How We Work
Mission & Vision
Our Vision
Oceans 5 bridges global and community-informed ocean conservation strategies, driving impact-oriented collaboration, grantmaking, policy advocacy, and leadership to support these efforts throughout the world’s ocean and coasts.
Our Mission
Oceans 5 envisions a restored and resilient ocean and thriving marine life that support healthy coastal communities for generations to come.
How We Deliver Impact
Our approach begins with leveraging expertise and credibility to elevate ocean conservation as a shared priority—one that donors both small and large can understand and rally around. By making the case for ocean conservation clearly and compellingly, we help expand the community of funders and advocates committed to protecting ocean health.
We invest in building diverse coalitions grounded in collaboration, trust, and mutual respect. These partnerships strengthen equity, inclusivity, and collective capacity among advocates and funders, ensuring that ocean conservation efforts reflect a wide range of perspectives and lived experience. Together with our partners, we design, fund, and advance conservation strategies that are science backed, community informed, and innovative. This approach helps ensure that ocean conservation initiatives are well resourced, strategically aligned, and positioned to deliver lasting, measurable impact.
We also work to build political will and advocate for policies that enable durable success. Through work at the local, national, and global levels, we help scale proven conservation approaches and embed best practices into policy frameworks. Through these interconnected efforts, we seek to realize a restored and resilient ocean—one capable of sustaining thriving marine life and coastal livelihoods for generations to come.
History & Timeline
Oceans 5 began in 2011 as a bold experiment: four founding philanthropies hired a single executive director to test whether funders could truly work together to protect the ocean at scale.
In its early years, the collaborative operated like a start-up—small, focused, and learning by doing—while building trust among partners and showing that shared strategy and pooled resources could deliver real results. As successes mounted, interest grew and new funders joined, steadily expanding both the collective funding base and the scope of work while the focus on policy remained clear.
Over time, Oceans 5 evolved from a scrappy pilot into a durable institution, growing to 25 funders and a team of 22 staff by the mid-2020s, with a far broader global reach and a diverse network of grantees across dozens of countries. What started as a simple idea has matured into a confident, fully realized collaborative—one that combines collective philanthropy, long-term partnerships, and a sustained commitment to safeguarding the ocean for future generations.
Our Approach
Our approach at Oceans 5 is intentionally behind the scenes. We focus on making progress happen rather than seeking visibility, serving as a convener and catalyst that helps align people, resources, and strategies toward shared goals. We work closely with partners to design and support campaigns that are rigorous, strategic, and grounded in a clear understanding of what is at stake for marine ecosystems and coastal communities. Through direct grants, matching support, in-kind services, and strategic guidance, we help ensure that conservation efforts—especially those aimed at stopping overfishing and establishing effective marine reserves—are well resourced, coordinated, and positioned for durable impact.
Policy and regulation are central to our work. We prioritize efforts that lead to enforceable, lasting change in laws, regulations, and governance systems from the local to global level. Rather than focusing on broad public awareness campaigns, we concentrate on strengthening the political and regulatory conditions needed for conservation strategies to succeed over time. This includes supporting politically informed, science-driven initiatives that can withstand shifting priorities and deliver real protections for ocean ecosystems. We are particularly drawn to collaborative efforts that bring multiple organizations together around shared policy objectives over defined periods of time.
At the core of Oceans 5’s approach is a deep commitment to working with local and Indigenous partners. We prioritize supporting organizations that are rooted in their communities, bring lived experience and local knowledge, and are already actively engaged in conservation and governance processes. These partners are often best positioned to navigate local political landscapes, build trusted relationships, and advocate effectively for change. We view our role as supporting and amplifying their leadership—respecting community priorities, fostering equitable partnerships, and ensuring that conservation outcomes deliver tangible, lasting benefits for both marine life and the people who depend on the ocean.
Project Selection
Oceans 5 supports results-oriented conservation projects throughout the world. We prioritize funding projects with the following characteristics:
- Significance for impact
- Building policy and political leadership
- Time-bound
- Collaborative
- Project feasibility
- Strategic geographies and issues
For more detail, see our project selection criteria. Please note that Oceans 5 does not fund unsolicited proposals.
Ocean Climate Diplomacy Initiative
Directed Fund
The Ocean Climate Diplomacy Initiative is a directed fund housed at Oceans 5. The Initiative is one of seven pillars of the Ocean Resilience and Climate Alliance (ORCA) and serves as a coordinating force across ORCA’s global policy priorities. By providing high-level political engagement, crafting shared messaging, and elevating leadership on ocean climate policy, the Initiative supports aligned coordination and synergies across ORCA’s pillars
Trusted Experts
As re-grantor for the Initiative, Oceans 5 works with trusted experts, global campaigns, and leading grantees to help deliver concrete policy outcomes, including progress toward 30×30 marine protection targets, stronger maritime emissions standards, nature-positive marine renewable energy, ocean carbon removal research, constraints on offshore oil and gas development, and a moratorium on deep seabed mining.
