Contest

We are excited to announce the winner of the Mobile Beacon Moments Storytelling Contest.

Congrats to our #MBMoments winner, Dynamic Community Solutions! Thanks to everyone who shared, voted, and learned about the organizations we serve!


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Title: Save the Harbor/Save the Bay
Author: mb_moments_admin
Votes: ?

Category: MB Moments Top 10
Views: ?
Description:

Save The Bay's Mobile Beacon Moment

If awarded with a Mobile Beacon Community Grant, how will your organization use the monetary donation?

In a typical year, the 36 young people who make up our summer staff, many of whom have been with our organization for several years, are the face of our organization, bringing STEAM and Humanities based curriculum to over 35,000 youth, and their families.

However, 2020 was not a typical year. Instead of working directly with boatloads of people as we have done in the past, we temporarily transitioned to creating virtual programming to connect youth from our community partners to Boston Harbor under these difficult circumstances, and serve as virtual ambassadors to help keep our beaches safe and open. In response to the pandemic, we moved our programs online, creating safe curriculum and activities that could be done from home, which we shared on our website, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and our youth program blog Sea, Sand & Sky to help meet the needs of our 130 organizational partners. I encourage you to take the time to explore these programs and activities on our Virtual Boston Harbor page at www.savetheharbor.org.

With $10,000 of support from Mobile Beacon, we will continue to produce virtual programming that continues to introduce the youth and families we serve to Boston Harbor, the region’s public beaches, and the harbor islands from the safety of their own homes, while it is still unsafe to resume our typical in-person programming, harbor cruises, and in-depth environmental education curriculum. Should the effects of the pandemic subside or a vaccine be developed we are ready at a moments notice to resume the in-person programming we have offered to the Greater Boston Region’s residents since 2002.

Despite the uncertainty at this time as to what 2021 will look like as we submit this request given the COVID-19 pandemic and rapidly developing changes to daily life at a local, national and global scale, we are confident that when the pandemic subsides, we will continue to be able to provide free, first-rate environmental education to the region’s youth who need it most. While we are not yet certain what the intermediate and longer term impacts the pandemic will have on the design of our free events and programs, we remain committed to serving the youth, teens, and families who typically take part in our Youth Environmental Education Programs, our 130 youth and community partner organizations, and all the regions residents who still face financial and systematically racist barriers preventing access to their beaches and waterfront.

In the near term, we are certain our online curriculum will engage young people who cannot attend a traditional in-person semester in the fall or take part in camps and summer enrichment activities next year. In the longer term we are confident that this digital content will be a valuable asset to Save the Harbor/Save the Bay, our youth and community partners, parents and teachers, and the thousands of youth, teens and families our free programs will continue to serve.

How will your organization use the 10 mobile hotspots with free internet service?

As we temporarily transition to irtual programming it is more important than ever that our summer youth staff has access to reliable and portable internet connections like that provided by Mobile Beacon.

In addition to continuing to produce the engaging virtual content described above, we will also continue to take the time to create engaging opportunities for our seasonal and full-time staff to engage more deeply in the issues facing our city, communities, and the environment. The vast majority of these opportunities are offered out in the field at our 14 program sites, often far away from reliable internet connections like those provided by Mobile Beacon’s Hotspots.

Even under these unprecedented conditions, this summer our youth program staff of 36 (which will include 30 Boston area high school age Junior Program Assistants) will served as virtual ambassadors helping to keep our beaches safe and open by encouraging beach goers to follow social distancing guidelines to stop the social spread of COVID-19. Should the COVID-19 pandemic continue, Six Team Leaders will oversee socially-distanced groups of six Junior Program Assistants. We max out our team size at six people to minimize the amount of contact each staffer had on a daily basis and maintained the same socially-distanced “pods” throughout the summer.

The successful safety precautions we will use such as taking daily temperatures, wearing masks, frequently washing hands, and using hand sanitizer will help to prevent the possible spread of COVID-19. With these precautions, we are confident we will see zero cases of COVID among our staff. These small and consistent teams will also foster a close-knit team environment that promotes teamwork, enthusiasm, and encouragement from peers to excel during the workday.

Throughout the summer, Save the Harbor’s staff of experienced educators and the youth we employ as Junior Program Assistants will take part in 9 harbor tours built on the curriculum we developed as part of our Share the Harbor and All Access Boston Harbor programs. Our youth program staff will also develop, produce, and publish weekly online videos blog posts and social media content that highlights the STEAM curriculum we have developed using simple tools and materials that can be found at home.

Each week there will be a team assignment to create a deliverable geared towards environmental science, history, and attractions at each of the sites that the teams will visit. The deliverables will include videos, activities, lesson plans, infographics, vlogs, and social media posts. Each team member will have a different role in planning and creating these weekly deliverables, including research, on site exploration, and video/activity creation, as well as pulling together the final product so that it will be polished enough to send out to the community. The work that they do will increase their knowledge of technology, public speaking skills, presentation skills, research and referencing skills, collaboration and delegation skills, and much more. While out at these program sites, each using a Mobile Beacon as connection to the internet.

Every Monday will be dedicated to virtual staff meetings for both senior and youth staff, followed by a speaker. Afterwards there will be time for the youth staff to break up into their teams to plan their deliverable for the week. The day will conclude when each team has presented to the senior staff their plan for the week. Tuesday through Thursday the teams will be on site collecting all the material that they needed for their planned deliverable. Fridays are dedicated to the teams putting their deliverable together as a team before checking in with Youth Program Senior Staffers. They also take this time to work on their weekly blogs that will cover a wide range of topics including, an introduction, the Boston Harbor cleanup, marine life, climate resiliency, environmental justice, water quality, fisheries, and their summer reflections. Each week they will also explore how each of these topics relates to their specific program site on the Harbor.

Mental health remains an obvious priority for our majority BIPOC youth staff, and we will take necessary actions to connect our staff with the resources needed to combat a year defined by this stress and uncertainty. This summer’s Youth Jobs and Leadership speaker series, including therapists and mental health experts, was crafted with the intention to provide examples of Black and POC community members not only surviving but thriving. Professionals from across industries spoke to our youth staff about their journey to success, emphasizing the role that mental health had on their experience.

The impact of this series was a highlight of this summer that we hope to build on in 2021. Emotional sessions with our speakers led some of our staff to break down only to be built back up again by their teammates. One of the most successful parts of this summer was how vulnerable, respectful, caring, and dedicated the youth staff were with each other, forming a support system that we believe was essential to the success of our programs this year.

Beginning in the early spring, we will launch virtual versions of our free Share the Harbor trips with cruises to explore Spectacle Island and sunset videos highlighting Boston Light and the harbor’s other lighthouses.

With your support, our hope is for our in-person harbor cruises and programming, including our Boston Harbor Explorers programs to resume next year, including public school vacation programs on Fort Point Channel. Regardless of the state of the pandemic, in March, will begin outreach to the hundreds of youth and community organizations who take part in our All Access Boston Harbor cruises to either begin planning for our in-person summer cruises and programs or to begin outreach to distribute our virtual programming.

During April public school vacation, we hope to offer free programs at the Boston Children’s Museum and at Atlantic Wharf on the Fort Point Channel while continuing our Share the Harbor cruises with three in person or virtual Marine Mammal Safaris to see harbor seals and porpoises. At this time, we also continue planning for the summer with our youth and beach program partners, regardless of the structure of our programs.

From May to August we hope to continue offering our Share the Harbor and All Access Boston Harbor cruises as well as our Boston Harbor Explorers Program for the region’s youth, teens, and families. In the event that the COVID-19 pandemic continues through this period and into the summer of 2021, we will begin expanding our Virtual Boston Harbor curriculum into the schoolyear while providing additional resources for our community partners.

Beginning in June, our Youth Environmental Education Program staff (properly equipped with PPE and observing appropriate social distancing protocols) will add new live streams to our existing Virtual Boston Harbor videos that will share the harbor, islands, and beaches with the youth development and community organization partners our free programs serve in a typical summer, and with the public.

These live streams and videos will include additional activities and videos which can already be viewed on our Virtual Boston Harbor Page, which we encourage you to explore. New content may include Songs and Stories of the Sea, Making Mandalas in the Sand, Catching and preparing Black Sea Bass, Narrated Historic Tours of Boston Harbor, the Harbor Islands and the Harbor’s Lighthouses, and much more.

Over the course of the year we will also develop new metrics – such as the percentage of people who practice social distancing or wear PPE at the beach, the waterfront, or on a cruise to the islands. Though these metrics are not very satisfying for a group whose mission is to share the harbor with everyone, they are critically important.

Share Your Story

For over 30 years, Save the Harbor/Save the Bay has been the driving force behind the transformation of Boston Harbor from one of the dirtiest urban harbors in America to one of the cleanest in the world. Since our founding in 1986, we have successfully advocated for the completion of the state of the art Deer Island sewage treatment plant and the Mass Bay outfall pipe, led the effort to create the Boston Harbor Islands National Park, and transformed South Boston’s beaches into the cleanest urban beaches in the country.

Over this period, we have helped make Boston Harbor, the waterfront, the region’s public beaches and the Boston Harbor Islands a destination for residents, companies, and visitors. We continue to work with civic, corporate, cultural, scientific, philanthropic and community leaders, with government at all levels and with more than 130 youth and community groups from all of Boston's neighborhoods and the region's beachfront communities. Through these partnerships we strengthen the connections between our local communities and the harbor while increasing the recreational and economic value of Boston Harbor to the Greater Boston region’s residents and businesses.

Over the past 18 years, we have proven that the best way to “save the harbor” is to “share the harbor” with the public through free events and programs that educate and engage the region’s diverse communities while creating new Boston Harbor Stewards who understand that the harbor belongs to them. Many of those who take part in our free programs lack the resources to enjoy our region’s $5 billion investment in clean water, though they do equally share the costs.

In 2020, we are wrestling with the twin public health crises of the COVID-19 pandemic and the systemic racism that has for too long actively prevented people of color from enjoying the full benefits of our beaches and waterfront. A main priority of our programming moving forward is to address these barriers that prevent access to Boston Harbor by providing free, equitable, and safe programs for all the region’s residents, especially the BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color) residents we serve, who have also been actively prevented from enjoying these resources through both financial and systematically racist barriers that have been in place for centuries.

Of course, we are proud of our past success and eagerly look forward to the time when it is safe and appropriate to share the harbor, islands, and beaches with large groups of people. However, it is clearly not appropriate at this time, as we actively work with our partners in state and local government to develop and implement strict social distancing requirements and other restrictions on the region’s public beaches to prevent the social spread of the virus.

Ironically, our spectacular harbor, islands and beaches are now attractive nuisances that need to be managed in new ways that protect the public’s health. Striking the appropriate balance between public health and public access has become the focus of much of our programs, as our partners in state and local government, and in the region’s waterfront neighborhoods and beachfront communities turn to us for advice and support.

With your support, it is our hope to either resume business as usual, offering hands on environmental education to ten’s of thousands of the Greater Boston region’s residents or continue to develop a suite of digital programming to share the spectacular urban natural resources which we have helped restore and protect.

Though the coming months will continue to be a time of uncertainty, you can be sure of one thing: When the COVID-19 pandemic has subsided, your support will be essential as Save the Harbor/Save the Bay continues to share the harbor with the region's kids and families, for whom our free events and programs will be especially important. Despite the enormous challenges we face as an organization, a city, and as a nation, all of us at Save the Harbor/Save the Bay are optimistic about the future of our Youth Environmental Education Programs.

 

 

Contest is finished!