My ocean story

We invited Anne Park, CEO of Sustainable Ocean Alliance (SOA) and an SOS partner to share her ocean story. She shows why aligning people, knowledge, and capital is the fastest path to a thriving ocean.

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Compelled to act

My ocean story began many moons ago, as a Peace Corps volunteer on the island of Bohol in the Philippines. I was teaching at a local high school, where most of my students’ parents were multigenerational fisherfolk. It was there that I saw, with my own eyes, how deeply people’s livelihoods are tied to the health of the environment, and how fragile that balance can be. I also saw the definition of the poverty trap: families who worked tirelessly yet could not break free of hardship. It lit a fire in me. I wanted my students to have the same opportunities I was given growing up in Chicago, and I felt compelled to act.

Sustainable access to opportunity

I began working with a coastal resource management group to help fisherfolk diversify their incomes by entering the growing ecotourism sector. That experience became my first step on a much longer journey: one centered on the question of how to create fair, sustainable access to opportunity.

Impact investing

That path led me to the United Nations and the World Bank, where I worked with informal waste pickers along the plastics and recycling value chain. It led me to the State Department as a Presidential Management Fellow, where I helped launch the Global Entrepreneurship Program to build entrepreneurial ecosystems in emerging markets. There, I saw the transformative potential of impact investing, how the very power of capital could be harnessed and redirected for good.

Protecting and restoring the ocean

For over 15 years, I continued to deepen this work at double-bottom-line private equity and mission-driven finance firms. But when I truly understood the role of the ocean in mitigating climate change, and the scientific tipping points we were approaching, something shifted. I realized I could not simply admire the urgency from the sidelines. With two young children of my own, I felt a profound moral obligation to dedicate my life to protecting and restoring the ocean, for them, and for future generations.

Powerful levers for systemic change

This is why I believe so deeply in the work of SOA. Our programs focus on two of the most powerful levers for systemic change:

• Investing in early-stage, game-changing solutions and the visionary leaders behind them.
  
  
• Catalyzing the global youth voice, which has already proven to be a force that can move policy, shift regulations, and raise the aspirational watermark for what is possible.
  
  

Global community of youth

Today, SOA not only holds the world’s largest portfolio of early-stage ocean innovators, but we also nurture a global community of more than 7,000 youth across 115 countries, each one actively pushing for solutions at the local, regional, and global levels. Together, they remind me every day that hope is alive.

Yes, there is much to fear in our world. But I choose hope. I choose innovation. And I choose the power of youth to carry us forward.

That is why SOA is joining forces with SOS: to spread not just solutions, but also hope. Hope rooted in science, in leadership, in community. Because every other breath we take comes from the ocean, and if we fail to act now, we jeopardize not only its future, but our own.

Let us breathe that in, sit with it, and let it move us to action.

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