Coast 2 Coast

EXPLORE

We are a youth-driven storytelling movement for happy, healthy fishing communities.

Coast 2 Coast offers local youth from small-scale fishing (SSF) communities new creative mediums, accessible audiovisual tools, powerful communication skills, and interactive digital platforms to explore their ancient marine social-ecological systems and co-create stories that inspire resilience and solutions for their sustainable futures.

Our multidisciplinary team facilitates photography, photojournalism, stop-motion animation, street art, murals, filmmaking and novel "edutainment" workshops, programs, and festivals for students, teachers and families in remote artisanal fishing villages that foster digital literacy, geospatial knowledge, and resilience-thinking.

Rooted in traditional knowledge, fortified by science, and expressed through their imaginations, children co-create stories that celebrate their community’s strengths, identify changes, daylight struggles, and pitch potential solutions. Through partnerships, we work to implement these youth-driven solutions for healthy seas and societies.

WORKSHOPS

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.

PROGRAMS

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.

FESTIVALS

Four to Six Months

Five Small-Scale Fishing Communities

We travel as an audiovisual & creative arts festival stopping in local schools along a specific 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.