Voices of Impact: Reimagining Our Relationship with the Ocean with Lea D'Auriol of Oceanic Global, the NGO running World Oceans Day
Voices of Impact is Foundation House's ongoing interview series featuring the leaders and organizations coming through our Activist Residency program. At Foundation House, we believe transformative change happens when there is space to connect, strategize, and take action. Our Greenwich, CT retreat hosts nonprofits and coalitions working across environmental, social impact, and mental health initiatives, giving teams the time and space to think bigger, align deeper, and return to their work with renewed clarity. These conversations are a window into that process.
February 26, 2026
We're excited to welcome back Lea d'Auriol, Founder & Executive Director of Oceanic Global to Foundation House.
Lea's path into ocean conservation. It started with a single article about the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement and a decade of near-irreversible damage to the oceans. What began as a festival in Ibiza, pulled together by friends volunteering their time, grew into an NGO now running World Oceans Day at the UN, working with over 500 businesses across 58 countries, and funding grassroots ocean protection projects on nearly every continent. In this conversation, Lea traces that arc from one article to a global organization, unpacks the three pillars of Oceanic Global's work, and reflects on how two residencies at Foundation House helped a fully decentralized, ten-person team find its footing again.
Video highlights and full transcript below.
Lea d'Auriol always knew she'd end up working in ocean conservation, she just didn't expect to start so young. In this opening chapter, she traces the moment it clicked: reading about the Paris Climate Agreement, recognizing the ten-year window she'd been given, and going home that night to sketch out what would become Oceanic Global. It's a story about urgency, burnout, and a circle of friends who showed up to build something before there was even an organization to build.
What started as a single event in Ibiza turned into a 5,000-person festival tackling plastic pollution and the world's oldest living organism, the Posidonia seagrass meadows threatened by careless anchoring. Lea walks through the improbable scale of it: thirty artists, upcycled Parsons-designed costumes, Cirque du Soleil performers recreating coral bleaching, and forty speakers at the UN. It's the moment she and her team realized, almost by accident, that they'd built an organization, one they filed the paperwork for just ten days before the event, and the conversation at the UN afterward that would become World Oceans Day.
Lea explains how World Oceans Day grew from a 350-person, invite-only gathering into a global convening that drew 200,000 viewers last year, spanning over 190 countries and regions. She also makes the case for why oceans, climate, and biodiversity can no longer be treated as separate conversations, and why this year's theme, reimagining our relationship with the ocean, matters now more than ever.
Oceanic Global's work breaks down into three pillars: education and experiences, business transformation, and grassroots grants. Lea explains how each one works, from behavioral change work linking ocean health to mental wellness, to the Proof Standard, which has helped over 500 hospitality and tourism businesses across 58 countries cut single-use plastics.
Small grants, Lea explains, can catalyze outsized change. She shares two stories that prove it: surfers in Peru winning legal marine protection for their breaks, and a Maori community in New Zealand building regenerative ocean gardens rooted in indigenous stewardship. She also gets candid about what measurable success looks like on the ground, and why she believes oceans should never be treated as a political conversation.
Oceanic Global has been fully decentralized since COVID, which makes their time at Foundation House, one of the only times their ten-person, all-women team gathers in person, especially valuable. Lea reflects on what that time unlocks that Zoom can't, then looks ahead to what's exciting her most in the ocean space: the High Seas Treaty, twenty years in the making, now protecting 65% of the planet's surface, and the upcoming COP One convening that will determine what comes next.
FULL TRANSCRIPT
Chapter 1: From One Article to a Global Movement
Richard Zimmerman: Lea, how are you?
Lea d'Auriol: Good!
Richard Zimmerman: Tell me about yourself, what drew you to this space, and what led you to creating Oceanic Global?
Lea d'Auriol: I always knew I was going to go into the ocean space, I just didn't realize I was going to be so young when I did. The 2015 Paris Climate Agreement was being negotiated, and I read an article that said we had ten years before our human impact on the oceans became irreversible. I grew up sailing, and growing up in a place like Hong Kong, I could see the human impact on the environment from a really young age, so I understood what that meant. I couldn't believe not everyone was talking about it, let alone activating around it. I went home that night and actually drew out the foundation. It just came through: a sense of urgency at the right time, with a certain amount of knowledge, and honestly a certain level of helplessness too, realizing I couldn't afford to wait another twenty or thirty years to get into conservation. That was really the starting point.
What was amazing is that when I came home, I was completely burnt out, I had two weeks off a year, I was living in New York, and I came back and told my closest friends, "I have this idea, I'm going to do a huge festival around ocean conservation." And they said, "I'll do your PR for free, we'll handle communications, we'll work on the logos." James [Sternlicht, Oceanic Board Member] was part of that from the very beginning too. It was beautiful to see the community that came together to build it with us. That was the seed.
Richard Zimmerman: That's amazing. So it wasn't that you had the idea for an organization first, it was "I want to do something," and the festival was the first move.
Lea d'Auriol: Yes. It took a year and a half to put the festival together, and we were very intentional about it.
Chapter 2: The Festival That Became an NGO
Richard Zimmerman: How was that?
Lea d'Auriol: It was a lot of work, and it ended up being more than just a festival. It was in Ibiza specifically, a place I have a long history with. Ibiza had two issues at the time: plastic pollution from mass tourism, and the Posidonia, a seagrass that's actually the oldest living organism on the planet. Between Ibiza and Formentera we had one of the largest seabed meadows in the world, but boats dropping anchor on it were tearing it apart. So we said, we need to educate people around plastics and around the Posidonia, which also led us into overfishing.
The festival ended up reaching 5,000 people. We worked with schools throughout the year, and with over 30 artists creating different types of installations. We worked with Parsons School of Design in New York to create upcycled costumes. We brought in performers from Cirque du Soleil to depict what coral bleaching looks like in dead zones, using creative mediums to bring this to the masses in a completely different way. We had 40 speakers, including people from the UN. That's when we realized: we'd created an organization.
Richard Zimmerman: What an amazing story, from being inspired and motivated by, what, one meeting?
Lea d'Auriol: One article.
Richard Zimmerman: Wow. It was meant to be. Leaders emerge, and you pulled it off.
Lea d'Auriol: We pulled it off with a lot of hard work, and all of our program areas grew from there.
Richard Zimmerman: Were you already thinking of yourselves as an organization by the end of it, or were you still just focused on getting the event done?
Lea d'Auriol: We filed our 501(c)(3) status under our name just ten days before the event. So the name Oceanic Global had already been established from the beginning, we just didn't realize it was going to become a full NGO. I was living in New York at the time, and I went to the UN and said I'd love to bring what I did in Ibiza to New York. The contact there said, instead of doing that, I'd love for you to run World Oceans Day. That was our introduction to working with the UN, and that's now been eight years. All of our partnerships and programs across every vertical have grown organically that way, the right people showing up at the right time to answer a need.
Chapter 3: Building World Oceans Day
Richard Zimmerman: Wow, the universe. So, World Oceans Day, talk about that.
Lea d'Auriol: World Oceans Day takes place on June 8th every year. It's a global convening hosted at the General Assembly, and now over 190 regions and countries mobilize around it. There's a key theme each year, and this year it's reimagining, reimagining our relationship with the ocean. That spans every sector: what does governance in the ocean look like, what does ocean finance look like, what does stewardship look like. It's about flipping the narrative, because the reality is our current systems are failing us and reaching tipping points across every sector, environmentally, and we're seeing that in the ocean space too. We like to come from a place of hope. There's still so much beauty in the ocean worth protecting, and the question is how we protect it while redesigning the systems holding it together.
Richard Zimmerman: Got it. And you said eight years now, running?
Lea d'Auriol: Ten years, officially.
Richard Zimmerman: Are you drawing in more interest, more groups, more support? What's the trend?
Lea d'Auriol: It's grown. When we started at the UN for World Oceans Day, it was 350 people, invite only. Over the last three years we've had 200,000 people tune in, just to see how oceans are now on a global agenda.
Richard Zimmerman: That's amazing. You have organizations, cities, and country entities involved, but you must also...
Lea d'Auriol: We facilitate the event itself, and there's a large campaign around it, we create discussion guides for local NGOs around the world to mobilize with. And I'd say the whole ocean landscape has changed. People are starting to realize oceans and nature aren't as separate as the dialogue made them seem ten years ago, climate and oceans are coming together. A lot of our work is showing that the ocean regulates the climate, there's no separation there. Same with biodiversity, 80% of biodiversity on this planet is in the ocean. A lot of what we do is stitching these narratives together and showing that these silos are an illusion. An ocean lens is needed for every sector.
Richard Zimmerman: Right, it's funny, people think of nature as separate from oceans already, but I understand how everyone compartmentalizes. So, World Oceans Day, and then a lot of other things from Oceanic Global.
Chapter 4: The Three Pillars
Lea d'Auriol: Our work at Oceanic sits across three pillars. The first is education and experiences, how we reconnect people to the ocean. It's behavioral change, it's shifting consciousness, it's the belief that people protect what they love once they experience and understand it. We've run all kinds of campaigns there, some thematic, around plastic pollution or overfishing, others more holistic, like our work linking ocean health and mental wellness, working with indigenous wisdom keepers and scientists to bridge the two. That's the foundation everything else sits on.
Richard Zimmerman: And the recipients of that, individuals, groups, corporations, all of the above?
Lea d'Auriol: All of it. We love bringing people from different disciplines together, that's our sweet spot. We bring the artistic community together with the corporate space and institutions, and that's where people start thinking more creatively about how everything intersects, getting out of their silos.
The second pillar is our work with businesses. We realized there was a huge opportunity to help businesses understand their impact on the oceans and move from extractive practices toward stewardship. We have a program called the Proof Standard, where we work with businesses, mostly hospitality and tourism, to eliminate single-use plastics across their supply chains and take on additional "blue actions." That's grown beautifully: we've worked with over 500 businesses in 58 countries, and it's also supported local policy shifts.
The third pillar is our grants and advocacy work, providing small amounts of funding that go a long way on the ground, marine protected areas, mangrove planting, work rooted in community stewardship.
Chapter 5: Grants in Action, Peru & New Zealand
Richard Zimmerman: And those grants go to local organizations, governments, 501(c)(3)s?
Lea d'Auriol: We don't fund governments, we fund local organizations and NGOs, most of them international. We work across South America, Africa, Europe, Southeast Asia. It's amazing to see how a small amount of funding to underserved projects can catalyze huge impact.
Richard Zimmerman: And that impact comes because they're able to bring in more capital behind it? Do you actually see change happen quickly, or does it take a while?
Lea d'Auriol: Yes, and it happens quickly. Right now we're working on a project in Peru with surfers to create legal marine protection for surf breaks, meaning no one can fish within those zones. That's creating real biodiversity and protection areas. There's another grant with a Maori community in New Zealand building ocean vertical gardens, which is really beautiful.
Richard Zimmerman: Ocean vertical gardens, can you explain that?
Lea d'Auriol: It's like agriculture, but in the ocean, using indigenous stewardship practices. They have clams and mollusks, they use different sounds to attract species like red snapper back, they're growing kelp, it's a whole ecosystem they're stewarding. They're not allowed to sell what they grow, but they can gift it to local communities. What's beautiful about this project is that the Maori people already had the legal right to steward up to a kilometer of ocean space each, they just had no idea how to unlock that from a governance standpoint. So this NGO exists to do exactly that. These are the kinds of projects most people never hear about, but that can genuinely shift how a whole community interacts with the ocean.
Richard Zimmerman: How do you find out about projects like these?
Lea d'Auriol: Some come to us, but most of the time we have an incredible network on the ground, people spending time in these global communities, explorers specifically, who send us word of the most impactful projects no one knows about.
Richard Zimmerman: And are you seeing success among the people and towns themselves, not just on the environmental side? Can you track that?
Lea d'Auriol: It's a complicated question, because the landscape shifts so quickly depending on the region. For us, oceans should never be a political conversation, it needs to be accessible to everyone, and everyone should be a steward. That's much harder to navigate in certain political climates. But in general, we're seeing an increase in awareness, and more than that, people genuinely wanting to reconnect with nature and the ocean. There's a deep longing there, and we see it in our ocean connection and storytelling work especially. There can be such a beautiful resonance, and that's why that first pillar matters so much. So yes, I think people are changing, and the beauty of the ocean is that it's also deeply healing.
Chapter 6: The Residency, and What Gives Her Hope
Richard Zimmerman: I want to come back to Foundation House, you've been here for two residencies now. What did you work on, was it catalytic?
Lea d'Auriol: These residencies have been amazing, thank you. After COVID we decided to stay completely decentralized, so our team is split between the US and Europe. This is really the one time of year we can come together in person, and what we've realized is that in-person magic is what sustains the work. You can only do so much over Zoom. Having a space to really dive into what's working, what we're dreaming up, but also what isn't working, how we're communicating, what's going on in our lives outside of work that's affecting how we show up, you need real time to drop into that. For us, that's what Foundation House has been: a space that lets us work on strategy and get hyper creative on our program areas, but also take an honest look at what isn't working day to day in how we communicate, and do a bit of nonviolent communication work in person around that.
Richard Zimmerman: How big is your core team?
Lea d'Auriol: Ten. Small team.
Lea d'Auriol: And all women!
Richard Zimmerman: There you go, that's great. Please come back. So, looking forward, for your organization or the ocean space in general, what makes you most excited?
Lea d'Auriol: The momentum happening in the ocean space right now. Last September, the High Seas Treaty came into effect, the first legal treaty to protect 65% of the surface of the planet. That's huge.
Richard Zimmerman: What did that treaty come out of, something like the Paris Accord?
Lea d'Auriol: Exactly. Countries had to ratify it, and it took nearly 20 years to get there. In January, there's the first convening around it, called COP One, happening in New York. They're still working out what a global high seas treaty even looks like from a governance standpoint. But the fact that it's on the table at all carries a huge amount of hope. It can unlock things like migration corridors in the high seas, protecting key zones where species migrate, marine protected areas, and more. We're also seeing big shifts around subsidies, there was a major win at the end of last year around industrial fishing. So when everything else feels like it's moving backward on the environmental agenda, the ocean space is still finding ways to come together on real wins.
That said, there are also real threats: political and corporate agendas around deep sea mining, still an extractive view of these shared resources. It's a duality, constant hope alongside a problem that keeps growing in magnitude. When you work with these communities, or get the chance to interact with wildlife eye to eye, you naturally feel hopeful. But the scale of the problem is also constantly increasing.
Richard Zimmerman: Well, given all that, it feels like it was meant to be, having you as a leader in this space. We're very fortunate, for you and for the organization. Thank you so much, this was amazing, truly inspiring.
Lea d'Auriol: Thanks.
Richard Zimmerman: Go oceans, go Oceanic Global. Okay.
Lea d'Auriol: Thanks, Richard.
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