Dale Carnegie Global Day of Giving
Last Friday, The WaterFront Center was excited to be joined by Dale Carnegie, and their CEO Joe Hart for their Annual Global Day of Giving!
For more than a century Dale Carnegie & Associates, Inc. has helped people from all walks of life become fearless leaders by teaching them the confidence they need to get the most out of life and work. An international professional training and development company, Dale Carnegie has helped communities prosper by improving the personal and financial well-being of the people who live there and the companies that do business there. Today, the company continues to create positive change by training people, in-person and online, to become the best they can be.
Every year Dale Carnegie’s global offices set aside October 22nd, their founding day, to give back to their communities and impact the lives of young adults, educators and to support non-profit organizations by providing time, talent, or free training. This year they teamed up with The WaterFront Center to clean up our local beach, Beekman Beach!
Our naturalists use Beekman Beach as an education area to take kids to explore the various creatures, big and small, that live both on and in the water! Not only does our staff use it to educate field trips and children from our programs, but it is also a local amenity used by the Community.
It is essential to comb through the sand and grass areas of the beach and the wrack line. The wrack line is where the high tide deposits natural and unnatural material such as seashells, seaweeds, wood and trash. Our Naturalist, Lauren, showed CEO Joe Hart and Human Resources Manager Christine Kelly how to sort through the wrack debris and look for smaller pieces of plastic and styrofoam that might have broken up in the water over time. It is important to collect even the tiniest pieces of these materials as they never actually fully break down, but instead turn into microplastics that continue to harm the environment.
The beach has three main parts; the freshwater stream, the main beach, and the salt marsh. Each section of the beach affects the ecosystem in different ways. The freshwater stream flows in from Mill Pond. This pond is separated from the beach by the main road, residential housing, and train tracks. Behind the central part of the beach lies a parking lot and railroad tracks. The main road that travels along the west of the salt marsh marks the perimeter. These surrounding areas all contribute to litter that travels to the beach by people, animals, and inclement weather.
After picking up litter from all three areas of the beach the Dale Carnegie staff and the WFC educators turned their attention to the back parking lot. It is crucial to get all the areas around the beach and marsh because runoff from rain and heavy wind can easily move the litter onto the beach and into the water. Spaces like the back of a parking lot are commonly overlooked on a beach clean-up. Still, we must remember that these areas around the natural ecosystem can also impact the primary habitat. One of our most eccentric finds was golf clubs recovered by Dale Carnegie Salesforce Administrator, Sue Hacker, in the brush in the back of the parking lot.
The next time you go out to your local park or beach bring some reusable gloves (gardening gloves) and a biodegradable garbage bag and see what you can find! You might be surprised by some of the most common items of trash such as cigarette butts, beer bottle caps, straws, and soda cans just to name a few. What will you find when you go out with your family and friends?
At the end of the clean up our educators, Joe and Lauren put together a touch tank of the local animals that would also directly benefit from this beach clean-up! They learned about Mollusks such as oysters, clams, mussels, and whelk snails. We also touched on spider crabs, hermit crabs, and Horseshoe Crabs. Global Marketing Manager, Tsvetelina Kemalova, even held a sea urchin as Human Resources Generalist, Christine Kelly, had a closer look!
We must never forget that humans are just one of the many species alive on this planet. We have to leave space and clean up after ourselves to promote a healthy ecosystem and, therefore, a happy planet earth!
