The Plastic Ocean Project

"If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together."
                                                        -African Proverb

I saw this proverb on my in flight movie on the way to the British Virgin Islands. I read it and processed it after a minute, the movie was emotionally draining and processing this proverb took minute. Fortunately I had the luxury of rewinding. This trip is all about coming together as nonprofits as women and as mothers and daughters to change the world. Anyone who works in the nonprofit world can tell you sometimes coming together can be difficult. Some people view each other as competition, as in we are all competing for the same all mighty donation. To us we just want to make a difference and the only way we see that happening is if we come together.

We all come from different walks, but not so extraordinarily different. We all hail from the U.S. but we all have traveled pretty extensively so we understand some of the issues we face, but we have never lived it. How do you tell someone living in extreme poverty to think about the products they use in terms of the environment?

Jennifer Palmer, a lovely woman and marine biologist on the boat, has just come back from a four month trip traveling mostly through villages in Indonesia. In some of these places the only clean water is is through a water bottle. Or now the only way they could find laundry detergent was in single-use packets. Not only is this not cost effective, in an area that could use cost effectiveness more than anything, it is extremely wasteful and not ecomonically sound.  In a place where there is literally nowhere to put waste. Who is running the dog and pony show over there? To create change globally, we need understand the way others live.  As Tonia Lovejoy, founding member of Beautiful Nation  often asks, "How does where you live effect how you live?" This question is one of many this crew has been wrestling this past week.

These are the big questions with multifaceted answers, this trip is about making a roadmap to those answers by way of educating children around the world. Olivia Ries has been giving us been educating us through the OMG curriculum, helping us get the tools we need to go out into the world and educate others. Because we won't have all the answers, but we may spark the interest of the kids who will.