| Home: About SIMoN: How to Get Involved |
| HOW TO GET INVOLVED |
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There are many ways to get involved with SIMoN. Depending on what your interests are, there are a variety of ways to lend your support to SIMoN,
such as internship and volunteer opportunities, donations, and sharing monitoring information. Each of these opportunities are
explained below.
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Internship and Volunteer Opportunities
The SIMoN program has numerous volunteer and unpaid internship positions. There are limited field research assistance opportunities, volunteer watershed and coastal monitoring assistance is always welcomed, and other research and public outreach related roles. Many of our interns are participants in college credit programs. People interested in exploring the possibilities should send a brief letter of introduction and areas of interest by email to:
linda.rosinski@noaa.gov (for Monterey Bay)
christy.walker@noaa.gov (for Gulf of Farallones)
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Donations and Financial Support
The SIMoN program is funded by numerous sources. Federal and state government agencies have seen the value of its initiatives and provided program-specific funding. Individuals, corporations, and private foundations are also important SIMoN supporters.
The Monterey Bay Sanctuary Foundation (MBSF) serves as a fiscal sponsor for SIMoN. One major difference between the MBSF and the many other valuable nonprofit groups involved with the sanctuary is its broad reach and collaborative approach. MBSF has consistently been involved in combining the efforts of multiple groups to ensure more unity in the programs, better integration of information, and more efficient use of the funds available. MBSF believes that its management skill in facilitating collaborative efforts results in much more effective programs and ultimately, better conservation of the marine resources. The Monterey Bay Sanctuary Foundation has also been recognized as one of the most efficient nonprofit organizations serving the California coastal environment, with more than 90 percent of donations going directly to program support, rather than staff salaries and overhead.
There are many donor options available with the Monterey Bay Sanctuary Foundation and the SIMoN program. In general, donations are either targeted toward general operating expenses or toward a specific program. In some instances, a donor identifies a need and the MBSF creates and implements a program to address it. In other cases, a donor or group of donors contribute to a restricted fund, targeted for a specific program.
For more information on how to contribute to the SIMoN
program, please email info@mbnmsf.org or call 831-647-4209.
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The Benefits of Participating in SIMoN
Sharing summary information about your monitoring projects with SIMoN can benefit your program, the regional research community,
local resource management efforts, the national marine sanctuaries program, educators, and the general public.
The benefits of sharing your monitoring project with SIMoN are far larger than the cost of time to gather and submit the necessary information.
Some of these expected benefits include:
- More informed decisions by local, regional, and national resource managers because monitoring information is in a format that is easily accessed and interpreted;
- Enhanced education opportunities because of activities developed in association with monitoring projects on the SIMoN web site;
- Increased frequency of research collaborations, and new hypotheses about ecosystem-level phenomena, with readily available interdisciplinary information;
- Increased funding from some sources as individual projects demonstrate application to management and education through SIMoN;
- Increased inclusion of monitoring information into environmental issue debates as the SIMoN web site regularly informs the public and elected officials.
SIMoN has developed a set of brief web-based forms that allow you to submit your monitoring project information over the Internet.
Many of the fields can be filled by simple cut and paste operations from existing electronic documents (e.g., from an NSF proposal).
SIMoN will also accept additional supporting materials from the project such as GIS data, digital images, and documents.
SIMoN does not seek to acquire raw data sets.
For more information download the SIMoN Information Packet.
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