Swim to Empower was created out of appreciation for opportunities we've had to explore both the oceans through SCUBA diving and mountains through backcountry camping. Protecting our local and global environment is important in our lives. We recognize that our most meaningful realizations have occurred in unintentional outdoor classrooms. We find inspiration in connecting with the places that we are in and the cultures that surround us.

Awareness of Eleuthera began through studying at The Island School in Cape Eleuthera in the spring of 2003, during a semester program for high school students. The Island School focuses on place-based learning, in which students understand their environment from multiple different perspectives: historical, scientific, and cultural. We gained a great deal from this experience and the views that we have today have been deeply influenced by the knowledge we gained during our semester.

One of the most memorable components of the semester was community outreach, in which we spent every Wednesday with middle school students from Deep Creek. Being immersed in a culture so different from our own compelled us to understand the deeper complexities and issues of the global community. Deep Creek is a struggling settlement adjacent to Cape Eleuthera and is located in the southern part of the island. Eleuthera was entirely dependent on tourism and was put into a state of crisis when tourism failed in the late 1970’s. The island currently has an unemployment rate of eighty percent.

Through community outreach, we were able to make a strong connection with a local child. As we developed relationships with our partners, Denero Anderson and Georginna Thompson, we genuinely began to love these kids and their community. Our interest in their lives grew with each visit. However, we felt ourselves unable to truly become immersed in their daily culture, with such limited time allotted for this. One of the most interesting parts of our time spent with them was learning that not only were they uncomfortable in the water, but they also did not know how to swim. This was shocking to us since the majority of Deep Creek is coastal land and beaches, with no obvious danger to swimmers.

This paradox became even more alarming when we left and were able to experience our home communities from an outside perspective. Back in Massachusetts, the majority of people in our coastal communities know how to swim, or at the very least are comfortable in the water. Learning to swim, like riding a bike, was a natural part of our own childhoods. Through discussion about this paradox we tried to figure out the core reasons of why Eleutherans do not know how to swim: Was it a lack of knowledge? Fear of sharks? A real danger that we were unaware of? We decided that we should stop talking and start taking action. We began to plan the swim program.

We decided to come down for a month during the middle of July in the summer of 2005 to try to start a swim program. Even with months of planning and preparation, we could have never prepared ourselves for the depth of complexities that we encountered.

Click here to read about The First Summer.