If you can believe it, the featured image here is made up of over 1,300 young students from underserved schools across Orange County. I had the opportunity to attend our local Kids Ocean Day (May 24th), and it was really awesome to see so many students assembled for the express reason of learning to care for our planet!

If you’ve never heard of Kids Ocean Day (it’s okay, I hadn’t either before I got the invite), this is an international effort to educate children on the importance of keeping our waters clean. The one I attended was spearheaded by Orange County Coastkeeper, a member of the International Waterkeeper Alliance. As part of the California Coastal Commission‘s Adopt-A-Beach Assembly Program, the students spend the day learning that they have the power, through recycling and litter reduction, to protect our environment.

 

A day at the beach

 

I had a chance to speak with Peter from OC Coastkeeper. He shared with me that his organization has been involved with this event since 2007. Children from underserved schools all over Orange County assemble in the morning to learn why and how they affect the ocean. Their homes are inland and some may have never even seen the ocean before. But they’re taught that everything starts at their doorsteps and goes out to the ocean through storm drains and other channels.

They also discuss the disastrous effect plastic is having on sea life. You can read more about that in my post about plastic straws.

As the kids travel from their schools out to the ocean, they follow the route that their trash takes. They also learn three important reasons to keep the ocean clean.

 

Because we need:

1. Clean air to breath
2. Clean food to eat
3. Clean beaches so we can have fun

In Orange County, the children were brought to Huntington Beach, voted California’s best beach by USA Today. Check out this pic I posted to the Eco Friendly Mama Instagram feed. If you can’t tell, the ocean is way out in the distance. The mountains you see on the horizon are actually Catalina, one of the Channel Islands. By the way, we visited Catalina last weekend and I’ll be posting our trip review here soon!

 

Sand for days! 😎🏖 . Hanging out today at Huntington Beach with @occoastkeeper and the Disney VoluntEARS for Kids Ocean Day 🌊 . This vast strip of sand will be turned into aerial art with the help of 1,300+ local elementary school students! 😮 . . #kidsoceanday #kidsoceanday2018 #huntingtonbeach #huntingtonbeachlife #occoastkeeper #savetheocean #stopsucking #disneyvoluntears #ecofriendlymama #keepouroceansclean #makewaves #blogwithheart #adoptabeach #californiacoastalcommission #calikids #momblog #disneymom

A post shared by Hilary Feldstein Ratner (@ecofriendlymama) on May 24, 2018 at 12:06pm PDT

 

Here amongst the seagulls at Huntington Beach, the children spent the rest of the morning picking up trash. Afterwards, they enjoyed lunch on the sand.

 

And then the real work began.

 

Kids Ocean Day culminates in the creation of a giant image made up entirely of students on the beach. It’s a gargantuan endeavor to organize more than 1,300 children into a complex network of lines making up a picture. To help, there was a team of about 20 Disney VoluntEARS pitching in.

These are employees of the Disney company, mostly cast members from our local Anaheim resort but some from the corporate offices in Los Angeles. They choose to volunteer at this event for no benefit other than to help out their community. There’s no internal requirement to participate. So it’s a purely at-will endeavor by cast members. Their families are also able to volunteer if they’d like.

I chatted with Brandon and Katherine from the Disney VoluntEARS Leadership Council. Their enthusiasm and dedication to helping the kids out at this event was so impressive and inspiring. Katherine told me that Disney VoluntEARS have been at Kids Ocean Day for several years now! I saw their team helping to supervise the children during beach clean up and lunch. They also helped to lead them into their specific lines for the aerial art. I believe they also got them back on the busses afterwards.

 

If you think about it, Disney cast members are the IDEAL volunteers for a day like this, especially the ones who work in the Disneyland Resort parks!

 

They know how to talk to young people. They deal with large crowds every day. And they are experts at generally keeping things running smoothly. I think the kids also got a little kick out of seeing so many people wearing Disney shirts.

Speaking of shirts, all the attendees received this awesome one. It features this year’s theme (“Make Waves”) design, provided by the event sponsor California Coastal Commission.

 

 

With the help of those Disney VoluntEARS, teachers, and other volunteers, the children were organized into a vast network of lines on the sand. It was all according to this ambitious design, where the different colors indicated where the different teams of children were to stand:

 

 

By the way, to keep the kids entertained as they were assembling, there was a professional DJ spinning tunes on the sand! Kid-friendly favorites that kept them entertained and helped to pass the time as they got organized. I heard more than a few students shout out song requests, which DJ Chris was happy to fulfill. Now when was the last time you went on a field trip that had a personal DJ?

 

Here’s what it looked like as they were assembling. Just looks like a big crowd of kids hanging out right?

 

 

Peter, my new friend from OC Coastkeeper, was also the drone photographer for the day. His challenge was to send the camera drone up into the sky to snap a perfect photo of these 1,300+ children assembled into a giant aerial image. I think he nailed it, don’t you?

 

 

“Children are the wave of the future” – Jack Ainsworth, executive director of the California Coastal Commission.

This event, which was actually started by the Malibu Foundation, takes place on beaches all over the world and seems to grow each year. Though I wish we didn’t have to do beach clean up days from over-pollution, I can’t wait to see what next year’s Kids Ocean Day theme will be!

• Adopt-A-Beach
• Disney
• Kids-Ocean-Day