Category: Past Speakers

Mobile Bay National Estuary Program- Community Relations & Business Resource Manager
Rick Frederick is the Community Relations and Business Resource Manager for the Mobile Bay National Estuary Program. Having spent over 20 years as a Business Development Professional with diversified experience in sales and marketing for the healthcare, education, hospitality, and utility industries, Rick joined the NEP in March 2014. Rick combines his business background with his love of coastal Alabama to meet environmental challenges that lie ahead.
Rick first came to Mobile in the late 1960s when his dad, Rex, was hired as the first head basketball coach at the University of South Alabama. He is a graduate of St. Paul’s Episcopal School and Auburn University, where he earned a Bachelor of Science degree in Business Management. After graduation Rick spent several years in Birmingham, New Orleans, Colorado, and Nashville, Tn., before moving back to South Alabama in 2002 and currently resides in Fairhope, Al.
Rick works with private industry, community leaders and local citizens of Mobile and Baldwin counties to ensure they understand the purpose, goals, and objectives of the Mobile Bay NEP. He looks to involve numerous stakeholders from all facets of the community to help ensure a healthy estuary and bay and takes a community based approach to advance local environmental projects on both sides of the bay.

Gulf Coast native Dale Speetjens co-founded Shipshape Urban Farms with his wife Angela in the spring of 2017. After high school he joined the US military and served in Operation Iraqi Freedom. Following his serve he earned a BS in Environmental Design, a Masters of Landscape Architecture, and a Masters of Community Planning for Auburn University. In 2015 the couple moved back to Mobile for Dale to take a Project Manager position with the Mayor’s Innovation Team. During his time with the Innovation Team he conducted geospatial analysis and helped develop the blight index. A year later he began teaching in Auburn University’s Masters of Landscape Architecture program. Additionally, Dale was a visiting professor at the 2016 Galapagos International Architecture Studio. There he worked with a diverse team of students, practitioners, and professors from around the world to explore the current and future development of the islands. His research interest include; blue urbanism, geospatial design, environmental and social justice, food systems, resilience design, and national park design.

Thursday, September 21, 2017
Our program today: Greg Cochran – Alabama League of Municipalities
Greg Cochran attended the university of North Alabama in Florence where he majored in Political Science and Psychology. During the mid-1980’s he began working on political campaigns as a volunteer before joining the staff of the Medical Association of the State of Alabama where he represented the interest of Alabama physicians.
Since 1996 Greg has served as the Director of Intergovernmental Relations for the Alabama League of Municipalities. In that position he is responsible for both federal and state legislation. The league was established in 1935 as a voluntary association of Alabama’s cities and towns and is the primary lobbying advocate for Alabama municipalities.
He is also president of the Alabama Municipal Funding Corporation which was developed by the league to assist municipal members with the refinancing of debt and funding local projects through low interest loans.
Greg lives in Montgomery with his wife Kelly and their two children, William and Sanders.

Rotary Program for Thursday September 14, 2017
Aaron Sharockman: Politifact
Aaron Sharockman has served as executive director of Politfact since 2010. Politfact is a fact-checking website that rates the accuracy of claims made by elected officials and others. Aaron oversees PolitiFact’s operations, development and revenue while assisting in its journalistic mission.
Aaron is a 2016-17 Reynolds Fellow at the University of Missouri and co-teaches a class on political fact checking at the University Of Missouri School Of Journalism. He is a graduate of Indiana University.

Our Program Today: Public Television for the Gulf Coast: Bob Culkeen – WSRE-TV
Since December 2016, Bob Culkeen has served as General Manager of WSRE which provides public television for the Gulf Coast, and as Executive Director for the WSRE-TV Foundation. The station is a recognized leader in education and an outstanding creator or local content and community engagement.
Bob has worked in many positions throughout the public media and educational fields since 1979 and was previously involved with WJCT, the PBS television station in Jacksonville. He was also an adjunct faculty member at Florida State College, also in Jacksonville.
He received his education In Massachusetts, earning his M.Ed from Westfield State University, a BS from Fitchburg State University and his AS from Grahm Junior College in Boston.

Randy Kennedy is program director and host of Sports Drive on Mobile’s WNSP Sports Radio 105.5 FM, the country’s first all-sports FM station.
Kennedy has been a leading voice in the Gulf Coast since becoming sports editor at the Mobile Press-Register in 2002. He was three times named state sports columnist of the year. His responsibilities eventually including supervision of all editorial content proved by the Mobile office of AL.com.
He left newspapers and the web site to work full-time in radio in February 2015.
Kennedy grew up in Birmingham and graduated with a degree in Communications from the University of Montevallo.

An investigative reporter for AL.com, Ben Raines has covered environmental issues and natural wonders in Alabama for nearly two decades. He wrote and produced the documentary America’s Amazon, which has been distributed to public schools across Alabama and is airing on PBS stations around the country. His underwater film work has appeared in documentaries on the Discovery Channel and National Geographic TV, and now in The Underwater Forest, which he wrote, filmed, and directed. Ben is a graduate of New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts with a degree in filmmaking, and is a U.S. Coast Guard-licensed captain, giving tours of the Mobile-Tensaw Delta. He and his wife and son live in Fairhope, Ala.