CIB looks to reach more people

By Jonathan Starkey
Staff Reporter

The Center’s outreach and education programs — and finding specific, talented volunteers for those programs — were the center of the conversation at the meeting of the committee charged with evaluating the Comprehensive Conservation and Management Plan (CCMP). Appendix B of the plan, written in the early 1990s, deals with how the Center can expand public support for issues surrounding Delaware’s inland bays.

“Changes in land use and the increase in population are the major issues,” said Sally Boswell, the Education and Outreach coordinator.

Boswell said that the Center is now formalizing the way that they accept volunteers, making the process almost like a job application. She brings volunteers in, interviews them and finds out their interests. This way, she can place them in the programs where they will have the most impact on education and public policy.

Some volunteers now teach in certain programs and others would prefer just biking along Route 1 to pick up turtles who have found their way to the highway, she said. Others can do research, testing the waters in the bay.

“You don’t reach everyone in the same way,’ Boswell said. “It certainly depends on the kind of people you’re looking for. It’s a balance.”

Martha Keller, chair of the committee evaluating the CCMP, agreed with Boswell and had some suggestions about reaching more people in the community, and perhaps finding more volunteers. Earlier in Tuesday’s meeting, Boswell said that the Center had planned to take their newsletter out of newspapers, print it on traditional newsletter print and distribute it in community spots like libraries in surrounding towns.

While Keller agreed with that approach, she had some suggestions. She said the “jazzy version” would be good for about 1,000 copies but the Center could reach more people by keeping the cheaper, newsprint version of the monthly letter.

“I feel like the newsprint is very good for mass distribution,” Keller said. Still, she added, the 1,000, or so, copies of the “jazzy” version should be distributed in grocery stores, gas stations and other places people frequent.

Keller also suggested changing the Center’s approach on its educational brochures and maps. One idea centered on putting posters on the back of hotel room doors. Tourists would see it every time they leave the hotel room, and it might spark some curiosity.

And Keller actually had a problem with simple brochures. Although they are distributed properly in tourist spots like hotels and rental offices for seasonal residents, people just don’t care for a brochure. Keller said that people are apt to pick up a brochure and through it away 20ft later when they walk by a trash can.

Instead of the brochures, she suggested printing information and pictures from the Center’s programs on postcards. People could pick them up in stores up and down the Delaware coast line.

“Give them something to do with it instead of putting it in a door,” Keller said. “Everyone likes to send postcards from the shore.”

And with the help of the postcards, more people could learn, perhaps become interested and maybe even volunteer in one of the Center’s programs.

“How something is used is as important as where it goes,” Keller said.