Postcards From Ecuador: growing the OFAA family

Returning to Ecuador this year felt different from the first time. In 2024, we'd come to start something - to train OFAA's first cohort - 11 organisations who'd go home and figure out what this work looked like in their own communities. This year, three of them were teaching alongside us.

A bit of background

The OCEAN FOR ALL Alliance exists to equip grassroots organisations with the same ocean connection methodology we use at I AM WATER to bring children safely into the ocean. We train them to run their own ocean connection workshops in their own communities, with their own people, in their own waters. The first cohort had spent the year between our visits putting the methodology to work along the coast and across the Galápagos.

This May, we returned to train Cohort 2 where twelve more organisations gathered for two weeks at Playa Aventura Hotel in Ayangue, on the Santa Elena coast - five participants from the Galápagos and seven from mainland Ecuador. The curriculum is wide: yoga and breathwork for children, ocean literacy, a full practical workshop moved through first as children and then as facilitators across six stations (in-water, water safety, beach clean-up, nature walk, intertidal zone, yoga and breathing), the 200-metre swim test and 25-metre rescue tow required to qualify as in-water facilitators, site selection and risk assessment, community asset mapping, station cards, and communications, governance and child safeguarding. At the end of the four weeks, participants were assessed across all six stations, completed their swim and rescue tests, and sat a written exam.

Who was teaching

Six facilitators led the training. Three were from the I AM WATER team - Shireen, Taahirah and me. The other three were alumni from Cohort 1, sharing their own experience since undergoing the training two years ago.

In 2024, they had been the ones being trained. They had sat in the same kinds of rooms Cohort 2 was now sitting in, learning the same curriculum Cohort 2 was now learning. And in the year between, they had gone home to their organisations and put the methodology to work - running workshops in the water with real children, with the real constraints of their communities. They knew which parts of the curriculum survived contact with the field, and which parts needed adjusting. They could answer questions in the specific language of local context, because they'd lived the questions themselves.

This, I think, is what distinguishes a programme that scales from a programme that doesn't. It isn't reach or budget. It's whether the people you trained last year become the people who train the next cohort. Because if they do, the network doesn't expand because we keep flying in to teach it. It expands because the people we serve become the people who lead.

The learning exchange

The final two days of the programme were the proof. For the closing learning exchange, we brought Cohort 1 back in person to meet Cohort 2. The alumni shared what they'd built since their training - what had worked, what they were still figuring out, how they'd navigated the challenges of running ocean connection workshops with children in real communities. Cohort 2 listened, asked questions, took notes. By the second evening, the two cohorts had merged into one long table over dinner.

The language beneath the language

A detail worth noting. A majority of the participants spoke only Spanish, and our team taught in English. Most sessions needed to move through a translator. In the first few days, that gap was a real thing - it took patience, slowness, a willingness on my part to trust that meaning would arrive even if the words took longer to get there. But by the end, we realised there were a lot of things that didn't need translating - underneath it all, a shared love for the ocean was doing the work that language couldn't.

By the end of the four weeks, the cohort wasn't a group of organisations. It was a group of friends - exchanging numbers, swapping stories, already planning when they'd next meet.

What I took home

I came to Ayangue carrying my usual Cape Town instincts - cold water, English-speaking rooms, the rhythms of facilitation I knew. Almost none of them applied. The water was warm. The rooms moved at the pace of translation. The team I was teaching with was half new alumni stepping into teaching for the first time, and my job was as much to make space for them as to deliver content myself.

Once I'd settled into the rhythm, I learned more than I taught. I learned from the participants - their cultures, their food, the species in their waters, the way they spoke about the communities they'd come from. I learned from the Cohort 1 alumni stepping into teaching alongside us. I learned from the Playa Aventura staff and the Ayangue community, who held us so warmly we never quite felt like guests.

What comes next

Twelve more organisations have now gone home to their coastlines - from the islands of the Galápagos to the mainland's Pacific edge - equipped to put children safely in the water, and to grow facilitators of their own.

That's the moment a programme starts teaching itself. That's when you know it's working.