Spreading the Word, FishWise in the Community

FishWise understands that informed consumers play a key role in achieving the goal of creating and maintaining a sustainable seafood industry. With this in mind, we often go out to reach people in the community who are interested in having a conversation about what sustainable seafood is all about.

Recently, we have been doing a lot this. Locally in Santa Cruz, we have had three public outreach events in two weeks. On March 1st, three staff-members — Victoria Galitzine, Meghan Frolli, and Elsie Tanadjaja — attended a meeting for local ocean conservation groups at the Seymour Marine Discovery Center. Victoria gave an excellent 5-minute presentation about the criteria FishWise uses in determining seafood sustainability. After the screening of Otter501, also shown that night, our team was out on the FishWise table answering questions and sending folks home with useful tools such as Seafood Watch cards, Low Mercury cards, and Be Happy recipe cards.

About two weeks later, on March 13th, Victoria spoke at a film screening of the popular ocean conservation film “The End of the Line” organized by our colleagues at Save Our Shores (SOS). The End of the Line is a thought-provoking movie highlighting the plight of the oceans at the hands of industrial fishing. Victoria was in a panel of experts along with sustainable fisheries advocate Melissa Stevens and the founder of the sustainable San Francisco-based seafood distributor ‘I Love Blue Sea’, Martin Reed. After the movie, Victoria and her fellow panelists answered questions from SOS docents and members of the public for almost an hour and helped the audience to understand traceability issues, responsible business actions, and what actions consumers can take. The next day, on March 14th, Meghan was giving a 1.5-hour in-depth training,sharing her knowledge of how to choose sustainable seafood to the Seymour Marine Discovery Center docents.

There are two upcoming events that will take place farther away from Santa Cruz. Elsie will be giving a guest lecture to students in the Natural Resources class in the American River College, Sacramento, on March 27th. She will be talking about choosing sustainable seafood and how non-profits like Fishwise work. Also, on April 11th, William Wall will moderate a discussion around sustainable seafood after a film screening at 18 Reasons organized by FishWise partner Bi-Rite Market.

If you are organizing an event and would like FishWise to attend, please let us know!