MY WORK
I describe myself as an applied social and environmental scientist and community advocate. Most of my current consulting work focuses on strategic communications and community-created and -engaged practices. Current partner-collaborators include state natural resource agencies, non-profit corporations, local neighborhood groups, and safety advocacy organizations. This means I spend the majority of my time writing, reading, learning, communicating with impacted individuals and communities and those who have impacted them, following and participating in policy negotiations on safety, health, and environmental rights, and whenever possible sharing my passion for community-centered practices around long-term resilience, self-determination and liberation, collaborative and adaptive governance, human rights, and rights of nature. In 2021, I finished my first nonfiction book, Good Works, Love Rules, and am currently working on revisions and querying agents and publishers.
Over the past 15 years, I have used applied social science methods to ask questions about the human (dis)connections with and from Nature, the localized impacts of global capitalism and political power on rural and urban communities, and how our cultural histories influence current perceptions, biases, and behaviors. All of this research has been community-centered, collaborative, and participant-driven and has led to the development of alternative ways to frame our communications and deliberations about persistent and emerging social-environmental changes and conflicts. My very broad theoretical and practical focus has always been on the intentional re-centering of people, Nature, everyday lived experiences, and the well-being of individuals and communities in a rapidly changing and globalized world. I am driven by a commitment to working in non-violent, consensual, ethical, moral, locally-led, and people-centered ways that center and respect different cultural knowledges and traditions and the interconnectedness between people and Nature. I incorporate deliberative dialogue, dynamic facilitation, trauma-informed practice, and transformational processes into my work wherever possible.
DR. SIMONA PERRY’S PROFESSIONAL BIO
In 2012 Dr. Simona Perry founded c.a.s.e. Consulting Services LLC, a roots-based consultancy to provide local, regional, and national consulting services and resources to rural and urban communities directly impacted by rapid social and environmental changes and conflicts. In addition to entrepreneurial activity with c.a.s.e., Dr. Perry currently serves in the non-profit sector as CEO of Oceans Connect, Senior Communications Advisor for Livelihoods Knowledge Exchange Network (LiKEN), community engagement advisor to Pipeline Safety Coalition, and is a member of the Which Way Savannah Collective in coastal Georgia. Over the past 12 years, she served as Executive Director of Pipeline Safety Coalition (2020), Executive Director/Riverkeeper for the Ogeechee-Canoochee Riverkeeper (2018), as the Civic Professionalism Program Director for LiKEN (2013-2015), as a Research Scientist at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York (2011), and as a Mellon Post-Doctoral Scholar at Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania (2009-2011). In 2016, Dr. Perry was appointed by the U.S. Secretary of Transportation to serve a three-year term as a safety advocate representative on the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration Working Group on Voluntary Information-Sharing. As a public safety advocate, she provides input and serves on technical standards committees related to pipeline safety management systems, public engagement, and transforming safety culture. From 2004 to 2006 Simona directed a non-profit international biodiversity education organization based in Washington, D.C., and from 1995 to 2003 she worked as a marine mammal field biologist, environmental regulator, and policy analyst with NOAA Fisheries in Massachusetts, Seattle, California, and Maryland. She received a Bachelor of Science degree in Wildlife Biology & Management from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and a Master’s degree in Marine Affairs from the University of Washington, Seattle. In 2009 she was granted a Doctoral Degree in the Human Dimensions of Natural Resources Conservation from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.