SAN RAMON — To 16-year-old Meghan Burr, being in the water is about as natural as breathing.
The pool is a second home for the Dougherty Valley High School junior and swim team member, who learned to swim and love the water as a young child. But not every child has the same experience, and Burr wants to change that.
“About two years ago I had the idea to come up with a way to give back to the community,” she said. “I’ve done a lot of volunteering in the past, and I wanted to do something with my passion for swimming. I saw a feature on water safety for children and realized how important it is for all children to be safe in the water; I’d had the opportunity for lessons at a young age. I did some research and learned that foster children had the least support and probably needed this the most.”
Today, her idea has developed into Foster Fins, a fledgling water safety program taught by teens and aimed at foster children and economically disadvantaged youth. The grass-roots group brings together enthusiastic swimmers with water-nervous children who might not otherwise have a chance to learn to swim.
“I gathered a group of friends I thought would be reliable and who swim and told them about the idea,” Burr said. “They were all on board and loved it. I met with many people and gained the consensus that a lot of adults and authority figures in the community who have dealt with foster children were on board with this.”
Foster Fins began operation in August and has offered 29 individual lessons to children, some of whom have been repeat students. Six Dougherty swim team students help Burr instruct. The group is reaching out to foster agencies and school districts to locate possible students and has a Facebook page.
Foster Fins holds its water safety lessons Saturdays at the Crow Canyon Country Club in Danville, where select members of the Dougherty High School swim team patiently coach students on all aspects of water safety.
“We teach them how to compose themselves in the water,” Burr explained. “If you fall in, how to get out, how to float and blow bubbles, then we move to treading water and swimming.”
Advising Burr is Taylor Nanfria, 23, of San Francisco, a former Danville swimmer and coach who swam for UC Berkeley and qualified for the Olympic Trials.
“I thought this idea was awesome,” Nanfria said. “I think everyone should be able to be water-safe, and it’s sad that some kids aren’t able to be. It’s cool that someone like Meghan can have a vision that’s so big. At first I said ‘That’s a huge dream,’ but then ‘Let’s do it, let’s chop away at it.’”
The program focuses on teaching basic water safety skills to children who may never have been near a swimming pool.
“We teach them skills like floating, kicking and then build up from there,” Burr said. “They love it.”
One 11-year-old girl was so frightened of the water that she initially refused to leave the pool’s edge, Burr recalled.
“She didn’t want to go too deep,” she said. “But after the lesson was over, she came up and said ‘I absolutely loved that, I had so much fun.’ ”
“That was a gratifying experience and why I want to do this,” Burr added.
While the program is not designed to be a weeks-long instructional program, Burr nevertheless hopes it may be enough to spark a love of swimming for some of the children.
“Swimming is just a great way to leave behind whatever stresses you’ve been dealing with in your life,” she said. “As a foster kid, your life is stressful … this is a really good way to have a place to come to, to have fun and learn water safety.”
Burr is continuing to reach out to foster care officials in the hope of expanding the program, which is scheduled to add classes in the Diablo Valley. Her hope is that the Foster Fins model can eventually be put into operation easily at a variety of locations.
“I hope that as we expand and get the word out, we’ll have volunteers from a lot of other schools,” she said. “This is a pretty easy idea to make portable and to get into other pools. … We want to make it more available to everybody.”
Burr’s enthusiasm and effort are 