Sponsors
Signature Sponsor
Diamond Sponsors 
Presented By
ANNA MARIA ISLAND PRESERVATION TRUST 
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Vision
Authenticity advances sustainability for Florida's future.
Our sustainableandauthenticflorida website has launched. It was designed by David and Jennifer Shafer of Shafer Consulting of Sarasota under the direction of Florida Journeys Communications. A succession of small changes will surely follow, but the site is up and ready for registrants. Even before the site launch, we have already received our first three conference inquiries.
Please help generate registrants by distributing information to your lists and through social media. If it's helpful, the site contains two statements that you're of course welcomed to use as you wish. In particular, the conference seeks to attract people from the arts, business, development and real estate, education, planning, tourism and transportation.
Funding for Sustainable and Authentic Florida is also now largely in hand thanks to sponsorships from the Bradenton Area Convention & Visitors Bureau, Pine Avenue Restoration (PAR) of the City of Anna Maria, the Sandbar Restaurant, and Anna Maria Island Resorts. Additional sponsors are still sought. Visit http://sustainableandauthenticflorida.com/sponsor/ to download the sponsorship package. If you have interested sponsors, we will be happy to follow up as you suggest.
Herb Hiller, Conference Director herbhiller12@gmail.com Caroline McKeon, Conference Associate Director caroline@floridajourneys.com |
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Conference Updates
● We have held productive meetings with chairman of the Anna Maria Island Chamber of Commerce Karen Lapensee, Bradenton Downtown Development Authority Executive Director David Gustafson, Manatee Economic Development Corporation President Sharon Hillstrom, and Manatee County Convention & Visitors Bureau Executive Director Elliott Falcione.
● Media are starting to pay attention. First conference reports have appeared in the Bradenton Herald, in the Anna Maria Islander, and in the Anna Maria Island Sun. |
Presenter Spotlight - John Moran
"If Florida had a Photographer Laureate, John Moran should hold that title." So says USF Florida Studies Program Co-Director Gary Mormino. Both will be key presenters at the Sustainable & Authentic Conference.
From his home in Gainesville, John seeks a vision of natural Florida as pre-contact natives must have known it. He says that "(my) work celebrates the magic of a unique landscape born of water and blessed with beauty beyond measure."
John makes a perfect fit for our conference in coastal Manatee County. His portfolio of landscape and wildlife photography ranges "from the Gulf to the Atlantic with an emphasis on Florida waters, the rivers, lakes, coasts, swamps and springs, and the creatures that inhabit them."
His photography has appeared in National Geographic, Life, Time, Newsweek, Smithsonian, The New York Times Magazine, and on the cover of the National Audubon Society Field Guide to Florida. Additional honors include Photographer of the Year for the Southeastern United States by the National Press Photographers Association, while his photograph of alligators at dusk at Paynes Prairie State Park was selected as top-placing American entry in the United Nations Earth Summit photo contest.
John's "Journal of Light: The Visual Diary of a Florida Nature Photographer" - a 20-year collection of photos and essays - was published in 2004 before debuting a year later as a major traveling exhibit of the Florida Museum of Natural History.
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Place-making
Our conference inquires into how authentic community can overcome Florida's domination by sprawl and consumption. The conference won't say "do this" or "do that." Instead, we will learn how authenticity can help re-direct post-recession Florida. At the same time, we will ask how will the crisis of the middle class affect what we do.
Our conference doesn't argue that we tithe away our goods for some monastic state. Instead, the conference will suggest that the quest for satisfying lives doesn't have to depend on expert science, expert technology, and expert government.
By authenticity we mean people-derived consensus about who we are where we are. Are we going to remain wasteful or is it time to turn sustainable? How does that choice affect our culture and our economy? What's the measure of happiness when we no longer accept ourselves as the workforce for engendering waste and sprawl?
Fortunately, the conference won't pose these questions in the abstract. Sustainable & Authentic Florida centers on four Florida places that will tell about change in each of their community outlooks: Miami Beach, Wakulla and mainland Franklin counties, DeLand and northwest Volusia County, and coastal Manatee County. For details, click on hotlinks at http://www.sustainableandauthenticflorida.com/program/.
The conference is about how this plays out in the real world.
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