Inclusivity Fund Profile - Paola Castillo
With US $2,400, SEE Turtles supported Equipo Tora Carey (ETC), based in El Jobo, Costa Rica with a grant from Our Sea Turtle Inclusivity Fund. ETC is a local organization working protecting sea turtles in 5 different beaches around the Santa Elena Gulf, located along the country’s northern Pacific coast.
Hi, my name is Paola Castillo, I work for the NGO Equipo Tora Carey, and I am in charge of the administration and coordination of the patrolmen, as well as the database of our project. We depend 100% on donations and volunteers and this grant for my salary from the Sea Turtle Inclusivity Fund will cover a whole year and is a great help to both me and the organization.
Paola with her family in El Jobo, Costa Rica
I have known about ETC since it started butI joined the group shortly after it started, when my husband started as a patrolman working on the nesting beaches. A few months later, I started with managing the turtle database and working with the treasurer of the organization. Now I also coordinate their patrol schedule, when there are volunteers with us and try to make sure their experience is good. In a few words I’m the coordinator of the organization. But until now there was very little or no pay for my position; this is the first time Equipo Tora will have a full-time local resident to help coordinate our programs.
ETC positively impacts our community because now there are more families that are associated with the environment and more families who recycle when before it was hardly seen. Our turtles are also more protected since continuous patrols have reduced the taking of turtle nests and therefore increases the probability that our turtles will continue to return. My favorite part is knowing that I am doing something that supports my community and our children will have a better environment in the future since we are constantly cleaning our beaches. Even my son is now patrolling the beaches with his father, so my whole family is strongly involved with conservation in our community.
About Equipo Tora Carey
Being a community-based project, we believe in the deep connection between conservation and local communities; conservation cannot be fulfilled without an active local community and vice versa. This is why we want and need to work together with the local community, not without or even against them! Our objective is to mobilize and empower these locals – the most important resource at the project’s disposal – in order to fight coastal-marine destruction!
Our three pillars of work are conservational effort, research and education. With patrolling our beaches every night and cleaning our beaches weekly, we not only actively protect nesting turtles and their eggs from being poached, but also gather a lot of valuable data. With this information, we try to predict the marine animals’ behaviour in order to protect them more efficiently. Finally, education is our way to raise the awareness of conservation in the community, especially among the children, to ensure a lasting change of habits.
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