Pitcairn MPA - A community project
Pitcairn MPA: A community Project - Melva Evans
Pitcairn MPA: This is Pitcairn - Torika Warren-Peu
Pitcairn MPA: dance of the free - Pirate Pawl
This toolkit provides the community with the tools they need to share their ocean stories -
A Personal Guide to Henderson Island - Zine: Download, print, fold & create you own
Our Theory of Change:
How we built this -
I remember the first time I heard of the Pitcairn Islands MPA - it was not long after Luke & I had decided to join forces and build Protect Blue into the agency it is today. He’d just got the news that he would be joining a team of scientists, journalists & artists on an expedition to the Pitcairn Islands.
Firstly - I needed to look at a map. And then I found myself falling down a zillion rabbit holes when I started googling Pitcairn. There are a lot of stories to be told about this place - and many, many people have written books, countless articles and made movies about the island. But the expedition Luke was joining was focused on something totally different - the natural environment. In 2015 the British Government established the Pitcairn Island Marine Reserve - a historic moment for the island. The expedition was headed first to Pitcairn and then on to Henderson Island - one of four islands. Despite being uninhabited, the shores of Henderson are some of the most densely polluted with plastic in the world. The mission ? Clean up East Beach. (You can read more about that trip here).
On his return I had my first real look at the MPA - thousands upon thousands of his incredible photos, and hours of footage (underwater, terrestrial, drone & 360 VR thanks to Luke’s dive buddy and good friend Jon Slayer). We began the painstaking job of building a media archive for all the expedition content - a way to make everything accessible and searchable for all stakeholders. Perhaps sometime soon in the future, AI will do this job for us, but for us it meant days and days of uploading, categorising and tagging content. I won’t pretend it was fun, but it definitely felt like a fast-track way for me to get a hint of the awe & wonder that the expedition team experienced.
Luke stayed in touch with the team and we continued to find ways to showcase the MPA - making short films, collaborating with the Pitcairn local school on World Ocean Day for Schools and sharing stories of the expedition.
In 2021 the Pitcairn Islands MPA Management Plan was published outlining a number of strategies and actions for the following five years. Immediately we saw an opportunity to support the work - focusing on Objective 5 of the plan - “Understanding and appreciation of the MPA by the local community, visitors and the wider international community is enhanced.”
We began exploring funding opportunities and alongside our fiscal sponsors, Blue Marine Foundation we were granted funding from the John Ellerman Foundation UK Overseas Territories Fund.
It’s easy to assume that we know exactly what to do in a project like this one - using tools that we work with often and approaches that we know align with the goals of the MPA - but so often, in making these assumptions we miss magical opportunities to learn. We miss conversations that inform, and opinions that help shift our perspective. So our very first task was to co-create a set of ‘Design Principles’ with our two main points of contact on the island, Michele Christian (Divisional Manager, Environmental, Conservation & Natural Resources) & Melva Evans (MPA Officer).
It’s useful to think of design principles as the guardrails of a project - quick, memorable guidelines that will help enable consistency & clarity across the team. They describe how you want the team to show up every single day. In terms of social impact, a good set of design principles help us ensure we engage with a community with respect, relevance and a desire to understand their needs and their connection to place.
So I thought I’d use our Design Principles as a way to share our learnings from this project - it seems more useful to talk about ‘how’ and ‘why’ we did things as opposed to just showcasing the ‘what’ -
Design with, not for
This concept seems simple but is often overlooked. With a remote community like Pitcairn and the number of stakeholders off-island, it became obvious that we needed to ensure that the project was designed with the Pitcairners, not for them.
After creating Design Principles we focused on building a Theory of Change together - a social impact tool that enables us to get clear on the impact that we want our work to create and understand how best we will measure it. A Theory of Change also enables us to look at (and challenge !) our assumptions - a vital part of any co-creation process.
Another approach that sits under this principle is making sure that our work is as accessible and inclusive as possible. It’s easy to think that being inclusive simply means inviting all community members to join - but actually, it requires more thought than that. We needed to offer a multitude of ways for people to engage in the conversation. Let’s be honest - implementing more accessibility often creates a lot more work. We shifted from our ‘normal’ comms platform of Zoom to FB Messenger because it was the local teams’ chosen platform. We created short videos for tutorials, we emailed, called and left voice notes. We built an online community platform and at the same time made everything available in print format to be shared on the community notice board on island. Efficient ? Perhaps not, but essential to give everyone a chance to be involved.
And finally, the decision to seek independent funding gave us the autonomy and freedom to build solutions that were a true fit for the community. The fact that we showed up, willing to help and with our own source of funding rather than asking for money from the local administration or UK government positioned us in a different light - one that wasn’t burdened with the complexities of local politics.
State your intentions
I laughed out loud when Melva came up with this principle. Mainly because it felt so ‘on brand’ for Pitcairn - a fiercely proud community who seem to rather like being quite so removed from the rest of the world.
Being super clear about our intentions for the work required some diplomacy - it asked us to become acutely aware of the role we had been given. Again and again we came back to the conclusion that our client was the MPA. Our service was to support the community engaged in protecting Pitcairn’s waters and help give them agency to act.
Stating your intentions sounds like a confident thing to do, doesn’t it ? But the reality, in a project like this one, is that in doing so, you are also accepting that you might not be liked by everyone. It feels strange writing that - when so much of our work is about community engagement, but the truth is that sometimes there will be folk who don’t resonate with what you’re doing. And your job is to remain true to the work, kind in your communication and firmly aligned with your values.
Respect the community
During Luke’s second expedition in 2023 I found myself reading two books back to back about Pitcairn. One gave a broad overview of the history and the other a deeper dive into some of the darker parts of Pitcairns’ more recent issues. It felt like hard, but necessary research.
Sometimes respect begins with curiosity. Deferring judgement to deepen our understanding of ourselves, each other and the context we’re working in.
Over time, we built strong relationships both online, and for Luke, in person. His expeditions gave him time to get to know people, to share experiences and to build trust. Nothing can replace those opportunities.
We wanted the community to know that we respected their time and that their opinions mattered. So we designed a survey that would enable everyone the opportunity to engage at a time that suited them and without feeling pressured to speak up on a call with a large group or during a community gathering. We also committed to paying for their submissions - this practice is often overlooked in the NGO space but vitally important.
Respect also comes in the form of holding our own opinions with a lot of flexibility - being willing to pivot away from a concept that we may have thought was genius, but in hindsight wasn’t going to work in practice. That’s a hard one - but an immensely freeing approach. “We might have gotten this wrong” is a tricky thing to admit, but one that opens doors to new ideas.
Acknowledge local wisdom & experience
The stakeholder list for the Pitcairn MPA is almost as vast as its waters. Filled with academics, NGO’s and government folk - all dedicated, smart humans - but none with ‘lived experience’ of Pitcairn.
We could have spent hours talking with experts without actually learning anything about the community’s connection to the ocean.
The 2023 expedition allowed us to facilitate a number of workshops on island - with one of our favourites being ‘Storytelling 101’.
Stories offer sovereignty - enabling a community to shape a more honest, authentic narrative as opposed to having others define it for them. Much of our work now and moving forward, focuses on enabling Pitcairners to share their experiences - in practical ways, like equipping them with GoPro’s and media training and a dedicated YouTube channel, and also by providing simple solutions that give community members agency to tell their stories - with zines, storytelling toolkits and access to a media archive of photos and films that they can use.
Say what you mean and mean what you say
The final principle - and one that I think we leant on more than we imagined we’d need to. A reminder that a co-design project still requires leadership in order to function effectively - people need to understand what we’re doing, why, and how they can take part.
There were moments that felt like the project could derail if we didn’t act fast and clarify when things were misunderstood. And moments where it felt vital to speak up and stand our ground. But ultimately, for me, this principle is about integrity. It’s about doing what we said we would do and not giving up when it gets hard. Trust is built when we keep our promises - to ourselves and to those around us.
Our ‘north star’, at the very beginning of this project was to build a brand for the MPA - A brand is much more than a logo, a website, or a marketing plan. It is an ecosystem powered by all the things you represent. A cohesive message. A well-told story. An idea transformed into an experience. A way of sharing this incredible part of the planet with the rest of the world. We walked in thinking we had many of the answers and subsequently journeyed through a process of iteration and simplification until we had created something that felt true.