Tag Archives: Watershed Sentinel

Environment, Parks, Rivers & Oceans

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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Environment

FOCI: Continuity & Change

The Friends of Cortes Island (FOCI) has a new President, is getting prepared to launch out in new directions and is also trying to raise $30,000 by the end of the month. The first two of those announcements may be interrelated, the third definitely is not. It is a result of two large contracts coming to an end, more on that later. First, Mike Moore has been one of FOCI’s members for decades and is now taking on a more active leadership role.

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Communications, Opinion

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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Environment, History

Carol Titler: When FOCI moved into Mansons

Carol Titler served on the Friends of Cortes Island Board (FOCI) during some of the society’s formative years. She was not one of the founding members, but joined FOCI when it was still meeting in people’s homes and hauling its records around in boxes.

“Then Hubert Havelaar built an office space and it was moved to downtown Manson’s Landing where it put us right there in the public eye. People began to really want to see what we were up to,” she explained. 

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Environment, Forests

Delores Broten: the 1990 logging blockade, FOCI and origins of the Watershed Sentinel

The Friends of Cortes Island (FOCI) was talked about in the past tense, when Delores Broten and Don Malcom moved to Cortes in 1987. In the first of a series of posts about the origins of FOCI, Broten talks about the 1990 logging blockade that inspired FOCI’s rebirth, and led to the award-winning environmental magazine ‘the Watershed Sentinel.’

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