Rocking the Boat Sets Course for Success in the Environmental Sciences

The mission

Rocking the Boat participants develop pride, purpose, and possibility by learning the unique and lifelong skills behind building and rowing wooden boats, sailing, and restoring the Bronx River. Rocking the Boat creates community, teaches through transformative experiences, and makes nature available to everyone, inspiring young people to determine their own future against a backdrop of systemic inequity.

Rocking the Boat is committed to helping its participants:

• Stay in high school until they graduate or receive an equivalency diploma
• Enroll in college or trade school and be prepared academically and emotionally to succeed
• Develop technical skills such as sailing, boat handling, navigating, chart reading, carpentry, sample collection and testing, scientific observation, and recording data, all of which reinforce STEM concepts and put them into a practical context
• Develop soft skills such as leadership, communication, teamwork, problem solving, and critical thinking

The program

The RBC Foundation USA currently supports Rocking the Boat’s Environmental Science Program:

The Environmental Science Program helps teenagers and young adults in the South Bronx develop environmental awareness and the skills to become stewards of their local natural spaces and the Bronx River. In doing so, they develop the technical and social skills to replicate the successes they have in the lab and on the water in their academic and professional lives.

High school juniors and seniors in the program's advanced Environmental Job Skills class will be involved in research and conservation projects which include monitoring the water quality and restoring marsh grass habitat along the banks of the industrially mistreated Bronx River. Graduates of the program have the opportunity to work as Program Assistants, helping to run the Environmental Science Program that benefits more than 2,000 local students and members of the community.