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Tasi Watch rangers call on community for fundraising support
Kolred Mettao and Wayne Dawe urged the community to support their “green” 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 “hard work” keeping the beaches of the island clean of trash.
“The amount of trash out there. It’s constant. Like, we clean today, tomorrow, go back out, [and] there’s more trash,” Dawe said.
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.
According to Mettao, the Tasi Watch project only has six rangers, who go out to beaches on their own free time.
“Six people to clean up all those trash is really hard work,” he said, describing community support as “so important” to what they do.
“We’re helping the community. If they help us, us being a non-profit organization, that will get us more trash bags [to recycle trash],” he said.
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’s beaches with his team.
“‘Tasi’ means ocean, so that’s what we do, we protect the species in the ocean and on land,” he said.
The Tasi Watch Project—under MINA—is 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.
In a press conference Thursday, Frankie Elliptico, chairperson for MINA, called on community support as well.
“In these times…it’s not easy to grow, it’s really through activities like [the Green Gala] and the support of our partners in the community to help bring us to what we do,” he said.
He added that MINA’s Green Gala—other than helping them fund their many environmental projects—will be a night “you won’t forget.”
“You’ll talk about it throughout the year,” he said.
