Agency Details:

Save The Bay

Save The Bay is the oldest and largest organization working exclusively to protect, restore and celebrate San Francisco Bay. As the Bay’s leading champion since 1961, Save The Bay is committed to making the Bay cleaner and healthier for people and wildlife. Save The Bay wages and wins effective advocacy campaigns to increase public access to the Bay, establish 100,000 acres of healthy wetlands around the Bay, and protect the Bay from today’s greatest threats: pollution and urban sprawl. Save The Bay educates nearly 10,000 students and adults on the Bay each year and engages volunteers to improve vital wetlands and subtidal habitats.

Description:
Since 1961, Save The Bay's members have successfully fought for a Bay that the whole community can enjoy and embrace. Save The Bay protects the Bay by waging and winning effective campaigns, restores the Bay by revitalizing wetlands and celebrates the Bay by creating recreation and educational opportunities for everyone.

From canoe trips and hands-on wetlands restoration to citizen action, we make it easy for you to celebrate, protect and restore San Francisco Bay.

We love to engage volunteers from families, corporations, community groups (North, East and South Bay), students and churches. We offer a broad range of scheduled volunteer opportunities throughout the Bay Area, and we also schedule special volunteer days for groups upon request. We can give educational presentations to interested groups prior to the volunteer day.</p>

We welcome transitional volunteers if they have supervision (counselor, friend, or other person with them). Also accept youth volunteers with adult, as young as parent feels appropriate. Without adult, 9th grade volunteers OK.

History:
Save The Bay was founded in 1961, as "Save San Francisco Bay Association" by three East Bay women who were watching the Bay disappear before their eyes. Kay Kerr, Sylvia McLaughlin and Esther Gulick set out to stop the City of Berkeley’s plan to double in size by filling in the shallow Bay off-shore. They mobilized thousands of members to stop the project, and their resounding victory was repeated on Bay fill projects around the region.

This first modern grassroots environmental movement in the Bay Area won a revolutionary change - tens of thousands of Save The Bay members forced the State of California to acknowledge that the Bay belonged to the public. Save The Bay won a legislative moratorium against placing fill in the Bay in 1965, the McAteer-Petris Act. The Bay Conservation and Development Commission (BCDC) was established by the State to plan protection of the Bay, regulate shoreline development, and ensure public access, which at the time was almost non-existent.

BCDC became a permanent agency in 1969, and continues today, the first coastal zone management agency and the model for most others in the world. The agency Save The Bay created has prevented most additional Bay fill, and since BCDC’s inception there has actually been a small net gain in the size of the Bay through tidal marsh restoration. Agency permits for development along the Bay have mandated new public shoreline access, increasing from only four miles of access in 1969 to over 200 miles today.

Save The Bay fought to close the garbage dumps ringing the shoreline, and stop raw sewage flowing untreated into the Bay. We helped establish the San Francisco Bay National Wildlife Refuge and helped stop the Peripheral Canal from draining more of the Bay’s fresh water from upstream and we fight to protect the Bay from today's biggest threats - pollution and sprawl.

For more than 40 years, Save the Bay has given San Francisco Bay a voice, and helped shift public attitudes from complacency to vigilance. Learn more about our history at www.saveSFbay.org

Contact people:

Sarah Lyons, Program Assistant, (phone), (email) Jocelyn Gretz, Community Programs Coordinator, (phone), (email) Marilyn Latta, Volunteer Contact, (phone), (email)

Office fax number: (510) 452-9266

Address:

350 Frank H. Ogawa Plaza, Suite 900 Oakland, CA 94612 (See a map)

Web Site: http://www.saveSFbay.org

Directions:

The Save The Bay office is in the Westlake Building, located at 350 Frank H. Ogawa Plaza, Suite 900, near the corner of San Pablo Avenue and 16th Street. Take BART to Oakland’s City Center/12th St. Station: Exit at the north end. . . (more)

Last updated on February 3, 2010