Moving into the wind, however, requires a maneuver called “tacking.” When tacking, one sails up wind at a 45-degree angle, moving back and forth. Which, over time, gets you to your desired destination. This is where power boat enthusiasts check out, as they can hit the throttles and go right into the wind. But as my father would say, “If I wanted to get there fast, I could drive in my car.”

As I said, this sort of back-and-forth pattern to get to a desired destination is one I have experienced over and over again in life. For instance, as a Christian, I was confronted with the certainty that there was a spiritual reality and a physical or natural reality coexisting together. However, if my sole focus was on that spiritual reality and I didn’t thoughtfully and diligently mind the opportunities, responsibilities and relationships in the physical realm, I could quickly find myself off course or, worse, shipwrecked. Similarly, thinking the physical world is all that exists akin to thinking Newtonian physicists as good an explanation as we will ever hear.

I have found life is full of this sort of “tacky” (pardon the pun) balance.

When tacking, the challenge is when you “come about,” or begin moving in the opposite direction up wind. To do this, the boat must reach a maximum speed and then turn back directly into the wind. The momentum, when executed correctly, will take the boat far enough around for the wind to then catch the sail and off you go at a 90-degree angle from the direction you were going.

If you are not prepared for this maneuver or if you are experiencing it for the first time, it can be unnerving. As you make the turn, the sails begin to flap in the breeze like a large flag on a windy day, all momentum seems to be lost and then the boom — which holds the sail perpendicular to the mast — comes whipping across the deck and can easily knock someone overboard or unconscious.

Leaders have to be visionary risk takers, but they also have to be practical and process oriented. Managing people, like raising children, is based on motivation and direction that comes in the form of both patience and understanding, along with a demand for performance and goal attainment. It is not either/or. It is both/and.

This is especially helpful to me in understanding our political processes. Totalitarian regimes prefer the efficiency of rule without opposition, which soon becomes rule without consent. Our system, on the other hand, is designed to tack back and forth, avoiding extremes, but making steady progress, even if it isn’t in a straight line.

The idea to create the charitable organization started after Jess and Luke started to see disturbing trends at local outdoor recreation areas.

“We love it here,” said Jess, noting that the two spend countless hours at local beaches and on local waterways. When they started to see increasing amounts of pollution and litter in these spaces, they felt a need to start a movement.

Jess and Luke’s parents got involved by helping them establish the non-profit and develop the website. The rest has been managed by the siblings, who’ve coordinated multiple beach clean-ups, planted numerous trees and worked with 81 student and community volunteers for a total of 501 hours to cleanup more than 200 pounds of trash from area beaches and community access areas.

“It has been exciting for me and my husband Peter to watch Luke and Jess work together on a common goal and to take pride in their achievements.

They have learned so much about ecology, stewardship, marketing, communication, public speaking, managing a group of volunteers, and hopefully have made the world a slightly better place in the process” said mom Linda Marzano.

Luke and Jess both have dreams to become medical professionals but also plan to continue running the organization as they work their way through college with the help of their parents.

Both have received recognition from the Town Council of Melbourne Beach and the Melbourne Beach Advisory Board for their environmental efforts.

For Jess, a sophomore who serves on student government and plays volleyball and lacrosse for the Lady Wildcats, it’s about “getting the community involved in reducing waste and thinking about our environment more.” She spearheads these wishes with activism and activities aimed at solving the problem.

For Luke, who’s a senior and a tennis player who loves surfing, hiking and fishing, it goes a little deeper. “Managing Global Sustainability Group has not only provided me with leadership and organizational skills but also shown me the extent of interconnection between humans and their environment. At the end of the day, humans are just animals that make things; we still are still governed by the same environmental principles that govern nature.”

These kids are alright.

Remarkably, only a small fraction of Brevard’s teens has ever been to Port Canaveral, one of the largest economic engines in the region.

Port Canaveral serves multiple sectors of Central Florida’s economy and supports thousands of jobs directly at the port and indirectly throughout the area, bringing fuel to our cars and food to our tables. Port Canaveral welcomes millions of travelers from around the world, while also rescuing sea turtles who have travelled from oceans and seas far from here.

Thousands of individuals make up the day-to-day safe operations of our seaport. Some of the more well-known seaport occupations at Port Canaveral include harbor master, lock master, harbor pilots, United States Coast Guard, United States Navy, and our logistics workers such as stevedores. Each of these requires unique and dedicated training. Each also enjoys precious moments on Florida’s waterways and occasionally watching history being made on Florida’s Space Coast.

Port Canaveral is known worldwide as one of the world’s busiest cruise ports. However, not everyone knows that Port Canaveral is also a key partner in the space industry, commercial fishing, and the United States military. Each one of these areas is growing and will need skilled labor.

Nationally, US seaports recognize that their workforce is aging. More and more seaports are working with local high schools to develop programs and scholarships to reach high school students and recruit them.

Locally, the Propeller Club of Port Canaveral raises money all year to support the HELM program at Rockledge High. HELM, or “Helping Educate Leaders in Maritime” offers studies in Maritime Technology and apprenticeship opportunities. Students learn maritime skills including knot tying, rope handling, navigation, maritime rules and laws, and port operations. Students are also given the opportunity to take the Maritime Transportation Associate exam.

The HELM program is one path to a career at the port, but there are others. Port Canaveral has paths for students in any number of the Brevard Schools certifications or skills, such as HVAC, Refrigeration and Heating Technology; Building Construction Technologies, Emergency Medical Responder, and Hospitality and Tourism, to name a few.

Port Canaveral’s Junior Port Ambassador programs seeks to change that. While Port Canaveral has had an Ambassador program for many years seeking to connect with the community, this is the first program of its kind seeking to connect high school students and their peers with the Port.

Port Canaveral is currently taking applications from high school students to participate in this one-year program. The program is designed to introduce Space Coast high school students to the different sectors of Port Canaveral. The students then work together to create a collaborative multi-media presentation that is shared back with their classmates.

The ambassador meet four to six times per academic year at the Port, where they connect with leaders from the maritime industry, space, commercial fishing, construction, the US Coast Guard and the Brevard County Sheriff’s department, to name a few. In its first year, students went on to enter the US Navy, the US Army, and local welding programs. At least one student also applied for a commercial fishing license.

Applications can be found at www.portcanaveral.com/careeers/Junior-Port-Ambassador-Program in the Spring of 2021. The next class will begin in the Fall of 2021.

A: Our youngest [daughter] is an artist and she needed art supplies, so I googled it and Ralph’s Art Supply came up in my search. It was my first time [visiting] EGAD. We had a great conversation with Ralph, got to play with his cat and her kittens, and then took a walk through the neighborhood. EGAD won me over right off the bat. This is where I’m supposed to be.

A: The people, without a doubt. It’s hard to explain how amazing it feels to be surrounded by people who support your ideas and never accuse you of thinking “too big.” It’s so fun and freeing! EGAD is filled with people working together to bring everyone else’s visions to fruition. It’s such a cool community.

A: EGAD lost one business because of COVID-19. Personally, I paid rent starting in January expecting to be open in three months, but actually opened on October 1, 2020. I had to eat that cost. Many of the businesses did a great job of adapting to the circumstances. Intracoastal Brewing Company produced their own hand sanitizer and created a drive-through for food and beer. FM Pizza added lunch shifts to make up for the limited occupancy at dinner. The Standard Collective closed for a few weeks and started producing custom masks. The EGAD Main Street program was able to secure some funds and used it to create maps of all businesses, storefront window signs that read “shop small” and provided masks to all businesses.

A: After reading several years’ worth of the minutes from EGAD Main Street and city council meetings, and researching similar main streets, I think we have to start from scratch and go back to fully focusing on the four pillars of the main street organization. We need to come together. We need to do the work. I plan to be more one-on-one with each merchant. We need a working board, not just board members with titles. I want to work on building our membership and we need to do lots of fundraising. I definitely want a stronger social media presence and I’m ready to get started on all of this. One immediate goal would be to landscape Highland and Eau Gallie so that it looks fresh, safe, and inviting. I’d like to increase activity at the square and I’d like to see more events happening in the area. We currently have the Space Coast Music Fest, FLEAGAD, Space Coast Pride Fest, Rocky Water Brew Fest, and Whiskey in the District. I’d like to add some official holiday events and I want event planners to know that we’re open to having events here.

A: Co/Create has 32 local “makers” – mostly from Brevard, one from Orlando and [one from] Miami. It’s a launch pad for local businesses. Fun workshops are held here: candle making, smudge sticks, bath scrubs, makeup class, wine tasting. We will start offering plant-based grab ‘n go, soups, and fresh juices, hopefully by March/April.

A: EGAD Main Street is a nonprofit and we need paying members, active members, and donations. I want to leave this community more connected and community oriented. Communication is key in all relationships.

EW: Florida Tech was initially shaped by the environment it was formed in, the Space Coast in the late 50’s and 60’s. Now, how do you see Florida Tech shaping and influencing that same environment?

DM: More than anything else, we are a source of talent that is providing much of the strength to the technology-based firms that are flourishing in this area and we have been doing that for some time. When you talk to CEO’s and HR executives in the 25 plus companies in close proximity to us, they love to hire our graduates, which translates to those graduates being some of the highest paid in the Southeast. The only complaint I hear from them is that we don’t graduate enough talent, but we’re working on that. The research we do here on satellites, or the Indian River Lagoon is all remarkable, but it is overshadowed by the qualified, career-ready talent we are producing.

EW: It has been observed that research universities are always an economic driver and that Silicon Valley would not exist without Stanford. How do you see Florida Tech in that sense?

DW: That is a scenario that has been playing out for some time, thankfully. I have visited 113 countries and I posed the question, “If you were going to choose a place to put an aerospace-oriented university, where would it be?” Without exception they say, “The Space Coast of Florida.” That was part of Dr. Keuper’s foresight when he founded Florida Tech, that the future of the area would be driven by highly educated talent.

EW: One observation I have heard in this regard is that we don’t have enough engineers and Florida Tech attracts the cream of foreign students, but they can’t matriculate into careers here because of the defense orientation of our local companies?

DW: It is true, they would like to hire them, but federal controls prevent them from doing so. However, graduates who move into the private sector outside the defense industry have risen to become chief scientist or chief technical officer.

EW: One of your goals when you became president, which reflected your background and passion, was to elevate Florida Tech as a leading research institution. How is the school doing in that regard?

DW: It has been more challeng- ing than I initially thought. Our history was as a great teaching institution and to mold us into a research-oriented university is like turning a big ship…inertia is an amazing thing. One initiative that I pushed as provost without success, but with success as president, is tenure. By advertis- ing for a position that is a tenure track, I get five times as many highly-qualified applicants. Tom Folliard, one of our famous graduates who helped build CarMax, whose brother is a tenured professor at the University of Texas, wanted to come here, but we didn’t offer tenure [at that time]. Without a tenured system, we were swimming upstream. Now, it is getting easier and easier to recruit. We have 20 faculty mem- bers who are recognized around the world as being leaders in their field, out of some 350. That is a huge number and most of that progress has been made in the last 15 years.

EW: It must be an extremely competitive environment?

DM: We had one of the world’s leading experts in cybersecurity, who left and became the chief technology officer at Microsoft. How do we compete with that compensation package? But now we have the Harris Institute for Assured Information, along with other industry leaders, and we have taken cybersecurity from being a sideline to being one of our core strengths that continues to grow.

EW: Biological sciences, including marine sciences, also is emerging as a strong field at the university.

DM: It is always about people and talent. Most of the community doesn’t know that we bring in close to 100 pre-med students a year. Of the ones who graduate in that track, an astonishing 82 percent get into medical school. This track record is leading to the location of a medical school on our campus in 2024. It is a program that has grown out of our biology department and the efforts of Julia Grimwade, who leads that program.

EW: How have you been able to manage the pandemic?

DM: There are only two private schools in the country that didn’t suffer declining enrollments through the pandemic, ours and a school up in Pennsylvania. We made decisions very early, we developed a strategic plan and we stuck to it. We communicated with parents, got their support and our enrollment actually grew. This spring we had the largest undergraduate enrollment in our history. There were many tough decisions, like canceling our public commencement exercises, [which] you know isn’t popular. But we did it and within a few weeks [and eventually] 70 percent of the colleges in Florida went to virtual graduations. These decisions, I think, go back to my background in launching missiles. You do everything to make sure everything is ready and then you push the button.

EW: What do you think Florida Tech will look like in 10 years?

DM: I call it “Back to the Future.” We will look like we did 30 years ago, where we were producing leading-edge graduates that industry competes for and re- search that was second to none, only we will be doing it better and on a larger scale.

The husband-and-wife team of Jason and Tamara Duhamel founded the company in 2018. Building on their complimentary skill sets and experience, they believed they could offer better service and value than other competitors in the field. It was a conviction and determination that has paid off, as today their clients include some of the largest commercial, realty, aerospace and technology companies on the Space Coast, while expanding their operations to all 50 states.

In fact, Jason and Tamara Duhamel have grown the business so effectively that Hero Facility Services went from 1,027 sites serviced in 2019 with approximately 3,000 service requests to 3,100 sites and 6,700 service requests in 2020. Jason estimates the company is on track in 2021 to complete more than 12,000 service requests.

One reason for this astonishing growth is the proprietary management software that Jason wrote and continues to update. “The software enables us to track every project for every client and ensure the costs for both services and any parts or equipment we replace is competitively priced. Then, we provide all those analytics to our clients, ensuring a collaborative dialog and partnership”, he said.

Further, added Tamara, “Our clients know that when they call us they don’t have to worry about the job getting done on-time and at the most reasonable price; it creates a great relationship.”

“Similarly, when our vendors – who are [providing] the services such as plumbing, HVAC or electrical repair – know that we are committed to paying them on time, whether or not we have collected from our clients, that produces a lot of loyalty,” Jason said.

Hero Facility Services is a veteran, woman-owned and operated full-service facility maintenance firm, providing a full spectrum of services including hvac, plumbing, electrical, handyman, disaster recovery, locksmith and more. From the rooftop to the parking lot, your Heroes have you covered.