Be an environmental champion

If you’ve been hanging out in several government offices recently, you might have heard the words “target audiences, messages, the environmental champion approach” and the phrase “repeat, repeat, repeat.” What is this all about? From August 3 to 9, individuals from the Division of Environmental Quality, the Coastal Resources Management Office, the Division of Fish and Wildlife, and the Division of Public Works were treated to a barrage of meetings and trainings on the topic of outreach and education.

Donna Barker and Suzanne Hawkes of IMPACS, a Canadian-based media-communications training center, came to the CNMI to pass on valuable skills in crafting messages and developing strategic outreach plans.

Funded by the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration’s Pacific Services Center and the CNMI’s Coral Reef Initiative, they facilitated meetings at CRM, DEQ, and DFW, and held two trainings at the Hyatt.

About 60 people attended meetings held at the three agencies, and discussed the role of outreach and education in their agencies, set environmental targets that could be addressed through outreach encouraging behavior change, and discussed the possibilities of collaborating across agency barriers.

On Friday, Aug. 5, over 40 people learned that education and outreach is more than just educating the general public on best practices to protect our environment. In order to make a difference, the education must result in changing specific behaviors. For example, it’s not enough that people know recycling is important, they must take action and bring their recyclables to the transfer station. Even better is if they convince their friends and co-workers to recycle too!

On Tuesday, Aug. 9, the training focused more specifically on developing outreach and education campaigns on litter and illegal dumping, coral reef damage by runoff and by anchoring, fishing in marine protected areas, wildlife and endangered species recognition, and recycling.

The first challenge was to come up with measurable environmental targets that could be addressed by educational campaigns. As the participants quickly realized, there are currently many gaps in our understanding of which people are causing the greatest environmental impacts, how we can best reach these groups and even how to measure the impacts themselves.

After brainstorming about the environmental targets, members of each group began their campaign plan by deciding on a target audience (who has the biggest impact or can have the greatest effect on the environment?), an appropriate message that will hopefully cause the desired behavior change, and a strategy for getting the message out. This might include traditional methods such as brochures or flyers, or innovative techniques such as enlisting the help of respected members in the target audience’s community, the so-called “environmental champion” approach. And, the trainers stressed, it is important to repeat, repeat, repeat your message.

Participants have a long way to go with more research, analysis, and brainstorming before new creative slogans and ads appear. However, the key message participants want to share is: Show respect for your island, by practicing environmentally friendly behaviors.

CoCo