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Rocking the Boat's Community Rowing Program allows hundreds of community residents free, weekly opportunities to get out in a wooden boat to row, fish, and learn about the Bronx River.
Staffing the program is a corps of On-Water Program Assistants, all former On-Water students. Program Assistants have a great deal of on-the-job training from their experience helping to teach and lead On-Water classes with Rocking the Boat's primary On-Water Program.
Rocking the Boat offers a special, multiple-day training to certify community members to be able to take boats out on their own. The Boat Captain Certification Program involves CPR and First Aid training, as well as a prerequisite of a certain number of hours logged out on the water, and enables a much deeper level of community engagement in Rocking the Boat's programming and in the use of the Hunts Point Riverside Park waterfront.
Interactive community events such as the Mid-Semester Open House and the End-of-Semester Boat Launch Celebration include rowing that complement the Community Rowing Program. Rocking the Boat also offers public rowing opportunities at various other community events such as Clearwater's Great Hudson River Revival and the Bronx River Alliance's Amazing Bronx River Flotilla.
The Community Rowing Program is based out of Hunts Point Riverside Park, adjacent to Rocking the Boat's site at the Congressman Jose E. Serrano Riverside Campus for Arts and the Environment.
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Rocking the Boat Profile: Meliza Pena
In Fall 2000, Meliza Pena learned about Rocking the Boat through a presentation at her school. She was a 16-year-old 11th grader at William Howard Taft High School, one of the most troubled schools in New York City . She immediately expressed interest in the boatbuilding program and came into the shop that very afternoon. She was a dynamic part of the Fall program, but had a hard time getting to class due to nearly 30 hours of extra work she was putting in at a supermarket to earn extra money for her family. At the start of the next semester, she came in to tell me that she had to take night school and couldn't join us again. I made a deal with her: If I could get her out of having to take night school, she would join RTB. We went to her guidance counselor, and found out other ways for her to make up the credits. She joined us again, and in a month, when our current apprentice quit, she took over his position and got paid for her work in the shop. Since then she has risen in rank at Rocking the Boat to become a “senior apprentice” (leading the other four apprentices) and is currently the shop assistant, acting as the second in command in teaching all boatbuilding activities. She is certainly the only teenage girl in New York City who not only knows how to build traditional wooden boats, but teaches it! She has also spent summers running our outdoor education programming, teaching rowing and environmental science, and has led environmental education campaigns fighting General Electric and Nuclear Power in the Hudson Valley . Now 18 years old, Meliza is a full-time college student at Bronx Community College, has joined the local New York Public Interest Research Group chapter based out of her college and is helping to organize a number of different campaigns to benefit New Yorkers. She continues to work for Rocking the Boat part-time, as our Senior boatbuilding apprentice. She plans on transferring to a four-year college in the Fall.
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