The Rock Pool Project

The overall aim of the Rock Pool Project is to empower us all to improve our relationship with the marine environment by connecting science and education. The Rock Pool Project is a not-for-profit organisation, led by an experienced professional marine biologist and an equally experienced primary school teacher, and supported by a talented and enthusiastic volunteer network. The team are passionate about bringing the joys of discovering marine wildlife to everyone, in a manner that builds on our collective understanding of our precious marine natural heritage.

Blue Recovery

Blue Recovery aims to help hundreds of local people to explore, understand and care for their local wildlife and coastline. Adults and families from specific, eligible communities will enjoy free, expert-led rock pooling events, receive citizen science training and experience the freedom that comes with enjoying a rock pool ramble with friends at their local beach.

The programme connects with a range of experienced community partners, The Dracaena Centre and Nudge Community Builders link communities where a high proportion of people rarely, if ever, access their local coastline. The Mount Batten Watersports and Activities Centre help facilitate and empower people to regularly enjoy their local marine heritage. Working with the renown Marine Biological Association ensures that all wildlife images and data collected through the Blue Recovery project contribute is meaningful, high quality and can be used for scientific and conservation research.

Year 1 Snapshot

This report is a chance to look back over the past year, to reflect on the Blue Recovery programme milestones and evaluate our impact (against what we hoped to achieve). We have worked with Plymouth based social enterprise Fotonow CIC to help capture the journey of Year One. They have produced this report having followed our progress, filmed and photographed events and helped share the data within.

Visualising Impact

Fotonow utilise creative media in a way that helps showcase impact, distance travelled and give an authentic voice to participants and communities. A register will show us that a number of people took part in an activity, whereas a photograph of those people taking part in that activity visualises that number while revealing much more - the wellbeing of an experience shared revealed in the expressions of those taking part.

For this reason we have commissioned Fotonow to explore evaluation in its most creative form, here an a summary of project milestones, data, quotes and crucially images and links to short digital stories that reflect back what was Blue Recovery, Year 1.