On weekday mornings, staff from the Two Oceans Aquarium Foundation often head to schools in Cape Town’s poorer areas to teach learners about the ocean and what they can do to preserve it.
In the financial year to February 2024, the education department of the foundation, now named Ocean Campus, reached 70,000 children in the Western Cape. This financial year, the staff expect to reach 100,000 children, says Ocean Campus head Leigh Meinert.
From puppet shows for pre-schoolers and children in early grades to online courses and teaching in classrooms, the staff are pulling back the surface of the ocean and helping young people to understand a little about what lies beneath and why it’s important.
Some of the children they meet will find their passion and make protecting the sea their life, like Anzio Abels. Abels, who was a course participant at the aquarium when he was at school, has been a critical part of the outreach programme for a decade.
This year, he says, he has covered about 12,000km and made about 85 school visits. His main message when he is out in the field is about how people can “make sustainable choices in their everyday lives to protect the environment for our own future”.
Abels, who this year launched his own online course for the Ocean Campus, called Climate Action Now, says there are some common questions from learners across the board. When he is teaching about the environment or biodiversity, the children most often want to know if megalodons and mermaids exist.
The Two Oceans Aquarium Foundation, under which Ocean Campus falls, has about 3,000 schools on its database. One of its challenges is to reach people inland where children may never have seen the sea.
This is important because much of the damage to the ocean is done inland. From chemical leaching and discharge flowing into rivers to prolific amounts of single-use plastic and typically large carbon footprints, big cities far from the ocean can have an outsize impact on the sea.
“To reach inland provinces, we have our online videos — it was one of the reasons to launch our Ocean Campus Studios and we now have our own YouTube channel,” Meinert says, referring to the foundation’s audiovisual department. “More and more we’re filming our lessons and making them available freely on our YouTube channel. That’s one way to have an impact. Online courses are another.”
With adult education another area of expansion, the foundation is working on influencing parents so that they are equipped to share that knowledge with their children.
“We’ve analysed what people know when they come in, and then we ask what do they know when they leave? Oh, they know more: great, we’ve done a good job. But that doesn’t really speak to the impact,” Meinert says.
Often the results are anecdotal, she says, citing one example where one of the children in an outreach class in Lavender Hill years ago now has her doctorate in oceanography.
“That’s just from one visit,” says Meinert. “What we’re really now focusing on is tracking our courses, letting schoolchildren know about marine sciences as a matric course, the new kind of subject choices they can make, and consolidating everyone who has come through our courses into an ocean champion community, helping them with what they want to do and supporting their activism.”
Meinert sees the Ocean Campus collaborating with all kinds of institutions from corporates to universities to activist groups. There are also plans to invite former students who have gone on to work in the marine field to give master classes. The future, she says, is going to be about upskilling, community events and things such as giving students who have completed courses aquarium membership.
Getting the Ocean Campus to where it is now and the number of children whose lives it can touch is a huge achievement, says Ann Lamont, executive chairperson of the foundation. “But we can’t stop at just a lesson or a course. We’re moving towards sustaining relationships with people who’ve been through our programmes and supporting them and starting to tell their stories.”
As for funding, Meinert says it is difficult.
“There are just so many worthy causes out there. Being a funder must be a nightmare because there are so many issues. We’ve done very well to build long-term relationships. But I’m also surprised by how little funding we sometimes receive, given how significant our reach is and how impactful our work is,” she says.
Nonetheless, with expansion under way, the foundation has taken on a new stakeholder relationship manager and is ramping up its fundraising efforts.
According to a report released earlier this year, only about 1% of philanthropic giving worldwide goes to the marine conservation sector. Yet the ocean is vital for sustaining life on earth.
But that is not to say there is no hope; Abels says he sees the impact the foundation’s outreach visits have, especially in schools that are revisited regularly.
He says when young people understand how they can affect the environment in their everyday lives, they are willing to make decisions to preserve and protect it for the future.
“Young people are eager to learn about how the world works,” he says.
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