ABOUT us
Why?
Historically, humans assumed the ocean was inexhaustible and resistant to our impacts. Today, the ocean is collapsing. The way we exploit seas and coastal areas devastates not only their biodiversity but also their potential to meet our essential needs.
We believe everyone is a storyteller and sharing your truth can have positive impacts on yourself, your community, and beyond. For many remote coastal communities dependent on healthy oceans, the media arts provide an outlet to use storytelling as an advocacy tool to promote conservation and social justice.
How?
Coast 2 Coast promotes healthy oceans and marine wildlife conservation through the audiovisual arts, engaging local coastal communities at the grassroots level. We aspire to serve as an advocacy platform for over three billion people worldwide who depend on the seas and coastlines for their livelihoods, promote ocean literacy, and engage coastal communities as ocean guardians.
What?
Our team facilitates youth-driven audiovisual workshops and productions in coastal communities where local people document their lives, explore their creativity, and engage with stakeholders as ocean activists at home and beyond through free-expression and storytelling. We tackle dire global issues such as rising sea levels, plastic pollution, and overfishing, in playful, emotive way. Digital storytelling and the visual arts are innovative, nonviolent, powerful advocacy tools that spread beyond socioeconomic and geographical barriers.
In the participatory process, C2C audiovisual workshop participants develop technological knowledge, critical thinking skills, a space for free-expression, and channel for engagement as active participants in their communities. Our community-based approach recognizes ocean conservation’s longterm success depends on locally-led change for sustainable solutions.
WHERE?
We work along the coastlines of the world, together with coastal communities under environmental, economic, social, or cultural distress to self-advocate in a nonviolent and creative way through participatory audiovisual workshops and educational projects.
WHY THE COAST?
The ocean is our largest resource for life and paradoxically our greatest dumping ground. While 85% of global fish stocks are overexploited, depleted, or recovering simultaneously over 14 billion pounds of trash flows into the ocean each year. Coastal communities are ground zone for climate change. Global warming and ocean acidification are jeopardizing food security, shoreline protection, the provision of income, livelihood sources and sustainable economic development. With more than half the world’s population now living within 100 kilometers of the coast, the majority remain completely ignorant and unaware of how our daily habits directly enable the problem which will lead to catastrophic consequences for coastal communities and beyond.
Humans devastate the ocean through development, pollution, and resource overexploitation. Only 3.4% is conserved. Societies remain ignorant to the harsh fact that our daily actions fuel the ocean’s collapse and climate change. Yet, those who contribute least to the problem are most suffering its consequences. Communication barriers exist between policymakers and communities due to current inequities in information flow, making honest knowledge sharing and true locally-led change, hollow.
SO, WHAT HAPPENS IF WE DO NOTHING?
The ocean is at a tipping point. Oceanographer Sylvia Earle says our actions over the next 10 years will determine the state of the ocean for the next 10,000 years.
Many popular seafood species will likely be wiped out within 40 years with current fishing practices. Unless we change our rate of consumption, we’re within a century of a world where jellyfish are the only wild seafood option left.
More than 60% of the world’s population lives on or near the coast. The ocean provides a livelihood, recreation, beauty, wonder, and untapped scientific discovery, leading to new medications, foods, and advanced technologies.
WHY PARTICIPATORY?
Traditional documentaries produce outputs that often make a social impact.
Participatory documentaries produce outputs but also inputs. When a person tells their own story, they often feel empowered through the process, start to finish, impacting something within them. This input factor often then makes the resulting output more powerful with a greater social impact.
An Organic Approach
to Community Engagement:
We start by facilitating free audiovisual workshops for local youth in a marginalized coastal community. Kids discover how to convey observations with intention and unleash their creativity in a safe-space.
Ivonne
Age: 9 years old
Daughter & Granddaughter of Local Fishermen
Families become interested in our workshops and come forward with stories to share. We strive to engage the world in a dialogue on a variety of social issues affecting their local community through participatory storytelling across a variety of creative mediums.
Jose Eche
Ivonne's Father, Local Fisherman
Don Cosme
Ivonne's Grandfather, Past Lobitos Mayor & Artisanal Fisherman
