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EDUCATION AND TRAINING 179 A MODEL FOR EDUCATIONAL LEADERSHIP The National Safe Boating Council is a group of private citizens and boating organization representatives who advise the Coast Guard in a variety of matters. The council's most visible public activity is National Safe Boating Week, an annual public awareness campaign aimed at recreational boaters. The council is an example of a private, independent group that collaborates with federal authorities to achieve common educational objectives. The format of National Safe Boating Week, which has taken years to evolve, deserves some examination as a model for other broad-based maritime educational efforts. The program has three simple strengths. The first is coordinated preparation. The private groups make all the decisions and handle all the preparations; both the producers of the educational materials and the boating organizations that distribute them work together in a consistent manner year after year. This coordination helps the large-scale effort succeed despite any personnel changes. A second merit of this program is that costs are shared in predictable ways. The government provides consistent funding. Each year, funds are appropriated through the Coast Guard to pay for administration and the coordinated distribution of all 25,000 packets of information to groups across the country. However, those· funds do not cover all production expenses or the mailing of additional packets requested. Therefore, private organizations that want to participate know they must pay the full costs for any materials they want to include in the packets. A third strength of this program is that the educational materials originate within the communities of boaters. The recipients recognize that the information has been prepared by groups knowledgeable about boating, not a regulatory agency or some other ''outside'' group. Readers' identification with the authors makes the message more palatable. distributed widely during the 1991 boating season. The Coast Guard also gives out MARPOL fact sheets to callers requesting such information from the Boating Safety Hotline (1-800-368-5647). The Coast Guard also is developing its own educational materials for use by the auxiliary. Although they do not enforce the law, members of the auxiliary supplement Coast Guard safety patrols, conduct public education courses in boating safety, and carry out other tasks that augment federal boating safety resources. With appropriate guidance and support, the auxiliary could become more active in educating recreational boaters about Annex V. Port Projects From January 1987 through March 1988, MERP supported a pilot project (described by Recht, 1988) to demonstrate port reception facilities for commercial vessels in Newport, Oregon. The fishing port management and fishing vessel owners collaborated to encourage vessel operators to return garbage, obsolete netting, and other gear to the port. Receptacles for the nets were placed at
