"It’s time for us all to bring everything we have to the table, to save the blue heart of our planet - and ourselves."
CAROLINA MANHUSEN SCHWAB
OCEAN BORN FOUNDATION
PRESIDENT & CO-FOUNDER
ABOUT OCEAN BORN FOUNDATION
The Ocean Born Foundation is a Spanish non-profit organisation established in December 2020 to create new, sustainable streams of income to accelerate initiatives that focus on mitigating climate change by casting the ocean as part of the solution.
It all started with two people concerned about the annual IPCC reports. Our co-founders, Carolina and Martin, were anxious about the direction things were going and feeling flummoxed as to what they could do about it. That is when they encountered a group of three surfers brewing their own beer and using the profits to fund ocean clean-ups. With their background in economics, Carolina and Martin saw an opportunity to expand the project, scale up the change and create a new model for a foundation, where funds come from steady revenue rather than sporadic donations.
Today, we have grown to four different brands distributed around Europe. But we still operate by bringing competitive, quality products to market, while minimising our environmental impact and donating 100% (yep, 100%) of our profits to initiatives dedicated to restoring and protecting the Ocean.
But we want to do even more.
We recognise that all activities have social and ecological impacts, and if the impact is not consciously benefiting social or ecological outcomes, it is quite likely damaging them. We also recognise that every form of investment, every choice of product and service, and every money-flow decision is directly supporting one future over another.
We hope to join the wave of change with the most ambitious environmental standards on our products with the sole purpose of benefiting the ocean. We believe that making a difference requires a total and radical commitment.
All Ocean Born Foundation activities exist to serve the ocean. This was not an afterthought: Ocean Born was born out of desire to bring more resources to the fight to save this little blue miracle we all call home.
Our goal is to mitigate the adverse effects we as humans are causing our ocean, because global warming and the rapid deterioration of the ocean are a fact.
Doing something about it is a choice.
OUR MODEL
The part we play restoring the ocean back to health, for the benefit of all life on Earth and to solve 25% of climate change.
- Ocean Warriors power a respectful to planet future
- Ocean Born accelerates the recovery
- Recovery wedges improve
- Goal: A healthy vibrant ocean
OUR WAY OF THINKING
How we identify where to act.
The landscape of blue projects is almost as vast as the ocean itself. With so many wonderful initiatives out there, how do we decide where to focus our funding?
In evaluating proposals, we draw upon the “Recovery Wedges” laid out in Carlos Duarte et al.’s 2020 paper “Rebuilding marine life”. These wedges lay out the key areas where action is needed to restore the ocean (and by extension the planet) back to health.
It is crucial that each of these recovery wedges is addressed, and that they are addressed together in concert. Thus every grant we consider contributes to at least one of the impact areas laid out in this framework.
Across our grantees, we have projects addressing each of these areas with a variety of approaches. In this way we invest holistically in our vision of a healthy blue planet.
OUR COMMITMENT TO THE SDG
At the Ocean Born Foundation we support the UN Sustainable Development Goals. As employers we subscribe to SDG8, as producers we give particular importance to SDG12, and our reasons for existing are to support SDG13 and SDG14, the latter the most underfunded of the SDGs.
