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.
Mike Moore: “I hadn’t really been that involved in FOCI before, except that FOCI and the Watershed Sentinel were at one time very closely aligned, and I’ve been a proofreading editor for Watershed Sentinel for quite a few years. I joined the FOCI board in December 2021, so I’m coming up now to three years. I joined because I was getting out of the Misty Isles and having more time to pursue naturalist activities. I was really excited about all the projects that FOCI does in the forest, on the ocean, and on the beaches. It’s a pretty cool thing that they’re doing.”
Cortes Currents: Now you’re the president of the board.
Mike More: “I’m the new president.”
“It’s not a big upset or anything like that. Our AGM was in December. At our board meeting in January, when we elected positions, the board said that because we were just embarking on a process with Andrea Fisher (of board development, education, and defining the structure of FOCI), we would keep that course under Max Thaysen until it was finished. We finished that process in early summer and are still working on the final touches, but Max was happy to step back and I was happy to step forward. Nobody has left the board. Everybody is really happy and energized with how things are going.”
Cortes Currents: Have there been any changes in direction?
Mike Moore: “This is an excellent question and that’s just something that we’re coming to grips with.”
“FOCI has done a really great job in monitoring the local environment, in enhancing the local environment, and in educating people about our local ecosystems. We work with parks, both at the Regional and Provincial level, to maintain Mansons Lagoon and the Regional Parks all over the island. We’ve got the longest continuous data set for foreshore monitoring. We’ve embarked on some wonderful projects like the Dillon Creek Wetlands Restoration Project and the Western Screech Owl Project.”
“We have all this stuff going, but it feels like it’s all pretty local and the world is changing. There’s this feeling that we want to have a bigger voice, a bigger input. We’re just coming to grips with that. That’s what this five hour meeting was this weekend. We’re pretty excited about where we can go. We are just in that revisioning process and we can’t actually make those decisions ourselves as a board. We want to involve our Executive Director, Helen Hall. She’s away at the moment and she’ll be back mid month, but we’ve done some preliminary work on that. We’re really excited about where we can go and stay relevant and vibrant as an organization.”
Cortes Currents: Have any ideas come out of that meeting that you can share?
Mike Moore: “We have some ideas.”
“When we tackled bigger picture issues before, we were not very nimble. I’m thinking about the issue of the Anvil Lake forestry. It took a while for FOCI to actually come up with a statement because we didn’t have a clear vision on big picture environmental policies. The same thing with the airstrip over at Smelt Bay. It took us a while to come up with a statement and it had to go through many revisions. One of the things that we realized is we need to be more nimble as an organization.”
“Nimbleness will stem from having a clear vision that everybody’s behind and moving towards. Once you have a clear vision, then you can actually just state that vision in whatever iteration it needs to take with whatever issue is coming up.”
“The other thing is without that clear vision, there was confusion as to whether we could jump into other projects.”
“For instance, the Union of British Columbia Municipalities Conference is just coming up next week, the 16th to the 20th. Mark Vonesch, our Regional Director, is going there.”
“I went to the sponsorship page for the UBCM, and it reads as a who’s who list of fossil fuel companies: Fortis, Enbridge, the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers (CAPP). They’re all there as platinum, gold, bronze, silver sponsors of this conference where our local elected officials are going to make important decisions as to our future. These polluting corporations that are burning the planet are advertising and that gives them access to these local voted-in representatives. I was just really upset at that.”
“I found out from Dogwood that there’s a letter that’s been produced by the CAPE, that’s the Canadian Association of Physicians for the Environment. It’s about fossil fuel sponsorship of this conference. That’s our first action where we’re signing on as an organization to aid and to leverage other organizations’ efforts.”
“I would just like to put in a plug for Mark Vonsech at this point. There is a motion on the floor, it came from Vernon, to eliminate that kind of advertising by the fossil fuel industry in that conference and future conferences. Mark is trying to gain energy for that motion and he is also running for the executive of the UBCM. So he’s hoping to have some pull there and we’re trying to get behind that any way we can.”
“One thing that we are thinking of doing as well is expanding our building at the Village Commons and making it bigger because right now when you have our Executive Director and office assistant in there, there’s no room for anybody else. We’d love that building to be more of a resource center where we can have documents, maps, books and things that people can access easily. So in our long term strategy, we’ve got a building addition to think about.
Cortes Currents: What about the types of projects FOCI has been doing in the past?
Mike Moore: “I think we’re going to keep all our projects going.”
“Our volunteers have been doing the monitoring for decades, especially like the foreshore monitoring, and they go to the beach on that low tide in the summer and they set it up and they do it and they submit their data. There may be some hardware that needs to be replaced every once in a while but that’s a really low budget activity. However, that data needs to be uploaded to the overall data sites so that any researcher can access that data.”
“Just this spring we pulled the first European green crab out of Manson’s Lagoon. It was a fully developed female. We were working with the Department of Fisheries and Oceans and FOCI volunteers and the Klahoose Guardians were there as well. We were shocked to get that thing. It was quite disheartening because when there’s one, there’s usually more and green crabs are a very successful invasive species. They really do a lot of damage to the ecosystem. They tear up eelgrass beds. They eat other crustaceans. So we were quite disheartened to find this.”
“In subsequent trapping and monitoring efforts, we have not found another living green crab. On the low tides in August they found an exoskeleton from a green crab in the same pool, between the islands in Manson’s Lagoon. In concert also with the light trap project for Dungeness Crab monitoring, which is run by the Hakai Institute, our volunteers are taking water samples to test for green crab DNA. That is happening in Cortes Bay. So, we’re working on several fronts there to monitor this invasive green crab species.”
Cortes Currents: Have you had any positive results from Cortes Bay?
Mike Moore: “Not that we’ve heard of. Genetic testing usually takes a little longer, and this is being done by DFO.”
Cortes Currents: On August 15th. FOCI sent out an email stating it was launching an ‘urgent fundraising appeal’ and needs to raise $30,000 by the end of September.
Mike Moore: ” We’re in an operational deficit at the moment, and the reason for that deficit is because two of our large grants have come to completion. That would be the Western Screech Owl grant and the Dillon Creek Wetlands grant. We’ve still got activities happening with both of those projects, ongoing monitoring and a little more work at the Dillon Creek wetlands, and there’s ongoing reporting that needs to be done as terms of the grant as well. We need to have professional monitoring and that costs a little money. I think we’re continuing on with the Screech Owl project on our own as well. So those two grants came to an end.”
“We didn’t get as much money from our gaming grant as we expected and had traditionally received. I think that the whole office move and everything else that went along with that was fairly disruptive. It took our eye off the fundraising ball to a degree.”
“It left us in a shortfall and I’m happy to say that we’ve had over $8,800 in donations and that’s about 30% of our goal. We’ve had 33 individuals donate to that fundraiser since it’s been up.”
FOCI needs to raise another $21,000 in the next three weeks.
Cortes Currents: Is there anything else you’d like to say?
Mike Moore: “I think there’s a real strong desire in the board to reconnect to our grassroots. I asked our Executive Director, Helen, for a list of volunteers. When I counted the number of volunteers and the number of contractors (Sam Gibb and Alex Bernier who do the trail maintenance, Soma Feldmar, Helen and a few others). I came up with 42 people that work to support FOCI. This doesn’t include our members and recurring donors. It’s actually quite a beautiful community organization and I don’t know half of those people. I didn’t realize that half those people were part of FOCI. So as a board member, not knowing where that stream is coming from felt like a big disconnect. I think there’s a real desire, as a board, to be more open in the community and connect that way.”
“Also, we are the only organization with a real environmental mandate on the island. We want to stay open to people and collaborative with community members and help feed the synergy that the environmental movement needs. That means connecting people with perhaps other organizations or facilitating letter writing or other activist campaigns here on the island and just being a kind of a hub for that.”
Links of Interest:
- Friends of Cortes Island website
- Friends of Cortes Island Facebook page
- Get Fossil Fuel Money Out of Local Politics – petition at Dogwood website
- Articles about, or mentioning, FOCI on Cortes Currents or Folk U
Top image credit: Corry Dow leading a group of birders around Linnaea Farm during ‘Bird Song & Breakfast Pie’ – courtesy FOCI Facebook Page
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