Golden Goody Award presented to Anna Cummins at UN Women LA Event

On behalf of the Goody Awards for social good, TV Host Sarah Backhouse (Future360.tv) presented a Golden Goody Award (our top humanitarian award) to Anna Cummins, 5 Gyres Founder, at the greater Los Angeles chapter of the USNC for UN WOMEN First Annual Special Assembly: Women, Climate Change and Human Rights on Saturday, December 8^th, 2012, in Santa Monica at the SGI Culture of Peace Center.

5 Gyres mission is to prevent plastic pollution,and the stand was customized for this special award. The Goody Awards changed their statue from acrylic to crystal glass, and asked fashion designer and artist Marina DeBris (LA ArtLab) to decorate this award for Anna. Marina designed a stand made out of plastic trash, which cleverly included a mermaid, shovel and snorkle.

And as a build up to the event, the Goody Awards launched a pro bono “Have a Green Plastic-Free Holiday” marketing campaign (Thanksgiving-New Years) with ongoing tips via multi-media (press release, social media marketing, video, contest, etc) for reducing plastic pollution during one of the highest consumption months of year.

As a new mom with over ten years of experience in non-profit environmental work, Anna is the Co-Founder of The 5 Gyres Institute (5 massive regions in the world’s oceans filling up with plastic trash) and Tedx speaker focused on stopping plastic pollution. Anna has worked in marine conservation, coastal watershed management, sustainability education, and high school ecology instruction, and is a recognized leader for raising awareness of ecological issues caused by plastic pollution.

Anna’s extensive experience in the environmental and water pollution prevention community includes a fellowship from the Sustainable Communities Leadership Program to work with Santa Cruz based non-profit Save Our Shores. In 2007, she joined Algalita Marine Research Foundation as education adviser, conducting school outreach and giving public presentations on plastic marine pollution. Anna later completed a month long, 4,000-mile research expedition studying plastic debris in the North Pacific Gyre, and a 2,000 mile cycling/speaking tour from Vancouver to Mexico, giving talks about plastic pollution.

Along with her husband Dr. Marcus Eriksen, Anna co-founded 5 Gyres in 2009, to research and communicate plastic pollution in remote regions of the world’s oceans, including the 3 southern hemisphere oceans where no previous research on plastic existed. After spending her honeymoon crossing the North Atlantic Gyre, Anna was elected a National Fellow of the Explorers Club in 2010.

For more information on this special award, event, and campaign and green tips visit, http://goodaywards.com, http://5gyres.org and http://unwlaspecialassembly.wordpress.com/category/climate-change/