The East End Seaport Museum & Marine Foundation preserves and promotes the maritime heritage, culture, and history of the East End of Long Island through our stewardship of Long Beach Bar Lighthouse (""Bug Light""), conservation support of the Peconic Bay ecosystem, and a calendar of exhibits, education, and events. We steward three sites: our museum, in a former LIRR terminal overlooking Greenport's fishing wharf, with exhibitions on the shipbuilding and fishing industries that built the town alongside an 800-gallon saltwater aquarium of local marine species; the Village Blacksmith, a replica shop with live metalworking demonstrations; and Bug Lighthouse, one of the few visitable offshore lighthouses on the East Coast, reached by weekly educational cruises. Annually we engage roughly 6,000 visitors at the museum, 4,000 at the Village Blacksmith, and 1,000 on lighthouse tours—year-round Greenport residents (population ~2,500, swelling to 7,000 in summer), seasonal homeowners, and tourists. We strive to keep maritime history active and evolving, expanding whose stories we tell and how.

Greenport, a village in the Town of Southold, is 53.6% white, with a long-established Black community (10%) and large Hispanic population (35%, primarily Mexican, Guatemalan, Salvadoran, and Colombian heritage). Despite the town's relative affluence, New York's Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act designates Greenport one of only two disadvantaged communities on the East End, reflecting disproportionate climate and socioeconomic burdens on its Hispanic, Black, and other minority residents, many in seasonal, low-wage agriculture, hospitality, and service work.

We reach this population through our Kid's Summer Fun Program, a marine science camp with the Group for the East End serving 45 children ages 7–11 in hands-on estuary ecology over five weeks. Children in Greenport's low-income day camp and after-school programs get first-priority enrollment, and a local patron's support made 70% of 2024 campers' tuition free. To date, this outreach has centered on children; Science on Screen would let us extend that commitment to their parents and other adults in the same households for the first time. We are building on this momentum with new initiatives: exhibitions on Black sailors in Greenport and Indigenous/South American dugout canoe innovations, a fall rowing program with the Village Community Boathouse of New York, and a boatbuilding program with Greenport High School.