About Us
Restoring the coast we live on.
A Freeport 501(c)(3) restoring native habitat and teaching the community about Long Island’s South Shore estuary.
The mission hasn’t changed. The method has.
Sea Friends Incorporated is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, incorporated in New York on June 9, 1993, and based in Freeport on Long Island’s South Shore. We were founded to protect the marine ecosystem and teach the community about it. The original plan for doing that was a public aquarium.
The mission hasn’t changed. The method has.
Freeport sits inside the South Shore Estuary Reserve, which runs seventy-five miles from the Queens line east to Southampton — shallow bays, tidal marsh, tributaries, barrier beach, and the marsh-adjacent uplands that drain into them. New York State designated it in 1993 as a maritime region of statewide importance, and calls it one of the most ecologically productive regions in the United States. The Reserve was created in 1993, the same year Sea Friends was incorporated.
That estuary is the work. We plant the natives that hold soil, filter stormwater, and take up nitrogen before it reaches the bay — and we build each project with the people who use the ground it sits on. School programs, workshops, volunteer plantings, and invasive removal days are how that happens, designed around a partner’s site and run alongside them. We are taking on projects now. See what we do →
What a coastal education center could look like.
We’re early in thinking this through, and we’d rather say so than oversell it. But the direction is clear enough to put in writing.
We’re exploring what it would take to build a coastal education center in Freeport — a place to learn this estuary by standing in it: the salt marsh, the tidal creek, the barrier beach, and the marsh-adjacent uplands that drain to all three.
Trips & field days
School groups and neighbors in the salt marsh, on the barrier beach, and eventually on the water — learning the estuary in the field.
A working greenhouse
Long Island ecotype natives propagated from local seed, grown on site for restoration projects and community plantings.
Room for groups
Space to host classes, workshops, and volunteer days — habitat cleanups, invasive removal, and native plantings staged from one place.
If this is something your school, your organization, or your community could use, we would like to hear from you. We welcome input from prospective partners as the direction takes shape. Get in touch →
Our first project is in the ground.
In April 2026 we completed our first restoration project: a permanent monarch waystation in the Freeport High School courtyard, designed and planted by Sea Friends alongside the school’s Environmental Justice and Horticulture Clubs, with construction by the school’s woodshop. The bed is certified by Monarch Watch under registry No. 55812.
Modest in scale, the project established the model for our work across the South Shore: a community partner with available ground, native species chosen for the site and its goals, students engaged directly in the planting, and education that carries beyond the day it went in. We are actively seeking additional partners.
Who’s behind it.
Michael T. Studer
A practicing certified public accountant since 1975, Mr. Studer graduated Babson College with a BSBA in 1971. He has served as a director of Sea Friends Incorporated since its inception in June 1993.
Shakespeare Newsome
Shakespeare Newsome was a securities professional from 1989 to 2003. He has served as a director of Sea Friends Incorporated since 2015.
Christopher R. Smith
A plant biologist and Certified Professional Horticulturist with more than 15 years in horticulture, conservation, and ecology, Mr. Smith leads Sea Friends’ restoration and education work and grows the Long Island native plants used in its projects from locally collected seed. He holds a B.S. in Plant Biology from the University of Vermont (2012).
Bring us a site.
Whether you’ve got ground that could be habitat, a class that needs a field day, or an idea for what a coastal education center should be — we want to hear it.