This summer, I had the great pleasure of interning with the Wahine Project here in Monterey, California. The Wahine Project is a local non-profit focused on expanding access to ocean and beach environments through inclusive surfing opportunities for children aged 4-14, and I was drawn to their focus on inspiring future generations to protect the ocean through engaging outdoor education and activities.

I thoroughly enjoyed my summer experiences — spending time at the beach and in the ocean, supporting environmental education initiatives, and connecting with the local community. Alongside volunteering to support operations at the beach, I worked on creating an internal, institutional resource. This educational booklet sought to help staff enhance their environmental knowledge and facilitate their leading of on-the-beach environmental activities. The booklet addressed topics, such as: the threat to marine life from ocean plastic pollution and anthropogenic climate change, inspirational women leaders in the environmental community, and actions individuals can take to protect our environments. This resource, and my time at the beach, sought to go beyond informational awareness and supporting programming, striving to inspire program participants to become active stewards of the environment.

Some of my summer highlights include: 

What did you accomplish with your host organization? What was the impact of your work?

My impacts were two-fold; encouraging children to engage meaningfully with the ocean and environmental actions/activities and creating an informational toolkit to support future staff volunteers and instructors in their leading of activities. 

The comprehensive educational resource I developed was a blend between an informational booklet and implementation toolkit, striving to equip staff with strategies, discussion questions and prompts, scientific facts, and local histories to inspire curiosity and ocean stewardship. One section I enjoyed creating was focused on inspirational women across a range of environmental fields, highlighting pioneering female oceanographers, marine biologists, conservationists, surfers, and environmental activists who have made significant contributions to our understanding and protection of marine ecosystems. This section aligned perfectly with The Wahine Project’s mission of empowering girls and women while connecting environmental stewardship to female leadership and achievement.

I hope that this resource will encourage both staff and children participating in the program to engage in larger environmental conversations. As an institutional resource, I hope it can be used and updated over time to support their mission for years to come.  

Describe the benefits of this experience for you professionally and personally? 

This internship gave me valuable, hands-on experience creating accessible, educational materials focused on supporting educators to have an impact, strengthening my skills in environmental education and curricular design. Developing practical resources tailored for younger learners developed my ability to communicate complex, interconnected systems of knowledge via accessible, easy-to-follow resources and formats, strengthening my outreach ability. These skills feel deeply valuable to my future career in environmental policy, outreach, and education. 

Personally, this experience was deeply fulfilling and engaging, as I got the pleasure of working with children to further develop their connection to the ocean, local stewardship, and to others in the community. Watching friendships flourish, first-time experiences, and inspiring confidence were all fulfilling and deeply meaningful. Working outdoors and seeing the enthusiasm of children encountering the ocean and environmental education strengthened my passion for EJ work and the value of inclusive, sustainable, community action.  

Did your experience provide any unexpected discovery, self-reflection, or epiphany? 

This experience felt unexpectedly grounding and meaningful, as I found joy in both spending time in the ocean while supporting a community-centered initiative that deeply values inspiring environmental stewardship in younger generations. With previous experiences in youth-centered non-profits, this internship highlighted the power of ocean-based exploration paired with education to foster both connection and action. I enjoy making knowledge accessible to all ages to inspire action, and felt lucky to engage directly with young people to inspire stewardship and curiosity about our shared environment this summer.  Thank you!

My time with EDF was kind of a whirlwind! For context, I’ve been chasing EDF for a while now, so even though I had no experience working in fisheries, I jumped at the opportunity to work with such a storied organization.

I’d liken the start of my internship to being thrown into the deep end of a pool, but enjoyable at the same time. Because much of the internship was going to focus on synthesizing the takeaways of EDF’s Approaches to Climate-Resilient Fisheries workshop in Portland, Maine, in early May, I got to start working a little earlier than expected and attended the workshop, which was co-hosted by the Gulf of Maine Research Institute. The workshop brought together global fishery practitioners, researchers, and managers to explore pathways for strengthening climate resilience in marine fisheries, and aimed to bridge the gap between resilience assessment frameworks and practical, context-specific actions, including approaches and implementation strategies. I served as one of the workshop facilitators – taking notes, managing breakout activities, and helping with logistics for the case study presentations and panel discussions.

The workshop was essentially a high-level brainstorming session. Attendees and organizers worked together to develop objectives based on the Climate-Resilient Fisheries Planning Tool, a step-by-step guide to define, assess, and plan for climate resilience in fishery systems. Experts shared their experiences through lightning presentations, panel discussions, and breakout activities, all designed to kickstart strategizing pathways for strengthening climate resilience in marine fisheries.

A key focus was bridging the gap between resilience assessment frameworks and practical, context-specific actions, including approaches and implementation strategies. A common theme across projects was overcoming cultural gaps and ensuring the effective integration of local knowledge. This was largely emphasized through knowledge co-production and co-development — iterative, collaborative processes that bring together multiple sources and types of knowledge to develop a systems-oriented understanding of a problem and identify solutions.

The heart of the workshop was the case study presentations: 24 studies shared through 5-minute lightning talks. Each presentation followed a standardized one-slide template, as shown here, which detailed project processes, co-development design, project goals, pathways, strategies, and implementation efforts.

This template structure helped us characterize and cluster the case studies, allowing us to examine strengths and weaknesses of different co-development approaches and begin designing specific pathways to ensure more resilient fisheries. As a note-taker and discussion facilitator, it was definitely a bit tricky considering I had zero fisheries awareness and knowledge base, but it was relatively easy to quickly pick up on crucial information and context. Coming out of this event, my understanding of climate-resilient fisheries was much broader.

Post-workshop, my work with EDF was focused on expanding my fisheries knowledge and synthesizing the workshop’s takeaways. The first few weeks of the internship consisted of reading through probably 10 scientific papers on fisheries management and climate-resilient fisheries as well as combing through EDF’s Virtual Fisheries Academy to help get me up to speed on fisheries science and policy. From there, I helped write out a full workshop report, detailing the case studies, policy recommendations, and next steps, including several in-progress working groups.

I also examined the 24 case studies used in the framework for potential similarities in order to visually represent their data, and I eventually clustered the he different pathways & strategies from the case studies into five groups – adaptive management, governance & institutional reform, climate risk and tools, science and data assessments, and collaboration/knowledge sharing. This will hopefully make it easier to standardize certain processes toward making more fisheries climate-resilient.

The workshop and case study synthesis efforts weren’t standalone — they were designed to produce several outputs that would maintain momentum and continue advancing universal approaches to climate-resilient fisheries.

These outputs include the formation of working groups focusing on fisheries co-management strategies and policy implementation, the development of a global climate-resilient fisheries toolkit, and the project I’ve been most involved with: a peer-reviewed implementation synthesis manuscript — my first foray into scientific publishing!

This manuscript will examine resilience approaches, goals, enabling factors, barriers, and provide practical implementation recommendations. A major section of the paper is focused on the social foundations of resilience in fisheries — exploring the social concepts that form the bedrock of resilience in fishing communities and fisheries systems.

The social foundations section of the manuscript aims to define the key social and theoretical concepts underpinning climate resilience in fisheries systems. This involves conducting an in-depth literature review on knowledge co-production and related social concepts in resilience, and outlining a conceptual framework for how these processes interact.

For example, concepts like knowledge co-production, co-management, collective action, and institutional fit – which refers to how well management structures align with the social and ecological contexts they aim to govern – are all critical social elements that must be intertwined with ecological resilience to build truly resilient fisheries.

This work has been a valuable experience, and a good use of my more policy-heavy background, in translating high-level social science concepts into actionable insights for fisheries systems — essentially bridging social and marine science to see the full picture.

Describe the benefits of this experience for you professionally and personally?

Not only has this experience helped me gain crucial experience in understanding scientific processes, but it’s also put me onto the process of scientific writing and publishing – very useful for someone trying to embark on a career in the space between climate policy and science. It’s also helped me to be adaptive, considering my lack of fisheries experience prior to this internship, and it’s a serious first step into the world of environmental NGOs.

Personally, it’s been an incredible taste of life as a scientist – probably not something I’m cut out for – as well as life as a fisheries/marine policy expert, which is much closer to the kind of career I came to MIIS to map out. Fisheries are a unique sector of marine science and policy – they’re not super flashy on the surface, and the intricacies of the field are not very well-known, but they’re incredibly important across many realms – socially, economically, ecologically, etc. Working in fisheries is a perfect marriage of social and ecological science and policy, and I am extremely grateful for the opportunity afforded to me by the CBE to get my foot in the door.