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How the Funds Are Spent
In addition to funding several large scale efforts such as California Coastal Cleanup Day, which involves tens of thousands of volunteers in cleaning our coast and waterways each year, the California Coastal Commission uses funds from sales of the WHALE TAILSM License Plate to support a wide variety of innovative, local marine education projects. The WHALE TAILSM Grants Program has so far awarded 157 grants totaling $2,227,000. Below are some examples of projects that received funding, thanks to sales of this plate.
The California State Parks Ventura Junior Lifeguard Program, together with the State Park Police Activities League, launched the Channel Islands Coastal Experience Camp to give 9 to 15-year-olds first-hand experience with aquatic life in the Ventura and Channel Islands areas. The camp teaches "at-risk" non-traditional beach users who may rarely visit the beach or go in the ocean even though they live in a coastal city. Participating youth learn about the coastal and marine environment through classroom work, educational activities and field trips to Ventura Harbor and Anacapa Island. They kayak and snorkel, conduct beach cleanups, and also learn about marine issues such as wildlife and habitats, polluted runoff, and marine debris.
In its second year the program added leadership workshops for other youth program leaders on how to teach marine education and set up programs similar to the Coastal Experience Camp in other locations.
The Upper Sacramento River Exchange in Dunsmuir helped local students design and build a traveling public exhibit about the connections between the Upper Sacramento River and the Pacific Ocean, and about the importance of caring for inland watersheds. Students from Mt. Shasta designed the exhibit showing items that can harm fish encased in a dramatic three-dimensional fish structure made out of copper. They also wrote poetry, studied ecology, painted, wrote research papers, performed skits, and conducted a lake cleanup.
Ocean Song Farm and Wilderness Center is giving elementary and middle school students the opportunity to explore watershed environments in Sonoma County. The program targets students in low-income and underserved Sonoma County neighborhoods who would not otherwise have the opportunity to study these coastal areas.
Participating students take two field trips. On the first, they visit the headwaters of Finley Creek at the Finley Creek Nature Preserve, and engage in fun and educational activities to learn about ponds, streams, and watersheds. On the second trip, they visit Shell Beach, where they go tidepooling and learn about the marine life there. At the end of their experience, students write down a personal commitment for helping the coastal environment, and program staff mail it to them later as a reminder.
The Glendale Public Library held special story hours for young children and their families revolving around the theme of ocean life, beach ecology, and care for the environment.
Library staff bought books for the story hours, and accompanied them with ocean-related craft activities and an interactive demonstration on humpback whales. Parents and their children were also able to decorate fish to display on the walls when they visited the Children’s Room. In addition to the story hours, the library also purchased new ocean-related books (fiction, nonfiction, and picture books) and educational videos. A traveling "ocean bag" was created so branch libraries would also be able to conduct this program.
The Kids' Adopt-A-Beach School Assembly Program and Beach Clean-Up motivates children to care for the marine environment by presenting slides and talking about the storm drain system, litter reduction, recycling, buying recycled products, and the dangers of plastic and debris in the oceans. Students are then given something to do about it by recycling and doing a beach cleanup. The program also provides each participating school with one to two buses for transportation to the beach, and encourages schools to hold a "recyclathon" to raise money for an additional bus. This program targets low-income and inland communities.
Founded by the Malibu Foundation for Environmental Education, this program now takes place in seven locations, each with a local coordinator: Humboldt County, the San Francisco Bay Area, Monterey (involving students from Fresno), San Luis Obispo County (involving students from Tulare), Los Angeles, Orange County, and San Diego. The program reaches dozens of elementary schools each year and annually brings over 5,000 children to the beach on May 22nd, deemed "Ocean Day."
At the conclusion of the beach cleanup at each location, the kids stand in formation and spell out artistic messages about the importance of a healthy ocean environment, which are photographed from the air by helicopters at each site. In previous years, children have created aerial messages such as "Graçias," "SOS (Save Our Seas)," "Clean H2O," and "Preserve."
Heal the Bay serves as the Los Angeles County coordinator of the Coastal Commission's statewide Adopt-A-Beach program. Volunteers pledge to clean "their" beach three times per year, and Heal the Bay provides them with a trained beach captain and cleanup supplies. Heal the Bay also arranges bus transportation to bring inland, underserved elementary, middle, and high school students to the beach for participation in cleanups, leads inland schoolyard and creek cleanups, and provides educational materials and presentations as well.
Heal the Bay has added special elements to their Adopt-A-Beach program, including monthly one-time cleanups for people who can not commit to an adoption, and a Beach Emergency Response Team, which is a corps of volunteers sent out to clean critical beach sites within twelve hours of a rainstorm. (Storm water scours city streets of debris and sends it through storm drains, which discharge on beaches.)