Coastal Conservation Corps Engaging Youth and Community Members with Their Marine Protected Area through GPS-GIS
This project empowers Bahia Ballena/Uvita students and community to utilize 21st century technologies, GPS, GIS, remote sensing, and electronic/environmental sensing equipment, to best visualize and represent their bio-diverse community to tourists. Visitors support local initiatives, learn academic content and provide valuable service alongside local community activists. Synergy benefits all involved.
About You
Section 1: About You
First Name
Anita
Last Name
Palmer
Website
Organization
GISetc
Country
United States
Section 2: About Your Organization
Organization Name
GISetc
Organization Website
Organization Phone
214-533-8376
Organization Address
1409 S. Lamar St. #302, Dallas TX 75215
Is your organization a
For‐profit
Organization Country
United States, TX, Dallas County
Your idea
Name Your Project
Coastal Conservation Corps Engaging Youth and Community Members with Their Marine Protected Area through GPS-GIS
Country your work focuses on
Costa Rica
Describe Your Idea
This project empowers Bahia Ballena/Uvita students and community to utilize 21st century technologies, GPS, GIS, remote sensing, and electronic/environmental sensing equipment, to best visualize and represent their bio-diverse community to tourists. Visitors support local initiatives, learn academic content and provide valuable service alongside local community activists. Synergy benefits all involved.
Website URL
Would you like to participate in the MIF Opportunity 2010?
No
Innovation
What makes your idea unique and innovative?
This project involves recruiting educators from across the United States to travel and learn how technologies address local issues in Costa Rica. Teachers build replicable technology skills working with businesses to address issues in a tourist economy.
Travel arrangements and technology tools provided by U.S. companies enable educators professional development in an attractive, multi-cultural setting. Local businesses benefit from a visiting workforce to focus on issues locally identified. Hotels and restaurants benefit from tourists patronizing their establishments while seeing conservation practices in place around their establishments. Tour operators benefit from broader understanding of technologies that enrich interpretive experience for customers. Local schools and student groups benefit from global educators as colleagues learning 21st century technologies. Together participants get a better understanding of systems such as social issues, water quality, ecological conservation and community infrastructure development within this coastal community.
The synergy of using several trends in educational tourism makes a uniquely sustainable model of tourism possible. These include:
Geospatial technologies are used across the U.S to support academic interests in schools.
These technologies are becoming affordable and available to parties wanting to make an impact in their local community.
International travel is universally accepted as a powerful tool to create an exciting learning atmosphere.
Service learning tourism benefits participants, recipients, and those who organize travel because of its ability to engage anyone in solving local problems and issues.
Engaging multiple small businesses in multiple countries to develop an economy that makes change sustainable.
Do you have a patent for this idea?
Impact
This Entry is about (Issues)
What impact have you had on your clients and the tourism sector?
The communities of Bahia Ballena and Uvita have benefitted by learning to use GIS, GPS, remote sensing and electronic measuring equipment to solve community issues. Some of the benefits are as follows:
School students learn science, geography and 21st technology tools both in their classes as well as in after school informal situations.
Local students provide a ready and willing workforce to help create community data.
Boat tour operators are learning GPS techniques to help keep themselves and their customers safe while on the water.
Local restaurants benefitting from map brochures available at tour operators storefronts.
Tour operators gain customers that find postcards with maps showing things to do in the community.
Coastal youth are engaged with their marine protected area and have a greater likelihood to become integral agents of change in the sustainable development of their coastal community. Being equipped with proper technology such as GIS-GPS they are truly empowerd to make change happen
Problem
This community is on the southern Pacific coast of Costa Rica and has only recently been given access to the wider world by road, electricity and internet connectivity. Their economy is changing from a resource extraction community of farming and fishing to a tourist service economy of eco-tourism. The growth of the community creates stresses in the community that must be managed. Land ownership is changing to international hands, touring ecologically sensitive areas still impacts carrying capacity for the species tourists come to visit, water resources are reaching maximum capacity without larger facilities. Computerized maps offer the ability to manage information on land use, erosion, wildlife, water quality or availability, tourist accessibility and carrying capacity to make better decisions on managing their community spaces.
Actions
GISetc has worked together with local businesses and schools to learn GPS and GIS to utilize in their community. They have worked in conjuntion with Holbrook Travel in the United States to bring international educators and students to the area to build capacity. Business owners in the community have been coached on how to build digital resources so that they might best manage the growth of their community and industries using digital maps.
Results
What will it take for your project to be successful over the next three years? Please address each year separately, if possible.
Businesses in the community are beginning to understand the power of communicating with maps where their business locations are to people passing by along the highways and to their online market to draw them into their community. Students are helping to create those maps and populate the maps with “census” like data. All community members are evaluating the assets they have in the community now that they can begin to visualize the community more clearly on a map.
What would prevent your project from being a success?
This project has been funded solely with volunteer labor (time and travel from the United States), local business support (free lodging and food), donated computers, software, and imagery. It will be essential that the project be prepared to purchase software as annual licenses expire. It would be helpful to aid the volunteer trainers with air travel costs which have been paid for solely by the volunteers. This would enable those volunteers to be able to come more frequently over the next years to solidify the broad based geospatial training that is being offered to the community as a whole. Finally, we would like to set up a stipend model for Bahia Ballena community members as they push the technology work of their community forward.
How many people will your project serve annually?
1001‐10,000
What is the average monthly household income in your target community, in US Dollars?
$100 ‐ 1000
Does your project seek to have an impact on public policy or introduce models and tools that benefit the tourism sector in general?
Yes
Sustainability
What stage is your project in?
Operating for 1‐5 years
In what country?
Costa Rica, PU
Is your initiative connected to an established organization?
Yes
If yes, provide organization name.
GISetc
How long has this organization been operating?
More than 5 years
Does your organization have a Board of Directors or an Advisory Board?
Does your organization have any non-monetary partnerships with NGOs?
Yes
Does your organization have any non-monetary partnerships with businesses?
Yes
Does your organization have any non-monetary partnerships with government?
No
Please tell us more about how these partnerships are critical to the success of your innovation.
GISetc hosts the Geological Society of America’s GPS loaner program to encourage the geocaching program. We have been able to leverage a bank of those GPS units as loaners to the Bahia Ballena community to use in their beginning data collection efforts.
We have also worked to design learning activities with the Uvita/Bahia Ballena conservation group ASANA and share data with the local representative of the marine conservation group KETO.
What are the three most important actions needed to grow your initiative or organization?
Procur software and tools for schools and community.
Continue regular trips to provide geospatial technology training and support for the students and community members at large.
Engaging more international teachers and students to experience this community project.
The Story
What was the defining moment that led you to this innovation?
When we started our organization, we have always looked for authentic settings to train teachers how to use technology. We started by offering workshops that were close to parks or other projects where we could involve our participants to help use technology to solve issues. As we have grown in experience and broadened the locations where we have offered workshops, we realized that we need to find locations with invested personnel in these spots. Our first visits to this area in Costa Rica were suggested by a friend who had met people in this community. On spending time with them we realized we found a location that fit the criteria. Between the politically savvy hotel owner where we to business owners who were supporting a young professional to work with students in the community on off hours we knew this would be great mix. This particular individual has been instrumental at keeping in touch with locals when we arrange opportunities to learn more about these technologies. Of course the local marine national park helped to create the theme of what we studied when training. As we have worked together hosting trainings or whenever we return to the area to help them develop their local infrastructure, the rest of the details have been filling in as we find local teachers, tour operators, hotel and restaurant owners who are excited to join in the efforts.
Tell us about the social innovator behind this idea.
This is a collaborative effort. GISetc has worked in another community in Costa Rica for six years in conjunction with Holbrook Travel of Gainesville, Florida. Here is where the GISetc vision of service learning trips using GIS in rural communities took shape. Sandy Doss of Holbrook Travel, introduced us to Geinier Guzman at La Cusinga Eco Lodge in Uvita. Geinier Guzman has provided full lodging and food for the multiple trips for three trainers over the past year. He also introduced us to Travis Bays of Bodhi Surf and Grupo SURF, Bahia Aventuras who generated sincere interest from the Boat Tour Operator Association, as well as government organizations of the ASANA, and the ASADA. With the intercession, introductions to community members, and guidance of Travis Bays, this project grew wings and has been soaring upwards over the past year. No one person can take credit for this, but rather this small group of visionaries who understood what could be and pitched in to make it happen.
How did you first hear about Changemakers?
Web Search (e.g., Google or Yahoo)
If through another, please provide the name of the organization or company
50 words or fewer
| Attachment | Size |
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| community.jpg | 54.66 KB |
| students.jpg | 46.62 KB |
 | 77 weeks agoAnita Palmer updated this Competition Entry. |
| 77 weeks agoAnita Palmer submitted this idea. |
