The workshops were facilitated by two Woodrow Wilson teachers who participated in the Environmental Science Institutes: Dan Odell (1998) and Dr. Anna Zareba-Kowalska (1997), as well as computer training specialist and videographer Gwendolyn Hazard from the St. Croix Curriculum Center.

Participants formed teams to develop projects, communicated by e-mail and located community resources online. The workshops took place on Fridays and Saturdays and each participant was required to complete eighty hours of seminar and field trip presentations and twenty hours of computer time.

St. Croix, the largest of the U.S. Virgin Islands, lies about sixty-four degrees and forty-five minutes west of Greenwich and seventeen degrees and forty-five minutes north of the equator. The island is no more than twenty-three statute miles long and six miles wide and has an area of a little over eighty square miles. It is situated in the Caribbean Sea, southeast of Puerto Rico and has a tropical climate. The tradewinds blow more or less along the length of the island, and the hills of the western part of the island receive a good deal more rain than the eastern part of the island; annual rainfall is on the whole extremely variable, averaging perhaps forty inches a year. Fairly severe and extended drought has always been a problem and has been the motivation behind the two TORCH workshops:

Torch 1999: Blue Mountain Watershed
from March 5, 1999 to May 29, 1999.

Torch 2000: Water Management
from March 10, 2000 to June 2, 2000.