Gullah Geechee Seafood Trail Project

The Consortium is an active, non funded, partner in the development of the Gullah Geechee Seafood Trail, funded by the NOAA Fisheries Saltonstall-Kennedy grant program.

The project is being led by the Gullah Geechee Chamber of Commerce, with partner entities including the WeGOJA Foundation, Gullah/Geechee Fishing Association, Gullah/Geechee Sea Islands Coalition, and Coastal Carolina University. The Consortium is supporting social science tasks on the project including interview and focus group questionnaire development, IRB approval, focus group implementation, and qualitative data content analysis; as well as other grants management and capacity building tasks.

A highly important aspect of this research is community ownership of the funds and the data. All project funds are administered by the Gullah Geechee Chamber of Commerce and distributed to other community-based partners based on agreed upon budgets. And as the project lead and as a representative of the Gullah Geechee community, the Gullah Geechee Chamber of Commerce has the right of first refusal when it comes to potential future use of the data.

Other important aspects of this research are 1) paying study participants, and 2) establishing a geographic stratification of interview and focus group sampling so that inland communities are included. The project team has budgeted for incentives to compensate Gullah fishing community members for their time being interviewed and their time spent sharing stories in focus groups. This is done to acknowledge the value of participants’ time and their perspectives. Social science data collection was stratified based on region: typically the southern, central, and northern coasts of South Carolina.

The project team included a fourth “inland” stratum in order to learn from community members and document perspectives from communities that are often overlooked in the documentation of Gullah Geechee cultural stories. These Gullah Geechee residents that happen to live more inland are still culturally connected to the coast, often reside in coastal watersheds, own seafood businesses, and community members still participate in fishing/harvesting riverine fisheries resources, so it is important that their experiences and perspectives are also included.