Cleaning Up the North Carolina Coast with Strategic Doing

After the Lab leads a training in Strategic Doing, we encourage participants to put the skills to work immediately. Here’s a good example. Gloria Putnam, with North Carolina Sea Grant, North Carolina State University, attended a workshop we conducted in Delaware With Sea Grant universities in the fall of 2017. This spring, she worked with her colleagues to organize the Debris-Free NC Collaborative Workshop held in February at the NOAA Fisheries Beaufort Lab.

From this starting point,  the team is expanding their network and putting ideas and action quickly.  By mid March, the news was spreading. See: Groups Try New Strategy on Debris Problem. The article points out: “[T]he benefit of using Strategic Doing for a loosely connected network, like the one in place for the marine debris workshop, is that stakeholders come together and move forward to get more done while paying attention to time and resource limitation.” The article continues:

“The challenge with loose networks implementing jointly prepared strategic plans is that there are often not enough volunteers or needed resources to implement the actions when the plan is complete but with the Strategic Doing approach, ‘you can get started taking action, using assets (strengths or resources) group members already possess, hopefully get some successes early, and build over time.’

“During the workshop, the half-dozen groups came up with 17 ideas, Putnam said, that could help prevent or reduce marine debris. Some of the projects included plastic bottle regulations, public service announcements about marine debris that features children, better marine debris data collection, educating underserved communities on marine debris, expanding ocean-friendly establishment efforts and educational programs.”