Community Involvement: The Port Liaison Project

(Video) Flaxen Conway addresses the camera.

(Flaxen Conway) "Although some commercial fishermen are very used to working with researchers and some researchers are very used to working with fishermen, that's not true, generally, community to community.

"The role that Oregon Sea Grant has played in this has been one of kind of the neutral convener. We're very well known as being connected to the marine community, to the commercial fishing community. We've been connected to them for years, helping them to improve commercial fishing and deal with coastal issues. So it stands to reason then that when the Northwest Fishery Science Center thought about having a project like this and they thought about how could we build these bridges between these two communities, that Oregon Sea Grant could be a temporary bridge, until a bridge would automatically exist between the two communities.

"Commercial fishermen are part of a community of interest, which is the fishing community which many times has no geographic boundaries. It goes many, many miles in many directions. But they're also members of their own geographic residential community where they live. And they, you know, raise their kids there and their grandkids, and that kind of thing. So they are very interested in how this project is going to help Oregon's communities, you know, through jobs and energy and, you know, helping to stabilize communities that have gone through transitions because of changes in other natural resources, like logging and farming and that kind of thing."