(upbeat music) - Welcome to Generation Rising, I'm Anaridis Rodriguez.

Here at Generation Rising, we have conversations that explore solutions to the inequities our diverse communities face every day.

And tonight, we'd like to welcome Catalina Martinez, an environmental and diversity champion in ocean science, marine policy and education.

Last year, she was selected as one of four finalists for the 2023 Remarkable Women of Rhode Island, a national competition that honors the influence that women have had on public policy, social progress, and quality of life in the state, Catalina, welcome.

- Thank you so much, I'm so happy to be here.

- It's great to have you here.

You are the equity advisor for the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration, also known as NOAA, their regional office here in Rhode Island, but this is a new role for you, right?

- Yeah.

- You went into this working on the ships, tell us about your journey and how you ended up here.

- Yeah, it's been a long journey, I've been so fortunate.

I've been with NOAA for, I think, 22 years now.

And I started as a John Knauss marine policy fellow out of the Rhode Island Sea Grant office at URI.

And that was in, I think, 2001.

And at that point I got placed into this brand new office, at that time, called NOAA Ocean Exploration.

And they were doing such incredible things, I just wanted to be part of it.

And so I was placed there as a fellow, and I've been with them ever since.

The office has gone through many iterations, different leadership, different focus areas but for nearly, I'd say, 18 years, I helped develop and implement through, you know, incredibly talented teams this technology that we use now to bring the bottom of the ocean to shore in near real-time, share it with the general public so that you can participate in these expeditions in real-time and experience the excitement of discovery as it happens in the deep ocean.

And so, I worked for many years going to sea and helping develop out those operating protocols and develop the teams needed to keep all of that stuff operating properly at sea.

And then, I transitioned to shore and really focused on the so what behind the technology.

So we can do this, how do we make this really matter to the general public, to people in different walks of life all over the world and make it accessible?

So I worked with many different groups at URI and around the country in academic spaces and others, as well as other federal agencies.

And we really did amazing things together.

And Dr. Robert Ballard, who is at URI, you know, he's the pioneer of all of this.

And the reason I ended up back at URI with NOAA is because that's where he was.

So we were working with him to do all of this.

So it's his teams that really lead the world in this type of technology, and our office supports them as well.

So my transition has happened in many different stages.

And throughout all of that, one of the foundational pieces for me and for many of us was always justice, equity, diversity and inclusion, as well as access.

Developing science identity for people who are not from the dominant culture in those spaces and places.

A sense of belonging and providing opportunity not only to get us in the door, but to really work on the culture and the challenges in these spaces to make it not just accessible to us, but make it feel like a place where we can belong.

And that's the work that I do more fully and more formally now for NOAA Ocean Exploration.

- What was it that, you know, shifted you to doing that type of work?

It certainly must have been your own lived experience, - [Catalina] Yeah.

- Going up in the ranks as a young Latina woman from the inner city of Providence.

Why did you decide that maybe you could be a voice at the table when it comes to diversifying this particular sector?

- Well, I think as you said, we don't come into this work lightly, we're not unscathed doing it in dominant culture spaces and we do it out of survival and necessity when you come from a background like mine, you know, I come from Providence, I come from a Cuban immigrant family, very gender oppressive family.

So I was pulled out of school a lot as a kid and told I didn't need an education so I didn't finish high school.

I had to work to take care of my sick grandmother and work to help the family in many other ways, which is a story that resonates with a lot of different cultures, not only the Latino culture.

And so, I think having that kind of credibility also in those spaces means a great deal.

So coming into that work was just part of my survival story.

It's how I got to where I was.

I had to embrace, you know, my ethnic and cultural identity but, also simultaneously, suppress it to try and fit in differently in these spaces where I stand out and try and do what I could to keep that door open for others.

And now I feel at this point in my life and in my career, I'm just so thankful to NOAA for really amplifying the value of the work that I and so many other people do.

We also have an equity lead for NOAA.

They're about to really create this new space in NOAA around justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion.

So really try to centralize it so that it can be normalized throughout the agency.

It's a federal agency, you know, like all federal agencies, academic spaces and other places that were created by and for the dominant culture, there's a lot of challenges.

And so, seeing that there is this authentic interest in making a difference and doing things differently, that is why I'm still there.

And I'm very thankful for the opportunity to do this work more fully, yeah.

- Talk to us about the inroads that you've been able to make Off camera, we had a conversation, you just recently came back from a conference in New Orleans - [Catalina] Yeah.

- Where you were very intentional and specific about how you want to do that outreach and how you wanna approach - [Catalina] Yeah.

- This type of work, tell us about that.

- So I just got back from the annual Ocean Sciences meeting, and it happened in New Orleans this year.

It's an amazing conference.

It's just, you know, this space filled with, you know, talented, powerful, amazing people.

And over the years, thankfully in the past, I'd say, six or seven years in all of these large scientific conferences and these national organizations, diversity and inclusion has become more of a focus.

And at this conference, we had an experience that I've never had at any science conference before, where it was kicked off by the University of Rhode Island's team, the Inner Space Center team, led by Alex DeCiccio and Kendall Moore, she's a journalism media professor at URI, and she's an incredible documentary filmmaker.

And they created this live documentary style experience.

This immersive, very emotional and personal experience for us where she had...

They had gone into Louisiana the past year and built relationship in communities that are challenged with environmental injustices, just terrible challenges.

And she built trust with these families and communities, and had four of those leaders with us on stage while they played parts of a documentary they're making in the background, and created this beautiful narrative and very, very immersive storytelling to bring us, you know, the stories around the challenges in the very space we're occupying for that conference, right, to put the why back into the science and center humanity into the science that we do.

And often, that is really not at the forefront.

So I'm hoping that they've really catalyzed a movement with the way they kicked off this conference.

It was an enormous, enormous success.

And it was a huge auditorium just filled with all of the people from the conference, mostly scientists who are not used to this touchy feely stuff, right?

And getting so personal into the human lives of these challenges and so, it was very special.

And it carried throughout the rest of the conference.

There were immersive storytelling focused sessions that I've not experienced before.

And I was just so thankful to be part of that.

And as part of this conference also, we just published our first ever Oceanography Society magazine that had a focus on diversity, equity, and inclusion.

It's our first time doing it.

I was one of the guest editors and co-authors of multiple manuscripts.

It's really important, and I will share the resource with you so that you can share it with the audience.

It's an incredible resource - Wonderful.

for the community, I hope, so that we can all keep making progress in these spaces.

- What was your takeaway and how is it informing the work that you're going to do now in Rhode Island?

Talk about why should the community care about this type of work?

- Yeah, and because I'm such a part of the URI community, I have multiple degrees from there, I had an office there for nearly 18 years for NOAA.

I love URI, they have so many people doing incredible work there in Rhode Island, in these local spaces, but also internationally around, you know, the personal human toll that are in huge environmental challenges such as, you know, global climate change are having on Black and Brown communities, on island nations, on these, you know, impoverished spaces where they are more directly impacted than maybe a lot of the folks who live in the bigger cities or the suburbs, right?

So they are disproportionately impacted and their voices are disproportionately, you know, invisible in these spaces, right?

So how do we amplify their voices, and center their humanity, and their challenges and why we do what we do and listen to them, right?

How do we create a space where it's a co-creation of solution so that it's not, you know, some very smart scientists coming in and thinking through the solution, but not really taking the community aspirations into account or their needs and requirements.

You can't possibly know what they need, or what they require or what maybe their economic aspirations are in that space, unless you hear from them, right?

- Yeah.

- So how do we make that a co-created experience?

And I think this immersive storytelling piece is so important, and it's inclusive immersive storytelling so that we make sure that the right folks are at the table, right from the conception, right?

- Let's talk about how you are directly connected to the work in the diversity, equity and inclusion.

- [Catalina] Yeah.

What are the challenges that you're seeing?

I know through my research, I found you talk about the dominant culture that men are overrepresented still in this industry.

So what are people of color and women facing when they're trying to make a way through becoming anyone in ocean sciences?

- You know, we've made a lot of inroads in geosciences overall and ocean sciences as well for representation of women, not nearly enough.

But we have had some progress there.

That does not equate to diversity, right?

We know that the dominant culture that we're speaking about in STEM, it's no secret that they are male and white, right?

When it comes to folks from more diverse backgrounds who are not white female, we have not made inroads.

And in some ways I see the numbers dropping.

In the federal agencies, in the workforce, you know, we have a lot of work to do, and NOAA is one of the spaces, there's many others that has issues there, right?

So it's not only a matter of creating, say, early entry positions so that we can recruit more diverse candidates into these spaces because how many generations are we gonna wait before we get through the ranks, if we can get through the ranks to have leadership voice, right?

So we need to make sure that what we're doing within these spaces, these academic institutions, these federal agencies and others, that we are making sure that we're looking at the workforce top to bottom, right?

So that we're creating opportunity for advancement, for recruitment of diverse candidates at all levels, including up into the senior executive service level.

And we see that we have representation even of women in these spaces that decreases as we go up in ranks, right?

And for many years, we used the analogy of a leaky pipeline.

As we go through the academic pipeline in STEM, we have less and less diversity, less and less women.

As we go through the workforce into the upper ranks, we have less and less.

But we know now that that is not a passive experience.

We have some very amazing colleagues who published a paper a few years ago called "The Hostile Obstacle Course."

So that is what we are facing.

So right from the recruitment pipeline through getting through our academic experiences in STEM, through being hired into these spaces where they often are looking for cultural fit, and we may not meet those requirements that are very dominant culture oriented to our lack of a culture that allows us to feel like we can belong and fit in these spaces.

There's a lot of, you know, what we call, slow violence that occurs in our workforce and in our academic spaces on a daily basis.

And then, there are other systemic frameworks and inequities built into the system, the structural inequities that don't allow us to get the advancement opportunities that we see our dominant culture colleagues experiencing, right?

How do we, you know, obtain these opportunities?

How do we even learn about them?

What are the requirements to get through those doors?

And what do we have to do to help create an environment that's conducive to the success, health and happiness of all of us?

And, you know, there's so many challenges that some people can feel that it's really daunting.

And so, we try to look at different spaces where we can really make a difference.

And really, if you're determined to make a difference, at this point, we've been doing this work out there, so many people have been doing this work for so long, it's not a mystery anymore.

You know, there are effective practices at each stage in these challenges to mitigate the barriers, to level the playing field, right?

There's so many opportunities to do that, and it's really about making a series of choices to do things differently.

So a lot of the work we do is just have conversation because we have to get people to think differently to behave differently, and we have to get people to value things differently to make different choices.

So we can change the policies and the procedures, which we work on all the time, but we also have to change the practices and behaviors, right?

- Yeah, and that was my next question, dovetailing off of how do you eliminate those barriers?

Who are you having those conversations with?

- [Catalina] Yeah.

- Is it the people making the decisions, is it the people on the other side of the table, who are trying to access that opportunity?

And how do you bridge that gap?

- Yeah, in both those spaces, right, those conversations are important and they're very different conversations.

- Yeah.

- So you have to go to the gatekeepers, you know, and the way I like to talk to my audiences, and I'm invited to have these conversations a lot talking about the barriers, the inequities, but how to mitigate them, right, and how to create opportunity is we're all gatekeepers of something.

You know, we have influence in spaces that we might not even notice at first or acknowledge at first so you may not run the program, you may not be the director of your office.

You might not be, you know, the person in charge of the agency, but we all have influence somewhere.

And so, when we talk about these challenges and shifting mindsets and behaviors, we have to normalize the conversations.

And that's really difficult in some spaces.

They're still at the level of, why does diversity matter, right?

So you have to sort of gauge your audience, understand where they're at, and meet people where they are.

And that, to me, is important no matter what you're doing, but meeting people where they are and understanding that, unfortunately, it takes more effort and resources, and it takes time for people to have that kind of a shift in their thought processes and their value systems in order to make different decisions.

- Yeah.

And when you're up against also a landscape that, like you mentioned, is hostile and not necessarily welcoming, that in itself creates another barrier.

I mean, the recent SCOTUS decision, the fair admissions ruling, - [Catalina] Yes.

- that has had implications already that we're seeing across many different industries and sectors when it comes - [Catalina] Yeah.

- to their efforts to diversify, right?

- The Biden-Harris administration came in and kicked the doors wide open for diversity and inclusion.

And they, you know, with dozens of executive orders mandating federal spaces to, you know, work on these issues in authentic ways internally and externally.

So who are you supporting with your grant research, you know, your grant funding?

Who are you funding to do this work and why?

And let's make sure we're diversifying that as well as the workforce and the work that we're doing internally.

So who are the communities you're supporting?

So this was an amazing couple of years to see how, you know, the opportunities really started to amplify.

And then to see all of this start to swing again in that other direction, even under this current administration, it's kind of mind boggling and being in, you know, the position that many of us are in in the federal government, we, you know, are all, you know, hoping for the best.

And we continue to do the work every day, and we can only hope that we can lean on these executive orders for as long as we can and continue to make progress with the work that we're doing.

- Yeah and when you have people like yourself who are part of that conversation, - [Catalina] Yeah.

- that helps because one thing I've learned from studying you is that you're very determined, you're very engaged, and you're very passionate about what you do.

And I think I read somewhere that you said that if you find success despite challenging circumstances, that's your superpower.

- Absolutely.

- And you've had many superpowers along the way.

What is your hope for the next generation of STEM leaders and how do you use, you know, your experience to motivate, you know, - [Catalina] Yeah.

the next generation of Catalinas that are coming along?

- You know, of all the things I do and all the things I've done the most important thing, to me, is that you collect your people.

If anything, I'm a professional people collector, you know, you have to have community around you.

- Yeah.

- That's the real superpower.

I didn't do anything on my own.

There's no way I'd be sitting here by myself if I didn't have my community.

You have have the people around you who are going to champion you, who are gonna help you navigate really challenging circumstances in the moment, but also as you have your ambitions for the future, and we do this for each other.

You have to build your network.

And that is, you know, they say your network is your net worth and I really believe that.

The people you surround yourself by means everything.

And that's the real superpower, right?

And when you, like you just said, if learned to overcome significant obstacles and find success despite that, and I'm surrounded by people who have done that in their lives, you know, I learned from them that is, you know... Those are special gifted people.

They're the people I wanna hire, right?

Because they've had to learn to navigate really difficult challenges and find incredibly innovative solutions that go around the barriers and find their way forward despite them, they're the innovative problem solvers.

They have courage beyond, you know, a doubt.

And they're the people that I want.

Those are the scrappers that are gonna be able to really innovate into the future.

And the most important job I have, at this point, is helping the next generation of diverse scholars get to those positions of influence, and leadership, and power because they're the ones that are gonna be the wave of change, I just know it.

- Recently I visited Classical High School, my alma mater for a transitional skills conference.

And like oddly, I met two...

It was a small group, it was only like 40 students, and I met two who said they wanted to be marine biologists.

- Really?

- And I had never come across anybody who actually said those words.

So for - That's fabulous.

- You know, the people who are watching, who have children in their homes - [Catalina] Yes.

- That are interested in studying ocean sciences or geosciences, or maybe someone who's watching, who wants to become a dive scholar, like you mentioned, what are the things that they need to do?

What are the things that need to know to forge their path?

- Contact people at the University of Rhode Island in spaces where they have this kind of stuff going on, because they're eager to have young people come in and learn from them, I'm eager to expose them to these things.

There are camps, to me, camp is a life changing thing.

There are internships, those are life changing opportunities for the folks who are fortunate enough to get them, right?

And that's actually one of the things I work on the most is, you know, making sure that that application process and the selection process is as justice oriented as possible, because it filters people out that, don't get me started on that conversation.

But you know, - I can imagine though.

- To diversify those opportunities because, you know, - Yeah.

- They are life changing for those who are, you know, fortunate enough to experience them.

- [Anaridis] Yeah.

- So you have to be intentional, because I grew up in Providence, I didn't even know that, you know, the Providence River was connected to a salt water body, I had no idea, right?

I was fascinated by water bodies, even puddles.

I wanted to know what lived in them, what was in the bottom of them.

I was that weird kid, you know, flipping over the rocks and grabbing the critters that were under them.

You know, when you have that kind of an interest and you grow up sort of in a cement world devoid of those opportunities, you have to be more intentional about how you experience those spaces, about how you get access to whatever opportunities are out there.

I know that are organizations in Rhode Island, like Save the Bay and others that have opportunities for young students, URI has a camp in the summer through the Inner Space Center.

I think it's for middle and high school kids, I could be wrong about that, but they should certainly contact URI about that.

There were other camps at the main campus.

One I think is associated with sharks.

So there are different spaces that look to bring in young people who have those interests, for sure.

- And we live in the ocean state.

- We live in the ocean state, but it is a world apart, you know?

- Yeah.

- Growing up in Providence, as soon as I got myself out to South County to those beaches, I never came back.

I got out there, but I was almost 30 years old before I stepped on the URI campus for the first time to go to college.

And I was just already so in love with the ocean.

I learned how to scuba dive on Elmwood Avenue in South Providence, there was a dive shop, you know?

- Yeah.

- I started to explore the coastline on my own because I didn't really have a whole bunch of folk who were into that stuff when I was living in Providence.

But I met some people, and I just fell in love with the ocean and all those weird and wonderful creatures that exist because of it.

I wanted to know all I could about it.

And so I got myself out to URI and I didn't stop, even though I had many barriers and many naysayers in the way.

I was older and not intimidated.

And I built a community of support, and I found my way through it.

And you know, I'm here now and so, the most important thing I do is help the next generation navigate their way through all of that.

- You went through that to become that beacon, right?

- Oh yeah.

- Now you're the source.

- Absolutely, I consider myself a wedge in the door.

That's all I am, I'm a wedge in the door, climb over my back, you know?

And as we go through our lives, we all have to remember to lift, as we're walking forward, lift others are up around us.

And that's always been part of my circle, yeah.

- I can't believe that we've run out of time, because I can sit here and talk to you all day.

- Thank you so much for this invitation.

It's been a joy and I'm just so humbled to be here with you, - And we are humbled to have you.

And we're just in awe of everything we've learned so far in this conversation.

Thank you for peeling the curtain back and letting us know a little bit more about ocean sciences.

Thank you so much, Catalina.

- Absolutely, take care, and thank you so much.

- We want to thank tonight's guest, Catalina Martinez for her time and incredible work.

To catch up on past episodes, you can head over to watch.ripbs.org and be sure to follow us on these social platforms for the latest updates.

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