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Oregon Shores’ Strategic Vision |  Our long-term goal: To build a vigorous, cohesive organization that is not only an effective line of defense in battles over current issues, but has the means and the broad-based grassroots support necessary to play a proactive role in pushing for fundamental change toward a more sustainable way of inhabiting the Oregon coastal region.
KEY STRATEGIC THEMES
1. Making connections: We will organize our work around interconnections among terrestrial and marine ecosystems and the atmosphere: the “land-sea connection.” We will bring this cohesiveness to our own planning and to the way we understand all of our work, and also to our public education efforts. We will be the group that stands for these connections in the public mind.
2. Adapting to the nature of the Oregon coast: We will develop and champion adaptive responses to coming climate change, which will become a central element in all our work. We will also bring this perspective to addressing the realities of tsunamis, landslides, water availability and the impacts of interbasin transfers, recreational impacts caused by more and more people and the general phenomenon of “loving the coast to death.” We will consistently demand an honest accounting of the full implications of these realities, and push relentlessly for policy and cultural changes that seriously address them, changes as fundamental as reconfiguring the built environment. We will be recognized as the organization taking the lead in creating public awareness of these realities and of the potential for creative, adaptive responses.
KEY ORGANIZATIONAL STRATEGIES
1. Grassroots organizing: While retaining our expertise in policy advocacy in such areas as land use and ocean planning, we will greatly expand our emphasis on grassroots organizing, building and training deep networks of activists supporting our positions and programs. While the ability to address issues through the technicalities of law and regulatory processes will always have an important role in our work, our overriding goal will be to foster a much more powerful movement for coastal conservation that will change the political environment within which such decisions are made
2. Broad-based membership: We will expand our membership by an order of magnitude, thereby increasing our clout and our avenues for disseminating our message, as well as giving the organization a more stable, broader funding base. We will seek to become a more fully statewide organization, increasing our ability to bring statewide concern to bear on decisions affecting the coast and ocean. We will continually emphasize that everyone is a “stakeholder” in the coast and ocean.
3. Volunteer engagement: We will develop a variety of structured roles through which volunteers can participate actively in the organization. These will include board/member committees, county chapters, CoastWatch support groups, issue campaigns and possibly campus groups.
4. Communications: We will emphasize external communications much more heavily, and cultivate the skills and methods to do so. We will consistently produce newsletters (varying between full editions and short updates) and alerts. Our website will serve as a key news source and calendar for the coast. We will regularly produce press releases and handouts about our positions and programs. We will produce op-ed pieces, letters to the editor and posts to online discussions. Internally, we will consistently update board members and key volunteers on our positions and ongoing activities, and maintain a strong flow of communication within the staff.
LONG-TERM PROGRAM GOALS
Ocean Program
1. Marine reserves: We will play a leading role in the continuing campaign for a full network of marine reserves and other protected areas. We will work in true coalition if we can, but develop the grassroots strength to campaign on our own if need be. We will campaign to create reserves that link onshore, intertidal and nearshore habitats, and develop educational and organizing efforts around linking communities to their neighboring offshore habitats
2. Alternative energy: We will continue to play a leading role in the state’s deliberations over wave and wind energy, formulating and advocating for a clear policy. We will continue to play an active role in addressing LNG issues.
3. Ocean aquaculture: If this becomes a serious possibility, we will formulate a clear policy opposing privatization of the ocean and its fishery resources and advocate for it aggressively.
4. Pollution: We will become much more visibly active on issues both of sources at sea (cruise ships, tanker safety, bilge dumping) and terrestrial sources affecting the nearshore ocean (in this arena, the Ocean Program will cooperate with Land use and engage CoastWatchers in monitoring).
5. Marine debris: While CoastWatch will play the key role in monitoring and education, Ocean will join in campaigning for source abatement.
6. Intertidal and subtidal: The Ocean and CoastWatch programs will both campaign for higher levels of protection for intertidal areas.
Land Use Program
1. We will expand our ability (in terms of available time and expertise) both to intervene directly in land use cases and to advise our members and other citizens engaged in local issues. We become even more clearly the resource of first resort for those concerned about land use issues. We will produce and widely distribute (and make available on our website) a wide range of instructional and background materials that are a key resource for citizens seeking to learn about land use issues and process
2. We will develop strong, proactive strategies for our land use work (stressing our key themes of land-sea connection, adaptation in the face of climate change and other hazards, plus protecting rivers, estuaries and watersheds), and advocate forthrightly and aggressively for our principles, rallying grassroots support among those who share those principles. We engage actively in state and federal regulatory processes as well as at the local level.
3. We will develop a strong network of land use activists working with us through Oregon Shores chapters or other such structures.
4. We will take leadership in building coalitions and seeking financial support for comprehensive approaches to watersheds, stretches of shoreline, community response to climate change and other hazards, transportation planning, public land or easement purchase and other broad, strategic planning issues.
5. The Land Use Program will work closely with CoastWatch to educate mile adopters in land use issues as they affect the shoreline, assisting CoastWatch in becoming an effective early warning system for all types of land use concerns.
6. The Coastal Law Project expands to 1 FTE in support of all of the above, with sufficient funding for all court costs, travel, etc.
CoastWatch
1. We will have at least one active mile adopter for every CoastWatch mile, and improve our participation level to the point that essentially every mile receives coverage every quarter.
2. We will have a comprehensive training program, addressing all aspects of monitoring and coastal natural history, available to all mile adopters on a consistent basis; this will be augmented by DVD, online and print materials available at all times. Active CoastWatchers will be sufficiently trained to produce valuable, accurate reports, participate in special surveys and assist scientists and regulatory agency personnel. (Note: If the proposed Coastal Master Naturalist program becomes a reality, we will have a strong reciprocal arrangement through which we will obtain some of our needed training but also play a leadership role in delivering some types of training.)
3. CoastWatch will conduct intensive, scientifically rigorous special surveys of marine debris, invasive species, sources of pollution crossing the beach and possibly other topics. We will play a more active role in the beached bird and marine mammal stranding surveys.
4. CoastWatchers will monitor for indices of climate change, and the program will become a key source of public education on the immediate coastal impacts of climate change.
5. The CoastWatch section of the website will not only have a full set of training materials and other tools, but will also provide a wide-ranging compendium of information about the shoreline, visited by people from around the world interested not just in CoastWatch and the Oregon coast, but in citizen monitoring and shoreline science in general.
6. CoastWatch will develop an exportable model of the program’s basic organizing mode and materials, and assist in the forming of sister programs in other states.
Climate action program
1. Legislative and planning: Oregon Shores will lead a successful drive to pass either Goal 20, requiring the incorporation of sea level rise and storm surge considerations in planning requirements, or the equivalent statewide planning provisions. Working through the Land Use Program’s grassroots network, our members in every city and county push for full implementation of planning measures that take into account sea level rise and increased storm surges.
2. Abatement: While this is not our primary focus, we will actively address transportation issues in these terms, joining with other groups pushing for increased mass transit, for instance, and opposing fossil fuel-dependent tourism. We will look for other ways to advocate for reductions in the coast’s carbon footprint (addressing carbon sequestration issues in the management of coastal forests would be one example).
3. Pullback: Oregon Shores will launch a comprehensive public education and advocacy project that provides sophisticated and visually dramatic presentations on climate change impacts (and other hazards such as landslides and tsunamis) projected for the coast, and develops truly long-range legal, land use and cultural solutions pointing toward a visionary, decades-long objective of retrenchment of the built environment away from shorelines, floodplains and hazard zones.
Legislative program
We will acquire the means to hire lobbying help as needed and mobilize our grassroots network so as to do a thorough job of campaigning for a limited number of carefully targeted bills when appropriate to our mission, primarily in the Oregon Legislature but potentially with the U.S. Congress as well.
KEY ORGANIZATIONAL COMPONENTS
In order to have the means to carry out this strategic vision, we will have:
1. A board all of whose members take responsibility together with the ED for raising the budget necessary to meet the organization’s goals and needs; well-established board policies and procedures; a complete board packet available for new or prospective members; regular board training.
2. An adequately sized and paid staff, approximately six full-time-equivalent, including the executive director and a volunteer coordinator in addition to staff directing the various programs.
3. An office at the coast—this might be partly staffed by volunteers, as not all staffers would necessarily be based where the office was located.
4. A fund-raising team capable of producing funding in the $500,000-plus range; strong connections to foundations and state and federal funding agencies.
5. Equipment available as needed—computers, projectors, water-quality testing equipment, among other things.
6. A well-organized committee structure, involving both board members and other volunteers.
7. Strong, transparent, widely understood financial controls, supervised by a Finance Committee that includes professionally skilled members
8. A youth program, certainly among college students and young recreationists, but possibly at the grade school level as well. |
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