We at Sea Speak Sphere want to express our gratitude to Funglode and GFDD (Global Foundation for Development and Democracy), Natasha Despotovic, the Executive Director of Funglode, Asunción Sanz the Director of the Washington D.C. Office, Emy Rodriguez the Environmental Program Manager and Margaret Hayward the Communications and Outreach Manager, as well as all their staff and volunteers for their hospitality, and for setting us up with an spacious, centrally located display area at the Funglode Head Quarters in Santo Domingo during DREFF (Dominican Republic Environmental Film Festival). We are also enormously thankful to everyone at GFDD and Funglode for furnishing art activist Asher Jay with an opportunity to speak out on a panel about plastic pollution in marine ecosystems. In addition Asher Jay was asked to engage a mixed age range of school children in Puerto Plata with a talk about upcycling waste into art, apart from which she was given a chance to conduct a workshop on found object creativity.
The installation was up from September 4th to September 10th 2012, for the entire length of the festival. The oeuvre was very well received, and furnished children as well as adults with insight into how one ought to reuse, reduce and repurpose waste.
GFDD, together with its sister institution Funglode in Santo Domingo, and in collaboration with its partners in the United States, Canada, Latin America and Europe, designs and implements projects and programs that contribute to the social, economic and democratic development of the Dominican Republic and the Region.
The issue of the environment has been at the forefront of GFDD and FUNGLODE’s mission since the very beginning. The Foundation’s work in the development of national and international networks, the discussion of pressing issues, training programs that have brought national experts together with the most prominent international leaders in the field, comes to fruition now with the creation of an Environmental Film Festival as a natural addition to its environmental program.
GFDD/FUNGLODE embraces the creation of this new initiative with high expectations particularly to reach out to the youth of the Dominican Republic, opening a world of beauty, information, inspiration and pride to them.
Their brilliant planning, seamless execution and extraordinary itinerary helped inspire and seed the tides of change across the island’s expanse.
Few words from Asher Jay
The entire festival was made incredibly accessible to the public, and I found it’s well curated content, panels, and events to be highly educational and inspiring. This festival seeds so many grassroots movements and empowers people from all walks of life to take responsibility for their own backyard and day to day actions. Personally I don’t think it is about people hitting a point of saturation on current consumption habits, but realizing that such endless material appetite never leads to true satiation. I think that is why I moved forward from who I was before, I recognized the void created by mindless consumerism. Jacques Cousteau had a similar epiphany about spear fishing, and the exploitation of marine habitats for human profit, this impelled him to take a strong stand on the exploration and conservation of the world’s oceans. I am inclined to think that true change occurs only when more people experience such an internal realignment on account of growing more self-aware and conscious of the collective.
