What Happens to my Recycling?

Rhode Island Resource Recovery just released this wonderful video, showing the step by step process of how the new recycling system works in the state.

It's very visual, has up beat music, and great information. I encourage you to watch with your families!

What is the Presidential Service Award?

As of July 1, Save The Bay has become a certifying organization for volunteers who wish to participate in the Presidential Volunteer Service Award program. However, I keep getting the question, "Stephany, what IS the Presidential Volunteer Service Award and why should I do this?"

The Presidential Volunteer Service Award (let's call it the PVSA from now on!) is issued by the President's Council on Service and Civic Participation on behalf of the President of the United States. The award is given to individuals who are helping to improve their communities through volunteer service and civic participation.

To earn an award, individuals, families and groups must keep a record of volunteer activities and hours served on the record you created on the PVSA site or as a diary or calendar. Each volunteer must submit a record of service to Save The Bay - your local certifying organization. We will review and verify the hours and then distribute the awards based on the total number of hours you have contributed to your community by June 30, 2013.

Here are some questions I've been getting quite a bit:

1. What's the website to participate and register?  www.presidentialserviceawards.gov

2.  Do I only count my hours of service at Save The Bay?  NO! You can count your hours of service to any organization in the area. We do ask that a portion be with us at Save The Bay, but we will consider all of your hours of service for the award.

3. What is the award?  Award recipients will receive a letter from the President, a certificate, and either a bronze, silver or gold pin.

4. How many hours do I have to give to get an award? The PVSA has a breakdown of hours you have to give in order to qualify for either the bronze, silver or gold level.

Kids - 14 and younger
 Bronze Award     50 - 74 hours
 Silver Award     75 - 99 hours
 Gold Award     100 or more hours

Adults - Ages 26 and up
Bronze Award    100 - 249 hours
Silver Award    250 - 499 hours
Gold Award    500 or more hours

Young Adults - Ages 15 - 25
 Bronze Award    100-174 hours
 Silver Award    175 - 249 hours
 Gold Award    250 or more hours

Families and Groups (two or more people)*
Bronze Award   200 - 499 hours
Silver Award   500 - 999 hours
Gold Award   1,000 or more hours
*Each member contributing at least 25 hours towards the total

5. How long do I have to complete the hours to get an award? Our service year at Save The Bay will be from July 1 - June 30. You have that 12 month period to perform community service hours and enter them in to the system or turn them in to us.

6. Do you already have people registered to do this? YES! We have 4 people so far registered on the PVSA site with Save The Bay. One has already qualified for a bronze award and one a silver. See - it's not hard! Time adds up quickly!

7. What's the benefit of doing this program? The benefit is really for your recognition. It's a great thing to tell your school, teachers, and perspective employers that you have received this award. It shows you are an individual dedicated to your community and service.

If this is a program you would like to participate in, please register on the website and notify me that you are enrolling. You will need Save The Bay's key code to link to our program. Once you are registered on the site, I'll give you the code!

Why Do You Volunteer?

This is a question I ask our volunteers quite a bit at Save The Bay.

The answers are always fantastic.

"I volunteer because I like to go to the beach and want a clean and healthy Bay to swim in."
"I volunteer to show my kids the importance of having a clean environment."
"I volunteer because I believe in the work you do."
"I volunteer because it's a way to put my skills to use."
"Volunteering gives me the chance to meet new people and learn new skills."
"I love getting out in the field and getting dirty."

Now Volunteer Match is offering a contest for you to enter! Go over to their Facebook Page or Pintrest page and upload of photo of you volunteering with a sentence about why you volunteer. Be sure to include #WhyIVolunteerPhotoContest!  If you receive the most likes, you and the organization you're volunteering with (maybe Save The Bay) can be entered to win some great prizes.

Learn more about this great Photo Contest and get involved today!

Did You Know?

80% of marine debris comes from inland and only 10% is what is left at coastal areas or released by fishing vessels?

I wasn't aware of these statistics until I watched this piece from Surfrider Europe.

Take a moment to watch this great video and share it with your friends. Then make a date to join us for a cleanup or pick up trash while you're on a walk this summer in your neighborhood. Help us Keep Rhode Island Clean!



http://ecowatch.org/2012/video-everything-you-need-to-know-about-trash-in-our-oceans/

2012 Cleanup Season is Off to a Great Start!

This past weekend, Save The Bay kicked off our 2012 Cleanup Season and Earth Day. We hosted 6 cleanups during the extended weekend - Providence, Westerly, Bristol, Newport, Conimicut and Rocky Point - and once again were amazed at the incredible turnout from our loyal volunteers and the amount of debris we found!

Some quick numbers for you from the past weekend.

Providence - 166 Volunteers & 2,396 lbs. of debris
Newport - 51 Volunteers & 669 lbs. of debris
Bristol - 38 Volunteers & 813 lbs. of debris
Westerly -55 Volunteers & 989 lbs. of debris
Rocky Point - 113 Volunteers & 1,625 lbs. of debris
Conimicut - 25 Volunteers & 208 lbs. of debris

Some of the crazy items we found:
2 surf boards, a life boat, a shopping cart, an outdoor dining set, interior card door panel, a vat of cooking oil, a propane tank and of course all of the regular small debris.

Thank you to everyone that came out to participate in our earth day cleanups - all 448 of you. Your help ensured that we were able to remove 6,700 lbs. of trash from our coastlines this past weekend.

Missed our cleanups last weekend? Join us in the coming weeks - see what we have going on! Can't make it to one of our cleanups? Visit www.keepriclean.org to see what's happening with other groups in the rest of the state!

Enjoy this video made at our Bristol Cleanup!



Save the Bay Beach Cleanup 4/14/2012 from chris ferreira on Vimeo.

Get Your Kids Volunteering!

How old were you when you first started volunteering? Do you even remember volunteering as a child? Was it required by your school or did you volunteer with your family? Ponder these questions while you read.

I first volunteered when I was 11 years old. I helped at my town's 4th of July Parade by spinning cotton candy - and I continued to do that through my high school years. Yes, I am a cotton candy spinning pro and should my non-profit career not workout, I can easily snag a job with the circus. (Mom always told me to have a backup plan!).

As I got older, my volunteering shifted from spinning cotton candy once a year to getting involved with my schools and community, volunteering for different events and programs. Once high school rolled around, I was at a school where community service was a requirement - 20 hours a semester. Add on an additional 30 hours a year if you did Service Club and tack on additional 20 a year if you were in National Honor Society. And of course I had to participate in those things as well most of my time at the school. If I think back, I probably completed between 300 and 400 hours of community service during my time in High School. Hmmm.... the volunteer manager in me is upset I didn't keep a record of how many hours I volunteered to know that stat now. Moving On...

I spent my evenings, weekends and vacation weeks honoring my commitments to service. I taught music lessons at my old junior high and I directed the beginner's band when necessary. I volunteered at our local Children's Museum doing everything from being a costumed character, managing birthday parties and eventually working in the children's library stocking shelves, checking out books and hosting story times. At the time, I enjoyed all of the things I was doing to help (OK, maybe not wearing giant costumes and animal heads or kids throwing birthday cake at me and dumping red punch on me, but I digress), but I still saw it as a "requirement" in order to graduate.

Once college rolled around, I continued to volunteer in my new community. I volunteered in the dorms, for student councils, and at organizations throughout the city. Volunteering in college was not a requirement for me, yet I naturally felt drawn to participate in these areas. I don't know if it was a natural need I had to be engaged, a desire to be helpful, or I was just looking for something to take my mind off of being homesick, but I continued to volunteer for all 4 years at college. By the time my senior year rolled around, I was so enamored with living off campus, trying to wrap things up to graduate and job searching that my volunteering commitments went from a plethora to one (and one that I really wasn't that engaged in either). And I still remember, over 10 years later, feeling as if I had a void in my life during my senior year at college - I just always felt something was missing but couldn't figure it out. My now adult self can pinpoint that void was from not feeling connected and helpful to people and my community.

After college, it was not until I moved to Rhode Island that I picked up with volunteering again. But now, as a young adult, volunteering took on a whole new meaning. I wasn't being asked to volunteer. Volunteering wasn't something I needed on a resume. But it was a way for me to meet people, gain experiences, and give back to this new community I was living in. When I moved here, I had a natural pull to be volunteering. I needed it in my life. Ten years later, I'm still volunteering in Rhode Island, more now than ever.

As a volunteer manager, much of my time is spent finding ways to engage youth and families in volunteering. I recently read a statistic from a 1993 study (yes, outdated, I know) that the earlier children are involved in volunteering, the higher the chances are of them continuing to volunteer in adolescence and adulthood. The study suggested that while many organizations encourage children ages 14-18 to volunteer, they really should be targeting those around the ages of 10-11 or younger to "reduce the erosion in service values and behaviors" (Benson & Roehlkepartain, 1993). This means, if you can get your child volunteering by the age of 10, there's a higher likelihood that the values they gain from volunteering will be instilled within them as they  develop in to teens and adults and a higher chance of them continuing to volunteer as an adult.

I am a big proponent for families volunteering together. While some of our projects at Save The Bay need to have an age requirement on them, I still encourage families to participate as a team in any project they meet the requirements for. Volunteering with your children is a great way to create family traditions and memories. Spending time engaged with your children giving back to your community provides the chance for you to learn and grow together as individuals. It's a chance for you to bond with your child in a new way and to have something different to talk about at the family dinner table than work and school. Volunteering with your children helps them learn responsibility for their commitments, their community and others. It allows them the chance to learn outside of the classroom and discover the world with a fresh set of eyes.

There are countless ways to begin volunteering as a family or to engage your children in volunteering. You can start by talking about volunteering and giving back, choosing options as a family to participate in. You can let each child take a turn choosing a project they want to participate in. Talk about what their classmates do with their families, what your friend's families do, what you did as a child. This is the perfect time to talk with your children about how you became engaged with volunteering when "you were their age". And if you couldn't answer any of the questions at the start of this post, then now is the PERFECT time for you to begin your volunteering adventure along with your children, so they can learn the life-long importance of giving back to their community.

Generation On, a fantastic resources for youth and family volunteering, released this video about kids volunteering. It's short, sweet and to the point. Watch it with your kids. Do any of the projects these youth identified in the video sound interesting to your child? Ask them. Then get on the plethora of websites out there to find an opportunity in your area that will engage your children and family. Then go out and volunteer, and keep volunteering. Even when life gets busy and you think there's just no time to be volunteering, there is. Carve out a niche of time in your family schedule and physically write it on the calendar - a weekend morning or afternoon, a weekday night, a day during vacation weeks, one day a month - and commit to it. To a nonprofit organization, it may not matter how much time you can give every month, but the time you can dedicate can mean so much to their mission, programs, constituents and work.

Look What Could Be Missing Soon from RI State Beaches!

A bill was introduced in the RI General Assembly this week that would ban cigarettes from state parks and beaches.

Smoking Ban at State Parks and Beaches. House bill 7166 (pdf) would prohibit smoking at public beaches, parks, playgrounds and pedestrian malls and plazas. The bill was moved to the House Committee on Health, Education and Welfare.

At first I panicked that without cigarette butt at beaches our volunteers would have nothing to clean up. But, thinking realistically, even though cigarette butts are the most common thing we find at Save The Bay Cleanups, and I foresee this making a lot of cleanup volunteers very happy, we really do find so much more than just cigarette butts on the coast.

Yesterday, I downloaded the 2010 Report from the Ocean Conservancy on International Coastal Cleanup. 2010 marked the 25th year of ICC Cleanups, and the report was full of some great fun facts.

• In 25 years, ICC volunteers have collected 52,907,756 cigarette butts and filters.
• 1,248,892 balloons have been collected over the past 25 years
• 7,825,319 plastic bags have been picked up at ICC cleanups over the past 25 years
• Do you use plastic bottles? Maybe this will change your mind - in 25 years volunteers have cleaned up 9,549,156 plastic beverage bottles.

I picked these stats because these items are quite representative of what we find on the local beaches and coastal areas in RI during our cleanups each season.  Aside from the standard items, if you've participated in a Save The Bay Cleanup, what types of items have you found that have shocked you? (Can you beat my growing collection of little green Army men?)

Internship Season is Upon Us!

Just last week I finished posting all of our internships on websites for universities across the country. Each summer we welcome many interns from around the country, from a variety of universities, to our offices to assist us in a multitude of capacities.

I always love hearing from our interns and what they've been up to, where they've gone in life. So this past week I contacted Save The Bay interns from the past few years to ask them for a run down of their time here at Save The Bay.  I thought it would be fun to share these with you all throughout the coming weeks so you can learn what it is like to intern at Save The Bay.

"Save The Bay gave me real world field research experience. Unlike summer programs that one might do, our research and work had real world applications. The eelgrass that we planted became habitat for marine species and the measurements we took became a part of a worldwide sea grass database. In fact, upon talking to the administrator of that database, we found that our beds in the southern part of the bay are the only ones in the world that are currently expanding. How cool is that?" 


"My favorite part of working with Save The Bay was feeling like I was making a difference in Rhode Island, in the ocean, in the environment. How many people can say that their job was to get in a boat every day to monitor the health of the bay and the health of transplanted beds that you planted yourself? Even in poor weather, I looked forward to heading out onto the Bay. There is nothing like sun on your head and sea salt in your face and the crusty salty feeling after a day of scuba diving. My least favorite parts were hauling TERFs! Those things were both stinky and heavy!" Michelle D. Eelgrass Program Intern. 

Thank you Michelle for your words on the Eelgrass Internship.

If you know someone looking for a college internship, please send them our way!  We love to meet talented and dedicated individuals who are passionate about learning and the environment.

And a helpful tip for those of you seeking out internships for the season. How to nail the interview!

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