40th Anniversary Awardees: Congratulations on Your Achievement

• The Bennett Family For Their Long-Standing Leadership and Support for Our Environmental and Park Goals

The Bennett Family

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Honored for Commitment to Protecting Our Shoreline and Our Bay

Ed Bennett launched a brilliant career in 1949 working as a neuroscientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Simultaneously he began a lifelong service to the environment starting with the Sierra Club.

Ed served as Chair of the S.F. Bay Chapter of the Sierra Club, as a member of its Executive Committee, as Treasurer, and on the Conservation Committee and the East Bay Public Lands Committee.

Ed worked hard on successful campaigns to protect the California coastline, including the 1972 Proposition 20 (Coastal Initiative) and the Wildlife, Coastal, and Park Land Conservation Act of 1988, which provided $25 million for the McLaughlin Eastshore State Park. He was one of the core activists in the 1970’s (with friend Sylvia McLaughlin and other luminaries) who stopped the massive development at the shoreline on the Berkeley Meadow.

The Bay Chapter’s Ed Bennett Lifetime Achievement Award is named in his honor.

Ed co-founded Citizens for East Shore Parks (1985) serving as Treasurer into his 90’s. His unwavering commitment to open space and parks helped us achieve the 8.5-mile-long McLaughlin Eastshore State Park, called one of the most outstanding achievements in the history of open space protection.

Ed helped transform Cesar Chavez Park from a Berkeley dump to a regional treasure and successfully created trails, recreation and habitat as a Berkeley Waterfront Commissioner, and Berkeley Recreation Commissioner.

Ed’s sons Keith and Reid understand the importance of treasuring our shoreline, protecting habitat and giving our souls space to regenerate. Their amazing generosity has helped CESP reach the goal of a second major shoreline park, Point Molate, and reach major shoreline improvements we have seen accomplished.

They have introduced CESP to others, community members who share this vision of the shoreline and the Bay for its recreation and beauty. CESP moves forward only with Community beacons like the Bennetts. Ed would be proud to see the inspiration his family has carried forward. Ed Bennett’s legacy is now the Bennett family legacy.

We honor the dedicated Bennett Family, for Commitment to Protecting Our Shoreline and Our Bay.

• Doria Robinson Dwight Steele Award for Service for the Public Good

Doria Robinson

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Richmond City Council Member, Founder and Executive Director of Urban Tilth Dwight Steele Award for Service for the Public Good

The Dwight Steele Award for Service for the Public Good recognizes the person who captures the concept of commitment to the public good. It is named after Dwight Steele, a successful lawyer, environmental visionary, Board Member of Save the Bay, co-founder of CESP, co-founder of Save Lake Tahoe, and an avid outdoors person who loved the shore and the mountains and skied up into his late 80’s.

Dwight saw public service as essential to the commonwealth and devoted his best years to protecting nature’s beautiful places and precious habitats. His work and his extensive contacts were essential in advancing the goals of all three of those organizations. It is fitting that this Award is named after Dwight.

Citizens for East Shore Parks is honored to confer our Dwight Steele Award for Service for the Public Good to Richmond City Council Member Doria Robinson.

Doria Robinson is an exemplary community leader who founded Urban Tilth, the groundbreaking Richmond nonprofit that engages the community in improving nutrition, health, and self-sufficiency.

Urban Tilth’s perspective brings together the goals of environmental sustainability, access to home grown food, and creation of a food system that inspires, hires, and trains local residents to cultivate produce in Richmond on repurposed urban land.

Considered a dreamer when she started, she has proved that creating sustainable ecological programs makes meaningful change in people’s lives and promotes the message that the world benefits when practical dreamers are unafraid like Doria.

Doria has fortunately brought this consciousness with her to her role as Richmond City Council Member. She makes plain the interconnection of parks, open spaces, land stewardship and healthy ecosystems as to our political and municipal world. This insightful perspective emerges when she speaks of facilitating shoreline habitat, open space and parks.

Doria brings her inspiring world view and wisdom to bear in the marketplace of ideas as she brilliantly executes her role as Richmond City Council Member. Doria is one of the Richmond leaders who are helping to make Richmond a model for City governance.

We celebrate Doria Robinson, whose tireless dedication to environmental sustainability and public service makes her the ideal candidate for the Dwight Steele Award for Service for the Public Good.

• Gayle McLaughlin CESP Award for Forging Visions Into Reality

Gayle McLaughlin

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Former Mayor of Richmond
CESP Award for Forging Visions Into Reality

The Forging Visions into Reality Award honors the ability to see what could be; to grasp the vision of what could be; and to work tirelessly to make that vision into a reality. The award honors the practical dreamers, the visionary activists of the world.

This year, Citizens for East Shore Parks is honored to confer the CESP Award for Forging Visions into Reality to former Mayor and Richmond City Council Member Gayle McLaughlin.

From the very beginning, Gayle McLaughlin caught sight of a vision for a public park at Point Molate. She was inspired to run for Richmond City Council to bring a non-corporate perspective to deliberations and decisions at the Richmond City Council.

She became the beacon of public interest and a leader who effectively voiced the interests of the community on each issue before the City Council, including the need for waterfront park and open space where the community could regenerate. She effectively taught community and sustainability by her words as each issue arose at the City Council.

Over ten years ago, during her tenure as Mayor of Richmond, she opened the Beach Park to the public, instead of allowing community space to remain behind chain-link fencing. She has fully supported the magnificent volunteer crews who have cleaned the Beach Park every week so that the park could remain open.

Gayle was the Richmond leader most responsible for a created vision that guaranteed world-class open space and park for a Richmond community that deserved access to its waterfront, along the Point Molate shoreline, the North Richmond shoreline and connecting to the Pt. Pinole Regional Park. And she did all this in a fashion that allowed others to share and join in the vision.

Moreover, Gayle has worked to get toxic shoreline sites cleaned up and has been instrumental in the City Council’s adoption of responsible policies for a safe, healthy 32-mile Richmond shoreline.

For the wider community Gayle has shared the bounty that is the Richmond shoreline. Her tireless leadership and admirable world view has been key to achieving the dream of a Point Molate Regional Park, and the dream of a safe and beautiful Richmond shoreline.

Gayle McLaughlin, an extraordinary visionary, is the recipient of CESP’s Forging Visions into Reality award.

• Robert Cheasty Sylvia McLaughlin Award for Environmental Stewardship

Robert Cheasty

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Executive Director of CESP, Former Mayor of Albany
The Sylvia McLaughlin Award for Environmental Stewardship

The Sylvia McLaughlin Award for Environmental Stewardship is given to those who demonstrate Sylvia’s qualities: commitment to the environment, to seeing long-term projects to completion, to protecting the Bay and its habitats, to envisioning future shoreline parks and open space. The person demonstrating these qualities with clear, tenacious vision is the recipient of this year’s award, Robert Cheasty.

• 1985 Albany City Councilmember Cheasty got Albany to close its waterfront landfill;
• 1986 1) successfully pushed to establish the Albany Mudflats Ecological Reserve; 2) helped Albany sign a 66-year lease for a state park on the Albany Bulb;
• 1988 Albany Mayor Cheasty committed with Berkeley Mayor Loni Hancock, Emeryville Mayor Ken Bukowski and Assemblyman Tom Bates to jointly plan a shoreline park;
• 1988 He joined the CESP Board, became President (2001) and Executive Director (2016);
• 1989-2006 Led 5 successful battles to stop destructive waterfront developments in Albany;
• 1990-91 Robert protected the Albany waterfront by co-authoring Measure C and leading the campaign to pass Measure C, giving Albany voters the final vote on the Albany Waterfront.

As CESP President Robert worked with community and elected leaders and agencies to create the McLaughlin Eastshore State Park (2002); for the creation of the Dotson Family Marsh; and led CESP’s decades-long effort to save Point Molate as a park (2025).

Robert is a leader who organizes grass-roots efforts, listens to all, inspires others and brings organizations together for common goals. He is tenacious. Attorney Cheasty (ranked in Super Lawyers) successfully fought numerous legal battles for shoreline access, parks and open space.

For fighting the good fight in protecting our shoreline parks and open spaces that would not have existed but for his persistence, undying dedication and prescient vision of what could be accomplished, it is a great honor to give Robert Cheasty the Sylvia McLaughlin Award for Environmental Stewardship.

• Nancy Skinner CESP Award for Extraordinary Conservation

Nancy Skinner

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Former State Senator
The CESP Award for Extraordinary Conservation

This award is given to Nancy Skinner for her lifelong dedication to protecting the environment and her advocacy of parks, recreation and open spaces.

As a City Council Member in Berkeley (1984 to 1992), first elected while a student at Cal, she authored an ordinance to stop the use of Styrofoam cups, committed to the goal of creating an East Bay state shoreline park, supported Berkeley’s Measure Q (one of the waterfront zoning measures that helped facilitate the creation of the Eastshore State Park), and worked tirelessly to make the planet greener, safer and more just – because it was the right thing to do.

Nancy co-authored Fifty Things You Can Do to Save the Earth and additional articles on global warming. In 2006 to 2008 she became a Director on the East Bay Regional Park District Board where she pushed through park enhancements in Richmond and at the Pt. Pinole Regional Park. She served in both the California State Assembly (2008 to 2014) and the State Senate (2016 to 2024).

During her years at the Assembly and Senate, Nancy pushed through important environmental bills including:

• A bill renaming the Eastshore State Park to the McLaughlin Eastshore State Park in honor of CESP co-founder Sylvia McLaughlin;
• An energy savings bill for schools that provided funds to every California school district to pay for energy upgrades;
• A bill creating large-scale battery storage to reduce the state’s reliance on fossil fuel power plants making California the leading state for battery storage;
• A bill for two-way battery use: making electric vehicles power sources for homes and buildings by making the chargers bi-directional;
• A bill to reduce greenhouse gases in manufacturing; and
• $36 million. As Chair of the Senate Budget Committee she created the budget that secured $36 million to purchase the land at Point Molate for a Regional Park.

CESP is honored to award Senator Skinner its CESP Award for Extraordinary Conservation at its 40th Anniversary Celebration because of her tireless efforts on behalf of the environment.