Tag Archives: Delores Broten

Parks

Three Decades of Stewardship: FOCI’s Ongoing Legacy in Cortes Island Parks

For over 30 years, Friends of Cortes Island (FOCI) has played a vital role in preserving and maintaining the natural beauty of Cortes Island’s parks. From humble beginnings to an established organization with year-round maintenance operations, FOCI’s legacy is woven into the very trails, beaches, and forests it cares for.

“There is just a wonderful collection of fantastic places that we’ve protected on this island, and I think we should celebrate that,” exclaimed Helen Hall, Executive Director of FOCI. “The parks are there for people to enjoy and learn about nature. They’re very popular on Cortes.”

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Animals, Environment

30 Years of Foreshore Monitoring on Cortes Island

Originally published, as part 3 of the Cortes Island Resonance series by the Cortes Community Radio Society.

In 1995, standing on a Cortes Island shoreline with fellow environmental advocate Delores Broten, Sabina Leader Mense agreed to launch something that had never been done before on the island: a long-term monitoring project for its rocky intertidal zones. “Delores said, ‘We really need to get onto monitoring the marine environment.’ And I said, ‘Okay,’” Mense recalls.

That conversation marked the beginning of FOCI’s very first marine stewardship initiative, The Cortes Island Foreshore Monitoring Program (CIFMP) and today, nearly three decades later, it remains one of the longest-running environmental monitoring programs in the Strait of Georgia.

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Environment

Only A Week From Now: FOCI’s 2024 AGM

The Friends of Cortes Island (FOCI) 2024 AGM is coming up at 5 PM on December 3rd. They are celebrating more than 30 years with their Marine Stewardship program. Sabina Leader Mense will be the guest speaker. 

“That’s the second part of the AGM. For the first part, we will be talking about  the work we’ve done in 2024. We’ve just produced our 2024 Annual Report and that’s bursting at the seams with amazing work that we’ve been doing over the last year,” explained Helen Hall. executive director of the Friends of Cortes Island.  

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Communications

Delores Broten: The problem with Facebook

Google and Facebook took in $9.7 billion in advertising revenue during 2020, while the revenues of more traditional news outlets – who produce much of the actual news being posted on Facebook and Instagram – are failing. In response to Bill C-18, which requires them to pay Canadian media outlets a fraction of their advertisement revenues, the dynamic duo will no longer let Canadian news outlets post. 

This was brought home to Cortes Currents on Wednesday, August 2, when Facebook served notice that as a news outlet, Cortes Currents Facebook posts will no longer be viewable inside Canada. 

As only about 10% of my web traffic actually comes through Facebook, my reactions were mixed, but the strongest was curiosity. 

So I reached out to some local media outlets to find out:

  1. What is their opinion of the situation?
  2. How does being cut off from Facebook affect their publication? 

The first to respond was a well known former Cortes resident, Delores Broten of the Watershed Sentinel.  

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Animals, Rivers & Oceans

FOCI’s Marine Stewardship Initiative

“The best overview of the FOCI’s Marine Stewardship Initiative (MSI), the absolute best overview in a nutshell, is an Arthur C Clarke’s quote. It’s the mantra of the MSI. Arthur C. Clarke wrote ‘How inappropriate to call this Planet Earth when it is quite clearly Ocean.’ That is, in a nutshell, the Marine Stewardship Initiative,” explained Sabina Leader Mense, Program coordinator.

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