Texas Campaign for the Environment: Board of Directors

Robin Schneider started her activist career in high school as a 17-year-old canvasser for the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) raising funds door-to-door to assist pro-ERA candidates. During college she led a campaign that stopped a plan to drill for oil on the UCLA campus, which would have displaced the university's childcare center. She also led a delegation of 18 California college students that traveled to Florida in early 1982 to work for passage of the ERA.

Robin was selected for a California State Assembly Fellowship in 1983 and worked on environmental issues during her year as a Fellow in Sacramento. She then gained campaign experience leading a voter registration campaign that signed up more than 17,000 voters in less than four months.

For eight years, Robin worked for a Los Angeles-based women's rights group and developed winning strategies for lobbying and electoral campaigns. In the mid-1990's, she became a volunteer English instructor at a teacher's training college in Northeast Thailand.

Robin began working with Texas Campaign for the Environment and its sister organization Public Research Works  in 1997. Under Robin's direction, TCE took a leading role in the campaign to close the Grandfather Loophole in the Texas Clean Air Act, for which she was dubbed the "Best Advocate for Breathers" by The Austin Chronicle.

She is a Vice Chair of the Computer TakeBack Campaign  and played a key role in successfully pressured Dell, the campaign's first corporate target, to take back its obsolete products and support producer takeback policies. In 2004, TCE won a second "Best of Austin" award (in conjunction with Dell) for "The Best New Partnership." Robin, TCE and the Computer TakeBack Campaign are now focused on improving Apple's performance and position on electronic waste.

Under Robin's direction, TCE has been working with landfill neighbors to impact local trash issues and statewide rules and legislation since late 2002. Austin City Councilmember Betty Dunkerley appointed Robin to the city's Long-Range Solid Waste Planning Task Force in 2005.

Robin also serves on the Board of Earth Share of Texas for Public Research Works. Her spouse works on land restoration projects at the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Research Center. She has been active with AFS Intercultural Programs as a high school exchange student to Kenya in 1977 and a host parent for exchange students from Ghana and Indonesia.