Back to Nature. Back to Health: Celebrating our 10th Anniversary!
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Celebrating 10 Years of ReBuilding a Clean, Abundant & Accessible New Yew Harbor that’s Well-Known, Well-Loved & Well-Cared For
Join the movement to restore New York’s Harbor at our 10th Anniversary of The Billion Oyster Party!
Have you heard the news? It’s our tenth anniversary! Whether you are brand new to the New York Harbor restoration movement or have been part of our story since the start, welcome. We hope you’ll join us at the Billion Oyster Party on September 26th at the Brooklyn Navy Yard.
We can hardly believe we are celebrating our tenth anniversary, ten years of rebuilding a clean, abundant, and accessible New York harbor. It takes more than an oyster (or even a billion) to make this work happen. Thankfully, we haven’t done this work alone. We’ve always wanted our restoration movement to be for everyone. And, in just a decade, more than 100,000 New Yorkers across our five boroughs—including 20,000 students and 19,000 volunteers—have joined us, many experiencing New York Harbor’s biodiversity for the first time. What a privilege to be among and lead a community that understands the restorative value of spending time in and giving back to our bays, rivers, and canals surrounding our concrete jungle! We have so much to celebrate here at Billion Oyster Project, yet it feels like we are just getting started.
Rebuilding a Clean, Abundant & Accessible New Yew Harbor
400 years ago, when the Lenape tribe, an Indigenous people of the Northeastern Woodlands, lived on the islands of Manahatta, it was one of the world's most prosperous and most abundant ecosystems. The oyster was the foundation or “engineer” of New York City’s underwater habitats. However, colonialist settlers, industrial pollution, overfishing, and the dumping of untreated sewage destroyed many habitats. Sadly, it took less than a hundred years to wipe out the New York oyster population. In 1927, the city’s last commercial oyster farm was forced to close. All that remained was a lifeless New York Harbor. This unparalleled urban estuary — where Atlantic Ocean saltwater meets Hudson River freshwater, collapsed.
For the last ten years, we’ve been leading a movement to rebuild a clean, abundant, and accessible New Yew Harbor that’s well-known, well-loved, and well-cared for. We are thrilled and proud of the first-ever return of wild oysters to our waterways when they were virtually an extinct species, in just ten years!
Though we have a long way to go, we’ve reached 140 million of our goal to restore one billion oysters in New York’s harbors by 2035.
Take a look at how much we’ve accomplished together – working to restore New Yorkers back to nature and the Harbor back to health over the last ten years:
A Clean New York Harbor
Shell Recycling
2.5M oyster shells cleaned, stored, and recycled from 75 NYC restaurant partners and diverted from landfill
Reef-building
140M+ oysters restored in the New York City Harbor.
We built an aquatic habitat from the ground up, and host 18 active restoration sites and field stations, including three new reefs built this year
Water Quality & Community Science
The waterways surrounding New York are the cleanest they’ve been in over 100 years
With volunteer community scientists and researchers from partnering organizations, we’ve built the first publicly accessible database of New York City’s water quality, using 12,000+ samples from 139 unique water bodies.
Oyster Research Stations (ORS): We’ve established 50+ ORS Sites—an 8 x 8 x 18 cage containing 50-200 oysters—allowing schools and community scientists to study waterways and wildlife in their backyards. We offer programming at ORS Hubs at: East 90th Street, Governors Island, Hudson River Park, the Lighthouse Museum, Riverside Park, Valentino Pier, and West Harlem Piers.
An Abundant New York Harbor
Oysters are reproducing in New York’s Harbor and engineering new habitats!
Dolphins seek food and respite in the East River as they migrate south along the Atlantic or play in Jamaica Bay during the winter.
Native Lined Seahorses, listed as a vulnerable species in New York since the 1990s, have entered a resurgence and are regularly witnessed by students and scientists at our Oyster Research Stations
In 2021, the city saw a rare run of wild blue tuna in New York Harbor for the first time in over a century
First whale sightings since 2010, and they return by the hundreds over the late summer to feed on menhaden (which leave their nursery (the calmer, safer waters of our harbor) and the oyster reefs they grew up on, for the Atlantic in adulthood).
An Accessible New York Harbor
The New York Harbor as Our Classroom
The Urban Assembly New York Harbor School: We started as a student project, helping high school students study and teach aquaculture
Over 20,000 students learned on our waterfront through over 100 school partnerships across all five boroughs
This year's 10th Annual Student Symposium brought more than 750 students and 81 teachers to Governors Island for an inspiring day of curiosity, passion, and enthusiasm for New York Harbor.
The New York Harbor as Our Commons
9 Field Stations, many at previously inaccessible waterfront sites to the public.
75+ NYC restaurant partners
19,000+ volunteers
YOU. More than 120,000 New Yorkers have engaged with our work and experienced nature’s power to offer personal restoration.
In restoring our blue spaces, we’ve witnessed how spending time within and giving back to New York City’s waterways simultaneously contributes to our own restoration, our individual and community health. Over and over again, our staff, students, volunteers, and supporters experience personal restoration, nourishment, and joy as they get and give back to nature. And, ultimately, that’s the miracle of our work. As we rebuild New York City’s greatest natural resource, we experience endless reciprocal benefits, like the ability to swim in the Hudson River. (We think we are saving nature, but really, it’s nature who is saving us. )
Setting Our Sights on the Next Ten Years of Restoring New York City Back to Nature & Back to Health
What do the next ten years look like? In addition to reaching our goal of restoring one billion oysters, we want our New York Harbor to become more well-known, well-cared for, and well-loved.
Well-Known: We are grateful to be listeners, leaders, and tightly knit with dozens of community-based organizations that have been serving their communities much longer than we have. We view it as a privilege and responsibility to clean up the waterways and bring New Yorkers back to nature and the harbors back to health. Thank you to our incredible community partners for the collaborative efforts that community oyster restoration work requires.
As a result of our community partnerships, our restoration work has received international recognition. We are proud to lead the global urban waterway restoration community with the curiosity and attention of worldwide leaders, including House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Prince William, King Abdullah II of Jordan, Sadiq Khan, the Mayor Of London, and international leaders from countries around the globe, who are also working to restore their harbors. Our work is inspiring others to join the restoration movement in their cities.
Well-Loved: We aim to engage the 10-30 million people in our metropolitan area to restore New York Harbor’s oyster reefs. We will continue to do this by fostering partnerships in education, the arts, sciences, conservation, and businesses. We look forward to the day when tourists visit our rivers or the Gowanus Canal (imagine!) for a swim.
Well-Cared For: With 520+ miles of shoreline and 9 million people, New York City sits 30 feet above sea level. Our mission ties right into the SDGs and other city-wide plans for climate resilience. Oyster reefs prevent coastal erosion and storm surge by creating a natural barrier that absorbs and diffuses wave energy. Our education work inspires the next generation to consider their purchases and impacts consciously.
We imagine the New York Harbor as the center of a rich, diverse, and abundant estuary that it once was. The communities that surround this complex ecosystem have helped construct it and, in return, benefit from it with endless opportunities for work, education, and recreation. The Harbor is, and will continue to become, a world-class public space, well used and cared for by everyone.
Celebrate ten years of rebuilding a clean, abundant, accessible New Yew Harbor and restoration community that’s well-known, well-loved, and well-cared for with us on September 26th at our 10th Anniversary Billon Oyster Party! Trust us, it’s not another NYC oyster-tasting event or environmental charity gala NYC. In addition to it being a Billion Oyster Project fundraiser, our 10th anniversary is a celebration of coastal community engagement to restore New York’s Harbor oyster by oyster.
We can’t wait to see you soon.
Secure your tickets here. Feeling VIP? Yes, you are. Looking for visibility and exposure among our community? We still have time for sponsorship opportunities.