In May 2018, Bennett was elected to his student council for his seventh-grade school year. On the same day, Amy was elected to the City Council of Stillwater, Oklahoma, a community of almost 50,000 residents, a regional hub for healthcare and commerce, and home to Oklahoma State University.
In the years since, Amy has continued to serve both her community and her clients, remediating contaminated sites and securing millions of dollars in funding to support such projects. She combines her passion for helping others with her skills in brownfields, grant writing, compliance, and urban planning to support environmental projects. In addition, she was appointed Vice Mayor of Stillwater in 2023 and will serve her community in this role until 2026.
While serving as Vice Mayor, she has learned about public-sector clients from a different viewpoint. She says that sitting on the “other side of the table” as a client of consultants is eye-opening and lets her see her consulting clients’ perspectives more clearly. She also credits part of her consulting success to this new perspective.
“A core value of our family has always been community service, and I have been very fortunate to steer my career in that direction.”
Redevelopment with Community at the Center: It Just Makes Sense
Recently, Amy and her team worked with the USEPA to provide brownfield redevelopment services to a predominantly minority neighborhood in Wendell, North Carolina. She worked with the community members and the town to use USEPA and the Housing of Urban Development (HUD) funding to vision, provide environmental assessment, and redevelop an historic and underutilized school into a community center.
Amy explains that in rural towns, economic development can be challenging because the real estate market and redevelopment projects often don’t ‘pencil out.’
Geosyntec’s work with the federal government funding programs “gives us a chance to think bigger about redevelopment, and we often do it in parts of town with a lack of investment.”
In the past 24 months, Amy and her team helped clients receive more than $515M in grant awards from the United States Department of Energy to fund innovative solutions and address greenhouse gas emission reduction, carbon storage, renewable energy and electric grid stability, lithium production, and industrial carbonization. One of her clients shared praises of Amy and her team, saying “We could not have done it without your team. You were a critical part of our success here and we are excited to work with you on what comes next.” With grant projects like these, Amy maintains her focus on helping fund work in underserved communities and improving environmental justice across the United States.
Finding Personal Inspiration through Her Professional Work
Amy has always seen her professional life and community involvement as intertwined.
In addition to serving her community through work and volunteering for the city council, Amy also sits on the Board of Directors of Mya’s Promise, a nonprofit that supports children and families living with special needs. Mya’s Promise not only provides peace of mind and a sense of community to these families, but also provides scholarships, family grants, programs, and activities.
In her work with Mya’s Promise, Amy helped build an inclusive and accessible playground for the Stillwater community, The PlayAbility Project at Strickland Park. She championed this project because she understands the importance of play to children’s development and recognizes that not all children have the same playtime opportunities or abilities. Amy observed her community, took inspiration both from her personal experience and professional work, and applied her skill set to help create this playground.
Building Brownfields that Bring Positive Change
Now, at Geosyntec, Amy is helping Oklahoma City redevelop a brownfield site into a new soccer stadium. The stadium will be surrounded by a mixed-use development for housing, restaurants, and storefronts. Amy says she’s particularly excited about this project because it brings together many local investors and is a significant initiative on the last substantial acreage of land in the city. And in addition to increasing tourism and boosting the economy, the project builds community.
“We are a part of helping communities realize their hopes and dreams for redevelopment and serving their needs, whether it’s commercial space, retail space, or park space.”
These kinds of projects, like her work with Mya’s Promise, are just the kind of work she likes best, because they allow her to draw inspiration from her family and their core value of service to create positive change for communities.
More About Amy
After earning her Master’s in Urban Planning and Environmental and Land Use Planning from the University of Kansas, Amy pursued brownfields redevelopment and environmental planning. At Geosyntec, Amy is a Senior Principal consultant who combines her passion for helping others with her skills in brownfields, grant writing, compliance, and urban planning to support environmental projects. Amy works with private- and public-sector clients, secures millions of dollars in grants for her clients, and speaks at conferences about the benefits of land recycling and brownfields redevelopment.
In one of our Benefiting Communities videos, Amy explains how she helps find funding for brownfield redevelopment in areas that are typically overlooked due to lack of resources and funds.
Learn more about Amy: Amy Dzialowski (Geosyntec.com)
Vice Mayor Amy Dzialowski | Stillwater, Oklahoma
About the Author
Maria Bonaparte is a Digital Marketing Coordinator at Geosyntec. In addition to writing and editing web content, one of the best parts of her job is talking with practitioners about why they are passionate about the work they do.
