Meet our 2023 Henrietta Award Winners!

Post by Thomas Meinzen, Keri Handaly, and Max Samuelson

*The Henrietta Awards are named after our beloved Council mascot, Henrietta the Great Blue Heron.*

Since 2001, the Henrietta Award, also referred to as the Environmental Leadership & Achievement Award, has recognized individuals, groups, or projects that have made outstanding contributions to the health of our watershed.

This year, we are excited to honor two amazing and dedicated watershed volunteers as our 2023 Henrietta Award winners. Meei Lum and Paul Taylor have each spent hundreds of hours paddling on the Columbia Slough, sharing this special place with others and contributing their time and energy to make it better for everyone. We are immensely grateful for all that they’ve brought to the Columbia Slough and to our community.

*Meei with her photograph of Columbia Slough paddlers on a natural habitat history sign in north Portland.*

Meei Lum is an exceptional Columbia Slough Watershed Council board member who has served and volunteered with the Council for 15 years. Initially, Meei joined the board representing a business within the watershed and later stayed on as a devoted community member. Over the years, Meei has volunteered at every major festival held by the Council many times over. She helped staff form the structure and training program for the volunteer Paddle Team and was regularly on the dock helping the public safely in and out of boats. Meei has also served for years as our volunteer event photographer! Our beautiful annual reports and website are full of her photographs. She served on the Fundraising Committee, assisted with event planning, and was integral to supporting the creation of the Council’s Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (JEDI) Strategic Plan. For the past six years, Meei has served on the JEDI subcommittee and assisted with the ongoing coordination and discussions of JEDI topics at board meetings. We honor Meei’s outstanding devotion and service with the 2023 Henrietta Award, and also send her virtual hugs goodbye, as Meei has moved to enjoy a new chapter with more sunny days in California. Thankfully, she will remain on our Board of Directors as a virtual participant. We are so grateful for all her contributions to our organization and the Columbia Slough community!

*Paul and his wife Hope kayak and clean up trash from the Slough.*

Like Meei, Paul Taylor has gone above and beyond to support the health of the Columbia Slough. If you’ve ever paddled out from the Whitaker Slough in the last couple years, you’ve probably seen Paul on the water, litter picker in tow, hauling an improbable pile of trash on top of his kayak. In 2020, Paul adopted a section of the Columbia Slough from Whitaker Ponds up the Middle Slough along Cornfoot Rd, taking SOLVE’s “Adopt a River” program to a new level. Since November 2020, Paul has removed over 180,000 pieces of trash (185,528 to be exact) and spent 413 days on the Slough! It is truly remarkable what he has been able to accomplish over this stretch. We’ve seen Paul balancing an entire porcelain toilet on the front of his kayak and dragging tire after tire up the bank onto Cornfoot Rd (137 of them, if you were wondering). Though he does most of this incredible work on his own, Paul has also been a key member of our paddle team, helping lead groups of volunteers on Slough cleanups across the watershed and organizing his own volunteer events to target certain hotspots for trash. He is a fixture of the watershed community, always in a great mood and excited to share stories of recent treasures found on the water. Paul’s dedication and connection to the Slough is an inspiration to all of us at the Council, and we are happy to honor him and Meei with the 2023 Henrietta Awards.

Thank you and congratulations, Paul and Meei!