Lakewood Chamber of Commerce Board member, Ann Zabkar, presents Mary Evans with the Chamber's Outsanding New Member Award

Mary Evans of GreenSmartGifts is the Lakewood Chamber of Commerce 2009 Outstanding New Member.  Ms. Evans was awarded this honor based on her support of the Chamber and various other civic organizations in town. While her downtown business as a green retailer just celebrated it's one year anniversary, Mary has also been busy dedicating her time, energy, and expertise in all things green to several organizations and projects in the community. For example, Mary started a GreenLakewood coffee hour to bring together Lakewood folks working on sustainability initiatives in order to identify opportunities to collaborate; this group has evolved into "EcoLakewood".  She also worked with H20 to have Lakewood declared an official Earth Hour city and helped coordinate Earth Hour events.

One of the most visible examples of Mary's influence in the community was the launching of "The Art of Recycling"; a partnership with the Lakewood City Department of Public Works and Lakewood is Art, in which local artists decorated eight trash bins to be used as recycle bins in downtown Lakewood. In addition, Mary partnered with Lakewood Is Art and Local Girl Gallery for the April 25th "Junk2Funk" sustainable fashion show and auction that benefited the North Coast Health Ministry and she helped with the planning of "Rutabaga Nights", a LEAF fundraiser.

In her acceptance remarks, Mary Evans stated that when she started her new business after years in the corporate world, she wanted to focus on both mission and margin.  The Lakewood Chamber of Commerce congratulates Ms. Evans and GreenSmartGifts on the accomplishment of this goal.