Kolred Mettao and Wayne Dawe urged the community to support their \u201cgreen\u201d initiatives by supporting the fundraising efforts by the Mariana Islands Nature Alliance for their many projects and organization as a whole, one of which includes the Tasi Watch Project, which Mettao and Dawe said calls on them as rangers to do a lot of \u201chard work\u201d keeping the beaches of the island clean of trash.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe amount of trash out there. It\u2019s constant. Like, we clean today, tomorrow, go back out, [and] there\u2019s more trash,\u201d Dawe said.<\/p>\n
He said part of his job is to encourage people to clean up after themselves, and noted that residents are bringing trash from home and dumping them in trash bins.<\/p>\n
According to Mettao, the Tasi Watch project only has six rangers, who go out to beaches on their own free time.<\/p>\n
\u201cSix people to clean up all those trash is really hard work,\u201d he said, describing community support as \u201cso important\u201d to what they do.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019re helping the community. If they help us, us being a non-profit organization, that will get us more trash bags [to recycle trash],\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
He urged the community to join in on MINA fundraisers like the Green Gala so they get to know the work done on the island\u2019s beaches with his team.<\/p>\n
\u201c\u2018Tasi\u2019 means ocean, so that\u2019s what we do, we protect the species in the ocean and on land,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
The Tasi Watch Project\u2014under MINA\u2014is an education and outreach program to build local capacity to help manage near shore marine resources. Currently MINA is in its final stages of planning for its upcoming Green Gala event.<\/p>\n
In a press conference Thursday, Frankie Elliptico, chairperson for MINA, called on community support as well.\t<\/p>\n
\u201cIn these times\u2026it\u2019s not easy to grow, it\u2019s really through activities like [the Green Gala] and the support of our partners in the community to help bring us to what we do,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
He added that MINA\u2019s Green Gala\u2014other than helping them fund their many environmental projects\u2014will be a night \u201cyou won\u2019t forget.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cYou\u2019ll talk about it throughout the year,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Kolred Mettao and Wayne Dawe urged the community to support their \u201cgreen\u201d initiatives by supporting…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":47,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[37,554,67],"class_list":["post-178473","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-local-news","tag-education-2","tag-mina","tag-people"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/178473","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/47"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=178473"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/178473\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=178473"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=178473"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=178473"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}