant for the Natick Community Organic Farm, a proxy voting student researcher in the investment office at Wellesley and as a statistics tutor. Last summer, she launched a recycling program at Moscow Building Supply as an AmeriCorps volunteer. She also volunteered this year with the Department of Conservation in Palmerston North, New Zealand.

Since 1875, Wellesley College has been a leader in providing an excellent liberal arts education for women who will make a difference in the world. Its 500-acre campus near Boston is home to 2,300 undergraduate students from all 50 states and 68 countries.

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