Last November, AMSEA was awarded $20,000 from the Reuben E Crossett Foundation to expand youth education in essential marine safety and survival skills.
With the help of Crossett funds, AMSEA formed two primary goals:
Train instructors from towns and villages across Southeast, AK
Use a network of qualified instructors to provide marine safety training to youth at a low cost to schools and communities
One of the biggest challenges to training in rural Alaska is the cost of travel. Travel in and out of villages is extremely expensive and difficult during many months of the year due to bad weather and inaccessible ports. We recognize that learning from outsiders is less impactful than learning from respected community members. Traditional methods of instruction from relatives and community leaders have a far greater impact on the community than sending an AMSEA instructor who doesn't understand the local challenges, terrain, and environment that youth face.
We decided the best way to tackle these challenges was to host an Educator's Workshop in Sitka and offer travel and tuition scholarships to attendees. We provided ten tuition and four travel scholarships to educators from across Southeast Alaska to attend a 4-day train-the-trainer workshop. We used the Crossett funds to help pay for air, ferry, lodging, and the course tuition in the hopes that we could build a community of educators across Southeast Alaska, and bring the shared knowledge to the youth through local educators at a much lower cost.
Thanks to the Crossett Foundation, we brought educators from Yakutat, Craig, Ketchikan, Petersburg, and Sitka to share knowledge, play, teach, and practice safety methods. We had local community partnerships both as participants and instructors from the Sitka Tribe of Alaska, Youth Advocates of Sitka, Sitka Conservation Society, 4-H, Sitka Sound Science Center, Sitka School District, Pacific High School, Sitka Trail Works, Parks and Recreation, Edgecumbe High School, and Search and Rescue. We facilitated a learning community and fostered new connections within our group of 12 educators.
We teamed up with the local 4-H group for newly trained instructors to practice teaching youth the Surviving Outdoor Adventures curriculum. The students built signals, tested heat retention in different types of clothing in cold water, built a fire, and cooked smores over the flames.
Additionally, the education team at the Sitka Sound Science Center partnered with us to offer more training opportunities to our new educators. We agreed on five mini-lessons and provided a different instructor for each lesson. Our new instructors taught hands-on skills in navigation, dressing for the weather, using a compass, reading marine charts, reading the weather, anchoring methods, building survival kits, reading the tide book, understanding ocean currents, and more. These training sessions allowed teachers to hone their instruction methods for different groups of kids.
We are so grateful to our partners for giving us this opportunity and loved the confidence it built in our instructors.
The second phase of our training involves reaching youth in communities across Southeast Alaska through the newly trained community members. I am thrilled to say that we are finding success!
AMSEA trained over 650 youth across Southeast Alaska last year. Many of these trainings were part of AMSEA's partnership with the Sitka School District. Our newly trained educators used their skills to build youth camps with curriculum around marine and shore survival in Sitka, Petersburg, and Yakutat.
Now that the school season is in full swing, we are back in the schools and working to expand the instructor network to include additional communities. This year, we are heading to Gustavus, Pelican, Hoonah, and Metlakatla to train in schools. We also hope these opportunities will help us find local advocates who are interested in becoming marine safety instructors in these remote communities.
We hope to teach an additional ten educators from underserved communities to continue the momentum built around marine safety training and the community partnerships that help keep our youth safe.
Thank you to the Reuben E Crossett Foundation for making this project possible. We couldn't have trained so many people without your support. AMSEA would also like to extend a warm thank you to our community partners, the Sitka Sound Science Center, the 4-H team with Sitka Conservation Society, Hope Merritt, Mike LaGuire, and Matt Hunter for being incredible guest instructors, the University of Alaska Southeast, and the AMSEA staff for taking the time to prepare, teach, and inspire. We operate best as a team; the most fulfilling success comes from strong community connections and bonds. Thank you to all of the participants in the Educators Workshop. We learned so much from you. We are constantly impressed by the power of our amazing Southeast AK educators to share your knowledge and skills to today's youth and tomorrow's leaders.
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