Fellowship Foci

Marine Education:

With generous support from the Casco Bay Estuary Partnership, we are organizing educational marine field trips for middle and high school students. The benefits of these trips are multifold: deepening youth engagement with the working waterfront community and ecosystems; empowering youth to take learning into their own hands (literally!); connecting educators; and perhaps stimulating some to consider marine careers. We believe that to maintain a culturally equitable community, we must foster the idea that no method of education is superior to another and that diversity of knowledge is necessary for the long term resilience of our community.

Solidifying Historical Shore Access:

Phippsburg clammers have long relied on hand-shake agreements with land owners to cross properties and access the mudflats. But as the demographics of Phippsburg change, so do the ways that we understand our land use, and clammers are losing access to historical fisheries trails–which means that they are losing access to crucial working waterfront. A central focus of my Fellowship is to better understand this pattern and support collaboration between local land trusts, landowners, municipal officials and clammers. I’ve been working closely with clammers and research groups to identify the biggest opportunities for more formal agreements.       

Tech Help: 

Fishermen are now required by the state to report their landings digitally, one of many changes facing them. To help them navigate these often-foreign technologies, I have begun offering drop-in tech help hours at the Totman Public Library. 

Community Outreach: 

Improving communications is central to  every facet of this Fellowship. To that end, we are starting a rather holistic community outreach plan to invite all community members to engage in and think more deeply about what it means to live in a working waterfront community.While this plan is multifaceted and ever-growing, the element that I’ll highlight here is our new fisheries dispatch.

Working Waterfront Inventory: 

In partnership with the Maine Coast Fisherman’s Association and as one of an eight-community cohort, we are completing a working waterfront inventory. Much like a population census, this data set will provide a baseline against which future inventories can be measured. In changing times, it is easy to forget what we once took to be the mundane and unchangeable facets of community and place. This eight-community cohort hopes to begin a long-standing tradition in coastal communities of regular working waterfront inventories, so that we might better understand trends and remediate them when possible or necessary.