Coast 2 Coast is a nonprofit that works with rural students from small-scale fishing villages using transmedia storytelling tools and participatory research approaches for young learners to illustrate and champion their ocean and communities' importance for sustainable futures.
Partnering with local schools, social projects, environmental nonprofits, and community-run organizations in small-scale fishing (SSF) communities, Coast 2 Coast enables rural students to explore their ancient oceans and ancestral villages as resilient researchers and skilled communicators, using transmedia tools, community-based participatory research approaches, and impact storytelling techniques to illustrating their SSF’s importance for ocean-human health and sustainable futures.
Our transdisciplinary team engages local youth as impact storytellers through photography, photojournalism, comic, stop-motion animation, street art, murals, filmmaking and novel “edutainment” weeklong workshops, 6-month programs, and touring school festivals that foster digital literacy, geospatial knowledge, entrepreneurship, and awareness around the Food and Agriculture Organization’s (FAO) Voluntary Guidelines for Securing Sustainable Small-Scale Fisheries in the Context of Food Security and Poverty Eradication, or the SSF Guidelines, the first international instrument to protect artisanal fisheries.
Guided by the SSF Guidelines, local students identify their fishing villages’ strengths, investigate changes, daylight challenges, and brainstorm potential solutions. Participants co-create their own stories rooted in traditional knowledge, fortified by science, and expressed through students’ imaginations that highlight their ocean and community as a marine social-ecological system. Through partnerships, we work to implement these youth-driven, community-based solutions for healthy seas and SSF communities.
One to Two Weeks
One Small-Scale Fishing Community
We facilitate photography, mural, film, stop-motion and other media workshops with local schools and nonprofits that address strengths and challenges.
Four to Six Months
One Small-Scale Fishing Community
We co-design with local partners a series of audiovisual workshops that take a deep-dive into a community's natural and cultural heritage for positive change.
Four to Six Months
Five Small-Scale Fishing Communities
We travel as an audiovisual and creative arts festival stopping in local schools along a stretch of coastline to provide students a platform for dialogue.
ABOUT US
For the past seven years, we've immersed ourselves in seaside communities from Mexico to India experiencing climate change, marine degradation, and overdevelopment. We've seen the remarkable, the tragic, and the auspicious through the eyes of local youth in fishing villages on the verge of collapse. We believe in the power of stories as a bridge to reach people and emotionally connect. Beyond the facts, we provide a pathway for the faces, names, and characters who depend on the ocean the most for their survival to share their side of the story before it's too late.
WHY?
For young people in small-scale fishing villages, there is a lack of quality educational opportunities adapted to rural reality and focused on practical issues within students' marine and built environments leading to low retention rates, out-migration, and less adaptive capacity to address fisheries scarcity, ocean degradation, coastal development, climate change and other anthropologic stressors threatening their sustainable futures.
One in 10 people rely on fish for their economic and nutritional security. Most live in the Tropical Majority countries located in the Global South. Small-scale and artisanal fisheries act as buffers against basic human insecurities such as hunger and extreme poverty. Fish-dependent families are on the frontlines — the coastlines — of ocean conservation and rural community development. Yet, they are often sidelined from critical dialogues between international environmental and economic actors who frame the strategies for the ocean's future. The problem is that current agendas undervalue human security objectives, and in doing so erode cultural heritage, gender relations, social capital, ecosystem services, human rights and the essential requisite of providing both livelihoods and affordable, nutrient-packed food for those who count on it the most.
SUPPORT
Make a one-time or monthly donation to fund our participatory transmedia workshops, programs, and festivals! Coast 2 Coast is an initiative of Beyond the Surface, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization and your donation is tax-deductible within the guidelines of U.S. law.
