About The Ocean Foundation

Successful ocean conservation is a community effort. With the growing awareness that the work of individuals could be supported within a community problem-solving context, photographer and founder Wolcott Henry led a group of like-minded coral conservation experts, venture capitalists, and philanthropy colleagues in establishing the Coral Reef Foundation as the first community foundation for coral reefs — thus, the first coral reef conservation donors’ portal. Among its early projects was the first national poll about coral reef conservation in the United States, unveiled in 2002.

After the Coral Reef Foundation’s inception, it quickly became clear that the founders needed to address a broader question: How can we support donors interested in the conservation of coast and ocean ecosystems, and re-imagine the well-known and accepted community foundation model to best serve the ocean conservation community? Thus, in 2003, The Ocean Foundation was launched with Wolcott Henry as founding Chair of the Board of Directors. Mark J. Spalding was brought in as President shortly thereafter.

A Community Foundation

The Ocean Foundation still operates using the known community foundation tools and deploying them in an ocean context. From the beginning, The Ocean Foundation has been international, with well over two-thirds of its grants supporting causes outside the United States. We have hosted dozens of projects and worked collaboratively on every continent, on our one global ocean, and in most of the seven seas.

Applying our breadth and depth of knowledge about the global ocean conservation community to vet projects and reduce risk to donors, The Ocean Foundation has supported a diverse portfolio of projects that includes work on marine mammals, sharks, sea turtles, and seagrass, as well as launched headline programs such as the International Ocean Acidification Initiative and the Blue Carbon Calculator. We’ve looked at the economic impact of debris on beaches and the ways communities can restore abundance to the fisheries on which they depend. We continue to seek out opportunities to make all of us more effective and to make every dollar for ocean conservation stretch a little further.

The Ocean Foundation identifies trends, anticipates and responds to the growing needs and urgent issues related to ocean health and sustainability; and strives to strengthen the knowledge and expertise of the ocean conservation community as a whole.

We continue to identify both the solutions to the threats that face our ocean, and the organizations and individuals best suited to implement them. We work hard to ensure that we remain open to multiple strategies and new ideas about where and how those solutions could be developed and used. Our goal remains to achieve a level of global awareness that ensures we stop taking so much of the good stuff out and stop dumping bad stuff in recognition of the life-giving role of our global ocean.