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. We create community, teach through transformative experiences, and make 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 there
- 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
Rocking the Boat is a Youth Development organization serving the Bronx that creates unique opportunities out of elements often overlooked yet close at hand such as water, wildlife, and the local environs. In the organization’s program model, wooden boatbuilding, sailing, and environmental research and restoration become powerful tools for education, empowerment, and long-term engagement.
In response to the Hunts Point Interstate Access Improvement Project, a large multiphase highway construction venture that includes an offramp which connects the Bruckner Expressway and Sheridan Bouldevard to Edgewater Road in the Hunts Point section of the Bronx, the organization recently launched a new air quality monitoring project. Rocking the Boat’s building, yard, and the adjacent Hunts Point Riverside Park, from which participants access the Bronx River, sit directly on Edgewater Road. This means that truck traffic will increase considerably right at our doorstep, and with it will come air pollution in the form of carbon emissions, diesel exhaust, brake dust and various other forms of particulate matter.
Rocking the Boat will engage a teaching artist to collaborate with high school participants on the design and construction of an original sculpture highlighting a local environmental justice issue: air quality as a result of the completion of Edgewater Ramps section of the Hunts Point Access Improvement Project.
