SALISH SEA SCIENCES
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Mission Statement
Salish Sea Sciences brings high school students from all backgrounds together with scientists and other professionals to learn from and protect the Salish Sea, its creatures, and people. In this context, our mission is to grow a community of critical thinkers, bring innovation to public engagement in science, raise awareness of science as a career path, and advance a more diverse cohort of investigators.
About This Cause
Our cause is maintain and grow funding for our Argonaut Prize, covering full tuition for students nominated by partner schools and organizations who have distinguished themselves as having exceptional promise for a future in a STEAM field. Currently, Salish Sea Sciences provides multi-week summer residential programs and multi-week school-day intensives for regional public schools. Our focus is Marine Field and Lab Research and Marine Ecology and Conservation, serving programs in collaboration with local and regional .edu, .org, .com, and .gov entities in the marine science, ecology, conservation, and maritime space, seeking outreach opportunities. Among our most consistent contributing mentors are researchers and practitioners affiliated with UW Friday Harbor Laboratories as well as Western Washington University's Shannon Point Marine Center, the UC Davis School of Veterinary Medicine Karen C. Drayer Wildlife Health Center's SeaDoc Society, San Juan County Land Bank, Wild Orca, Friends of the San Juans, and Friday Harbor Whale Museum, Seattle Public Works, and NOAA Fisheries. Over the years, Salish Sea Sciences has been honored to have its students included in NOAA WA Sea Grant and NSF supported research. We are in the process of growing more programs as well as a semester school. Students engage with experts, develop data collection and analysis skills, and practice leadership and communications in context of a host of San Juan Island habitats and organizations. They explore geology, oceanography, and fisheries, consider upland influences on water quality and water and land management systems, survey for invasive species, and observe a necropsy. Students collect seeds, learn about endangered species and participate in restoration projects. They hike, beach-comb, learn about trophic ecology and whale health, explore the rocky intertidal, study eelgrass beds, learn about marine diseases, and discover how indigenous knowledge informs the science and restoration of native species as well as land management. They also row and sail in island waters—a particularly profound experience. Each program concludes with individual capstone projects designed to meet professional standards that students present to their mentors, family, and community members at an end-of-program gathering. Serving local and regional high school students underrepresented in science and leadership is built into the DNA of the organization and represents the life experiences of the founders, the Board, and Salish Sea Sciences' contributing individuals and organizations. One of the pillars of our mission has been to strengthen science by expanding the diversity of its investigators. From our perspective, the lack thereof is to the detriment of contemporary scientific and environmental practices, our society at large, and certainly to the bright young individuals whom we lose along the way through the current educational system. Practicing field science and ecology while participating in an intentional residential community in the company of professionals in the San Juan Islands dramatically shifts who will be contributing to and evolving science and its use in the future, including how science informs our care for the environment in which we live. Since our founding, Salish Sea Sciences has partnered with Rainier Scholars, an organization dedicated to cultivating academic excellence and leadership of students of color. During the ensuing years we have sought to increase scholarship and grant funding to grow program opportunities for Rainier Scholars, as well as our local rural students, and students with Unleash the Brilliance—a regional organization committed to the career and leadership potential of students from low-income, at-risk communities. Enriched by this uniquely beautiful and biologically rich place, and exposed to diverse career paths by the people practicing them, our students gain the social and academic skills that engender a strong sense of personal agency and belonging, equipping them with the confidence and knowledge to engage successfully in their college, career, and civic lives. To borrow from the language from the 2013 Declaration of the San Juan Islands National Monument, the San Juans Islands are "...a refuge of scientific and historic treasures and a classroom for generations." The experiences of Salish Sea Sciences students confirm university studies and statistics: investing in students with intensive, high quality, experiential mentoring programs in which they are held accountable to each other and to their mentors—while they are still in high school—has a direct, positive impact on college and career outcomes. This is true for all students and most especially for those historically underrepresented in STEAM. So far, our students represent 21 states and Puerto Rico, with approximately a third hailing from the Pacific Northwest, as well as international students from 6 countries. Our students have gone on to colleges and careers in the marine sciences, medicine, veterinary science, engineering, and architecture, attending the University of Washington, UC Davis, UCSB, Stanford, Duke, Wellesley, U Chicago, RPI, Washington & Lee, U. Hawaii, St. Olaf, and RSDI among others. Many have won regional, state, and national recognition for science while in high school or obtained NSF REU and college UROP research appointments. Three have been national NOAA Hollings Scholarship recipients. We are especially proud that so many of our students have attended these selective colleges with full needs-met financial awards or merit scholarships. It continues to be our pleasure to hear of our students' successes and that so many are still in touch with each other. As anyone will tell you, upon reflection, the greatest guide to a life is one's lived experience among mentors and peers. Salish Sea Sciences' method of engaging high school students with the Salish Sea and professionals who are invested in its study, protection, and mitigation—whether at a .edu, .org, .gov, or .com—tips the balance of that truism in favor of marine and/or environmentally related STEAM college and career trajectories. Experience tells us that intensive, place-based experiential education is deeply impactful for all students, but most especially students from backgrounds that are historically underrepresented in STEAM. One profound form of impact is the heightened level of perseverance and sense of belong gained from living in a residential context among peers with a common interest and among mentors who engage students in their work. These students can envision themselves as professionals because they are literally there, doing those things, among those people. The experience has a powerful and lasting effect, reinforcing a mindset of resiliency, and practices like reaching out for help, that gets Salish Sea Sciences students through those college science courses that are known to disproportionally subvert STEAM ambitions of first-generation students. Here is but one example from a student who attended one of our programs on full scholarship: "I loved being able to be a part of hands-on science and experience first hand what it's like to work in the field...The other part of the program that made it a success was being able to meet and talk with graduate students and professors at the labs and expand my knowledge of the oceans...The program helped me realize that ocean sciences are something I would like to study and possibly pursue as a career. It also gave me the opportunity to meet new people. I have amazing friends, but no one I've been able to connect with quite as well as the people I met through this program. Not only did the program open doors for me, but it helped me to realize that there are people in the world who I will be able to have strong friendships with." She is now a needs-met STEAM student at Stanford. Please consider giving to Salish Sea Sciences. Someday we hope to be a fully needs-met organization, in which the size of a family's pocketbook need not hinder the size of a student's ambition and the contribution to science and the world they could make. Your gift will advance that cause.