Ocean Conservancy

Hello! We are Ocean Conservancy, an organization dedicated to protecting the ocean and all the amazing life within it. Our story begins in 1972, a time when people were becoming more aware of how human actions could affect the environment. We weren't always called Ocean Conservancy, though. When we first started, our name was the Delta Corporation.

Our founders were two people named Bill and Kathy Moody. They saw that the ocean and its wildlife were being harmed by human activities, and they knew they had to do something to help. They believed that if people worked together, they could make a positive change. This belief became the foundation for all of our work. Our very first mission was to protect seals. At the time, these marine animals were being hunted, and we wanted to ensure their safety. This early project proved that a group of dedicated people could successfully protect marine animals, setting the stage for the much bigger projects we would take on in the future.

One of our best-known projects began quite unexpectedly. In 1986, a member of our team named Linda Maraniss was walking on a beach in Texas. She was very upset when she saw how much trash had washed up on the sand, spoiling the natural beauty and creating a danger for wildlife. Linda decided she couldn't just walk away. Instead, she organized a local cleanup event. She invited others to join her, and many volunteers showed up, ready to help clean their beach.

The event was a huge success. So many people came together to make a difference that it inspired us to think bigger. What started as one cleanup on one beach grew into our annual International Coastal Cleanup. Each year, we invite people from all over the world to join. Today, millions of volunteers from more than 100 countries participate, removing trash from beaches, rivers, and other waterways. This incredible effort has become the largest single-day volunteer event for the ocean on the entire planet, all because one person decided to take action.

While cleaning up trash is very important, our work involves much more. We team up with scientists to study and understand the biggest challenges our ocean faces. Two of these major problems are climate change, which is warming the ocean and changing its chemistry, and overfishing, which happens when too many fish are caught too quickly for them to reproduce. Using scientific research, we work to find real, long-term solutions to these threats.

One of our key strategies is to help create marine protected areas. You can think of these as giant underwater parks. Inside these protected zones, marine life is safe from harmful activities, giving animals and their habitats a chance to recover and thrive. We also focus on protecting specific animals that are endangered, such as sea turtles, whales, and manatees. Our goal is to make their ocean homes safer, whether that means reducing plastic pollution that they might mistake for food or working to prevent them from getting caught in fishing gear.

Today, we continue our important work from our headquarters in Washington, D.C., but our reach is global. We collaborate with partners all around the world because we know that a healthy ocean benefits everyone. Our mission is to tackle the greatest threats to our ocean head-on. This includes fighting plastic pollution at its source, which means stopping trash from ever reaching the water in the first place. It also means finding ways to reduce the impact of climate change on our seas and promoting sustainable fishing. Sustainable fishing ensures that we can fish in ways that do not harm fish populations, allowing them to remain healthy for many years to come.

Everything we do is driven by the belief that we can solve the ocean’s biggest problems by working together. From our first project protecting seals to our global cleanup and scientific partnerships today, our goal has remained the same: to ensure a healthy and vibrant ocean for the generations that will come after us.