Shea O’Neil spent her first year of university at a school in Pensacola, Florida. Just days before the school year ended, the Deepwater Horizon oil spill occured in the Gulf of Mexico. O’Neil says that the spill had a lasting effect on her. When she returned to Canada and started at SFU the following year, she decided to take environmental science. She eventually found her passions were more suited to environmental geography and recently graduated with a bachelor of arts with an environmental geography specialty.
O’Neil’s dedication to sustainability at SFU extended far beyond the classroom during her time as a student. She volunteered as a peer educator with Embark (then Sustainable SFU), was part of the first cohort of Radius Fellows and participated in the work-study program at Carbon Talks.
She now works as the assistant to Shauna Sylvester, director of the Centre for Dialogue, where she says she finds great support for her passions. “I get a lot of opportunities to participate in events that I’m really passionate about, especially sustainability and waste related,” says O’Neil. That passion has her currently serving as a SFU Sustainability Ambassador, a role that has her volunteering her time to be both an educator and advocate for sustainability within her department.
Along with former Radius Fellow Jessica Beketa and Emily Carr University grads Karen Byskov and Jayde Chang, O’Neil also runs an initiative called Repair Matters. The projects aims to create a community around repairing, rather than throwing away, through regular events and a blog.