About Us
You don’t have to be an environmentalist to help conserve our natural resources. You can make small changes every day that add up to create real impact. And participating is fun!
Compete to Conserve provides you with the tools you need to set personal conservation goals and track your progress. Share your goals with the community and help each other reach them!
Feeling competitive? Challenge your friends or accept challenges from other members. Together, we can make progress and have a little fun while we compete to conserve.
Compete to Conserve is a supportive and fun community. Compete to Conserve is a resource for tools and information to help you reach your sustainable goals. Compete to Conserve is what you make of it, so jump in and let us know what you think!
About the Team
We created Compete to Conserve in the fall of 2007 because we wanted to make a difference and not just a statement.
Craig Garner, Founder
Craig is the CEO of a community hospital in Los Angeles County. That’s just his day job. He’s also an avid music and art lover. He runs his own record label and sits on the board of the LA Opera. He might be the only board member who shows up to meetings on a motorcycle.
Tim Barkow, Co-Founder
Tim is an experienced journalist, web developer and graphic artist. As the co-founder and Creative Director of SMITH Magazine, Tim helped create the six-word memoir bestseller, Not Quite What I Was Planning. We tried to reduce Tim’s professional experience into a six-word resume but he’s been a busy guy. He previously served as the online general manager at SagaCity Media, co-founded Skoodles Internet (an online service for children), co-founded the web-consultancy Thinkcorps, and has written for publications including Wired, Wired News, Business 2.0, ESPN The Magazine and Inc.
Cris Dobbins
In the spring of 2008, Cris Dobbins joined Compete to Conserve as an artistic/graphic designer and director (and sometimes the voice of reason). Spending most of her life between Hawaii, the Caribbean, India and northern California, Cris relocated to southern California in 2006. Cris’ solid educational and professional/background in fine art and photography and her uncompromising dedication to having a good time completes our founding team.
Micki Krimmel
Micki joined the team in August 2008. Micki cut her online community teeth at Participant Productions, a film company founded with the mission to affect social change. Micki built the media company’s first online activist community and led the interactive media efforts for Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth as well as Participant’s other award-winning films. Micki was also a columnist for Worldchanging.com and her work has been published in the best-selling book, Worldchanging: A User’s Guide for the 21st Century, .net magazine, SXSW World and countless online publications. She has also worked as the Director of Community at Revver.com and has advised numerous startups on their social media strategies. You can follow Micki’s exploits including her passion for roller derby at Mickipedia.com.
Editorial Team
We are joined by a team of professional journalists and editors who are committed to sharing the most relevant and useful conservation news and information with our community.
Julie Sullivan has tried her hand at every form of media — from film, television and radio to print and online publications. Her work includes research, writing or editing for Wired magazine, The Industry Standard, CNBC television, NBC radio, WebReview.com, Guru.com, Ms.Money.com, ClickZ.com, Wells Fargo, Kirshenbaum, Bond and Partners advertising and LeapFrog. She also has two masters degrees in writing and has taught for Santa Rosa Junior College and the University of San Francisco. She fully admits addiction to using paper towels and complete devotion to the Boston Red Sox.
Anne Speedie is an advertising copywriter, freelance journalist, and recovering uber-consumerist. She has written for a variety of publications and companies, including Wired magazine, One magazine, Gap, babyGAP, Pottery Barn, Williams-Sonoma, The Picture People, John Muir Health, Charles Schwab, Wells Fargo, and Barclays Global Investors. Someday she hopes to find ways to reuse the years worth of shopping bags cramming her pantry.
Angela Iuorno joined the editorial team of Compete to Conserve in August 2008. Hailing from a background in public relations in the fashion and entertainment industries, this is her first foray into blogging for a public community outside of her circle of friends. Her current “daytime” occupation is a publicist for independent film and her favorite snack is Uncle Eddie’s Vegan Chocolate Chip Cookies.
Cynthia Schultes: Cynthia Schultes has a Ph.D. in history and has taught history and writing at universities in both the United States as well as Japan. A self-proclaimed packrat, she is currently working on adopting a more Zen-like lifestyle as part of her Compete-to-Conserve mission.
Shout Outs
We’re also extremely grateful to Jenny Wang, whose excellent design skills helped shape our site design. Big thanks also goes out to Guillaume Mathieu, Dan Blaker and the crew at Intrigo, who — despite being in the middle of moving their entire company to Portland from Tucson — put some much-needed polish on the code that powers this website. The bookmarklet code was adapted from the excellent Asaph microblogging project. Our music search is powered by Seeqpod, Google Maps API is helping with zip-code validation, Amazon S3 hosts our media files, and the whole shebang is powered by Ellislab’s CodeIgniter framework.
