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The Susie Buttrick Award is named after our longest running volunteer here at the Aquarium. This award provides the opportunity for a department to provide enrichment to their volunteers’/interns’ experiences at the New England Aquarium. This grant is awarded to a department that meets one or more of the following criteria:
- Develops a thoughtful recognition program for their volunteers and interns.
- Implements additional professional development or training of volunteers/interns.
- Utilizes the skills and expertise of volunteers for a special project, providing
- volunteers and interns with a sense of connection to the department and to the New England Aquarium.
- Hosts and implements a project initiated by a volunteer or intern.
The 2019 recipient of the Susie Buttrick Award is the LBSC Skills Program.
- We would like to support the three, highly successful programs (Turtle Emergency Response Volunteers, Marine Mammal Education Volunteers, and Edge of the Sea Volunteers) by providing financial support to better sustain, develop, and evolve the model into the future.
- Sustain: Marine Mammals & Rescue teams would benefit from a slightly heavier uniform that would also allow them to be easily identified as LBSC. We would hope to purchase a collection of hoodies or fleeces to help meet this need.
- Develop: The Marine Mammal team has been using the same biofacts for decades. In recent years many of these biofacts are showing wear and tear. This has been exacerbated by daily warm weather use by the Marine Mammal Education Volunteer team. We would like to purchase new and novel biofacts to be used in the MMC by our Skills volunteers, allowing them to expand their interpretative impact on our visitors
- Evolve: The Visitor Education team has been thinking very proactively about how to increase accessibility of Edge of the Sea Training while also improving the workflow balance of training time of these volunteers by staff. The team would like to invest SBA funds into a small scale pilot training model that would leverage blended learning. With these funds the team will identify an online technology that offers ELearning that can be blended with in person training and design/test a training with an Edge of the Sea class. If the testing goes well, we believe that this platform will be able to be scaled and also transferred to other skills programs to make the onboarding process more feasible moving forward- starting with the Marine Mammal Education Volunteer program and expanding from there.
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