Speaker Series Featuring Courtney Mueller of St. Louis CITY
Tuesday November 19, 2024
6:30 – Meet & Greet
7:00 – Presentation
7:45 – Q & A
Courtney Mueller
St. Louis CITY SC
Director of Public Engagement
Bio of Courtney Mueller, Director of Public Engagement, St. Louis CITY SC
Courtney Mueller serves as St. Louis CITY SC’s Director of Public Engagement. In this role, Courtney helps manage and communicate the Club’s efforts and impact in the community to be more than a soccer team and to bring people together through the power of sports. She helps look after CITY’s strategic civic and neighborhood
engagement efforts, community-based communications, sustainability platform Our CITY, and radio broadcast partnerships.
Courtney has been working with CITY since 2019, first as a public engagement
consultant and officially joining the club in 2021. Prior to CITY, Courtney worked in
public communications efforts for regional initiatives in economic development,
education, health care, public transit, and neighborhood development. Born and raised
in the Metro East, Courtney returned to St. Louis in 2007 after living throughout the U.S.
and Russia because St. Louis really is an amazing place to live and work. She was
raised on Cardinals baseball and Mizzou football, and her family are now die-hard CITY
fans. She lives in Troy, IL with her husband Chris and two children, Audrey and Sam.
2021
Dreams were realized in the Fall of 2021 when All American Saint Louis Lodge #9 kicked off the Speaker Series. If you have a dynamic friend with a timely topic contact PER Luby – [email protected].
2021 – Upcoming
Patrick Ishmael is the director of government accountability at the Show-Me Institute. He is a native of Kansas City and graduate of Saint Louis University, where he earned honors degrees in finance and political science and a law degree with a business concentration. His writing has been featured in the Los Angeles Times, Weekly Standard, and dozens of publications across the state and country. Ishmael is a regular contributor to Forbes and HotAir.com. His policy work predominantly focuses on tax, health care, and constitutional law issues. He is a member of the Missouri Bar.
For twenty one years, Jason worked at Missouri Botanical Garden as North Gardens Supervisor and Bulb Collections Specialist, maintaining and specializing in the bulb, daylily, and iris collections, among others. During his time at the Garden, Jason participated in plant collecting expeditions to the Altai mountains of southern Siberia, the Caucasus mountains of the Republic of Georgia, the High Atlas mountains of Morocco, and the Changbaishan mountains in northeastern China. He has also traveled to Taiwan, New Zealand, the Netherlands, and throughout the U.S. for his work with daffodils, his greatest passion. Jason’s daffodil collection is situated on three acres of family land where nearly 3,000 varieties of daffodils are grown for small-scale production, hybridizing, and evaluation; PHS Daffodils specializes in classic, historic, and novel varieties for garden and exhibition. Jason began hybridizing daffodils–and daylilies, lilies, and crinum–in the late 1990s, and the best of his first-generation daffodil seedlings are now in production. Jason’s work with bulbs has been widely featured in magazines, journals, newspapers, and television programs. Additional to PHS Daffodils, Jason also operates Professional Horticultural Services, specializing in residential garden design and maintenance.
PHILOSOPHY – “I truly believe young people have amazing potential. With the right tools and direction, that potential can be realized and even soar. My mission is to make a difference in the lives of young people and teach them to do the same in others.”
BIOGRAPHY – Since 1986, Ray Lozano has educated and entertained thousands of students in hundreds of middle schools and high schools from Alaska to Florida, and internationally in the Cayman Islands and Bermuda. Ray has a talent and gift for conveying what could be construed as boring drug and alcohol prevention information in such a fun and humorous way that his audiences come away informed and entertained. The best analogy would be giving your kids medicine in a spoon-full of sugar. There’s a good reason that Ray’s audiences feel like they just came back from the Improv rather than from a “lecture.” Ray has performed stand-up comedy at the Improv in Hollywood and Ontario, CA. It is his background in comedy that keeps his audiences coming back time and time again. The fact that he has been asked to return to many of the same schools across the nation, some for as long as 15 years, speaks to Ray’s ability to keep his information updated, fresh and relevant.
Ray’s varied experience professionally has equipped him to become the unique speaker that he is today. His career started out in the Teen Challenge Ministry Institute, where he saw firsthand the ravages of drug use in young adults. Having not used drugs or alcohol, this was an eye-opening experience to see firsthand the deleterious effects that drugs have on a young person. He saw how drugs stripped away a person’s chance for an extraordinary life. From working with people fighting their way back from addiction, he realized he wanted to work with kids before they got involved in drugs and alcohol, which led him to his work in prevention.
As a Vice Principal for a private elementary school, he launched an after-school program with an emphasis on promoting a family-oriented, drug-free philosophy. This gave him an understanding from an educator’s perspective that schools are looking for the best for their students.
Ray Lozano was the Program Specialist for a very successful youth prevention program at an internationally known, Level-A teaching hospital. The youth program provides drug and alcohol education for youth ages 14-18. Through the program, Ray increased the adolescent’s knowledge of the effects of drugs and alcohol on the body, the addictive process, consequences of risky behaviors, alternative choices and the ability to make positive life decisions.
Ray holds a current certification as Prevention Specialist from the state of California as a drug and alcohol counselor.