Today, I decided to pull the curtain back and let you in on the
future plans of this company I call Speak Up For Blue (SUFB). I
started SUFB without any real plans. In fact, I didn't even know
how long I would be spreading Ocean News with an Ocean Conservation
Message.
The website turned into a company and there is so much I want to
do with SUFB. We will be offering so much content on different
platforms in the near future that everyone will be able to consume
Ocean Conservation information via podcasts, You Tube, digital
magazine and of course, our website.
One of the other items that we will be offering that is really
exciting in the fact that we are opening the SUFB Institute for
Marine Science and Conservation.
Take a listen to the episode for more details!
Speak Up For Blue TV:
http://bit.ly/sufbtele
Support the Podcast:
http://www.speakupforblue.com/patreon
Shop for the Ocean:
http://www.speakupforblue.com/shop
10 Ocean Tips to Conserve the Ocean:
http://www.speakupforblue.com/wordpress/sufb_optinpdf
Show Notes:
http://www.speakupforblue.com/session153
Welcome to the Speak Up For Blue podcast session 153. What's up everybody? Happy Monday as you're listening to this. I just want to let you know it's not to rub it in, but I am in Cuba right now and I'm hopefully on a scuba dive underneath the wonderful Cuban waters exploring all the wildlife and new things that I have never seen because this is my first time in Cuba. So this episode, we're actually going to talk about the future Speak Up For Blue and where I want to take this company. So I hope you enjoy this. I hope you enjoy the future and I'd love to hear your feedback. So stay tuned for this episode of the Speak Up For Blue podcast. Welcome to the Speak Up For Blue podcast, helping you get involved in ocean conservation. And now, here's your host, he still puts his hands in the air because he doesn't care. Andrew Lewin. Hey everybody, welcome back to another exciting episode of the Speak Up For Blue podcast, your voice for the ocean. I am your host, Andrew Lewin, founder, Speak Up For Blue dot com, marine ecologist and self-proclaimed ocean printer. And as you are listening to this, I am in Cuba with my family. We're enjoying a week off of work, and we're having a great time, we're just playing on the beach. We're enjoying the blue water as Wallace J. Nichols would say, we're enjoying our blue mine, getting our blue mine on, and loving this, this, this vacation that we're having in warm weather, which we haven't really been having back in Canada. So we're enjoying that warm weather and hopefully when we get back, it'll be a lot warmer than it was before we left. So yeah, so that's kind of where we are right now. But I wanted to take this time to talk about the future of my company, Speak Up For Blue. And before I wanted to get into that, I mean, Speak Up For Blue is really when I started, it was just a website, it was just a website to create awareness of what was happening in the ocean because I didn't think a lot of my friends, a lot of my family really didn't know what was happening, the news and stuff like that. They would look out for articles for me in the paper and whatnot, but didn't really understand what was really going on, the issues that were happening, and how they can actually better the issues. And since 2011, when I launched the website, to now, five years later, we've actually gotten a lot further than I actually anticipated. So I'm really happy about where Speak Up For Blue is right now, yet I'm pivoting it a little bit because there's been an evolution of Speak Up For Blue from just a website to now making a full company that I'm going to support, not only make it support my family, but I'm going to change the way we do conservation. I'm going to change the way that people think about conservation and hopefully instill it in as part of their regular routine. That's the way I want people to think. I want people to think in a way that it's more sustainable, that when we purchase something, we ask the first question we ask is, is this environmentally conscious? Is this ethical? Do I really need this? What is the imprint that it's going to have on my entire environmental imprint? That's what I want people to think about and it's not, I don't want people to think about it as a restriction, but this whole idea is to discover things that will help you. So it's not restrictions, but discover access to information and to products that actually better the world. You know, whether it be from San Cloud, which sells towels, that every time you buy a purchase a towel, they spend 10%, they take 10% of that and put it towards saving the fishies, as they call it. So it goes to a marine organization and during their entire social media campaign that they've been running on Snapchat and other platforms, they actually put together this wonderful package that you explore your blue mind. You see beaches that are pristine, you see water that is pristine and you get to thrive yourself in that. And you get to want to go to the beach, it gets you going to the beach, it gets you enjoying these towels and it gets you to save the fishies. And I love that kind of stuff. To products like Simply Straws, which are essentially glass straws that are reusable and that they even have a little pipe cleaner that helps you clean them. And I've purchased those before and these companies are not sponsored to the show, they may eventually become sponsored to the show, but they're not sponsored to the show, they're just, they're just companies that I want you guys to know about because they're providing an alternative to the norm and they're bettering our environment for it. And it's just things like that and information that you can have that will make you think in more sustainable ways, in more environmentally conscious ways. And that's where I kind of want to speak up for blue to go. So the way I'm designed, and of course I'm a scientist and I think our knowledge is based on what science discovers in the ocean, the issues that are happening, the assessment of those issues, whether they're getting better or worse or staying the same, and the ability to communicate that to the public. So that is a fundamental, a basic fundamental point of speak up for blue is to get, not only help acquire the information, but get that information out there. So that is really where speak up for blue is going right now. Right now we're more of a media sort of junket or media site where we just provide information and tips and things like that. And we're hitting platforms, of course, as you're listening to this podcast, we've hit the podcast platform pretty hard, Facebook, which has been pretty good, where we just relaunched our YouTube channel, which you can check out on links below in this in this podcast on the show notes, speak up for blue dot com session forward slash session 153, or just look on your podcast app for those notes in the notes there. And we're going to, this is a big announcement for speak up for blue. There's a lot of big announcements in this one, but we're, we are going to provide a prototype of our digital magazine on Oceans Day. That's what we're shooting for. We're hoping to get it by Oceans Day, June 8th. You are going to see a digital magazine that is essentially helping getting the word out for, for the ocean, for ocean conservation and giving you guys visual images. It's going to be digital. There's going to be videos involved. There's going to be imagery involved. We're trying to make as professional as possible. And we've got a really got a small team, which I'm going to talk about in a, in a bit. But yeah. So that's, you know, big announcement. We got this digital magazine coming out. We're hoping to really address a lot of things that are happening in the oceans. A lot of things that you can do for the ocean. So, you know, the awareness, the education, the action, we're also going to introduce you to a lot of people who are also helping out the ocean during these things we're going to address, you know, things like Shark Week, Oceans Day, 48 days of blue that the National Aquarium is doing. All these different types of things that are going along, we want to kind of encapsulate and just put it in this, in this magazine, this is going to be a subscription based magazine. But it's going to be awesome. And some of the money that's going to go there is going to go towards, is going to go towards ocean conservation work. So you, as you buy it and you read it, not only you're making yourself aware, but you're doubling that by the money that you spend on the magazine will go towards ocean conservation projects, which we'll detail in a bit. So that's awesome. Right? That's, that's, I'm really excited about that. So on one hand, we've got Speak Up For Blue, the media site to give you, hit all these different platforms, really start the conversation online about ocean conservation, about ocean issues, what we can do about them, how to educate yourself, and how to implement action that we talk about, right, and that other people talk about. So we're not just going to do it from a Speak Up For Blue point from our small team, we're going to do it from the larger umbrella of organizations that are out there and people that are out there that are actually going out and doing all this work and hitting the public, educating the public and really just focusing on that and helping them amplify their work. That's what we're here to do. We're here to work together. We're here to collaborate, which is a huge word that gets really underused in an ocean conservation, but we're here to calibrate and amplify those messages that are going out for you guys through our media portion of the site. The other part of the site is a new part of the site, and I'm tentatively calling it the Speak Up For Blue Institute of Science and Conservation. All right, big words, huge, it's long, it's probably terrible naming, but we'll come up with something. That is essentially going to be our science and conservation data acquisition site. How we're going to do that is we've teamed up and we're teaming up with organizations that are small organizations that don't necessarily have the money to hire someone to help them complete their work, and they also don't have necessarily the time because they're running a small organization, a small charitable organization, to manage the people who they hire to bring on. They have trouble managing all the volunteers and whatnot. Let's speak up for Blue what we've decided to do is we've decided to team up with these organizations to partner with these organizations, and we've decided to say, "Hey, let's help you complete your work." For me and our team, Nathan and Kate, we are going to act as project managers, but we're going to leverage the work that these organizations need to do with people who are newly graduated or switching over from different careers in the ocean conservation industry, and they want to get experience in doing ocean conservation work, like real working experience. What we're doing is we're taking on members. This is a paid membership. We're taking on members on an annual basis, and they will help us do the work. They will help us write grants in the organizations for the organizations. They will help do data analysis. They will help write reports. They will help do social media. They will help edit videos. They will help write blog posts and magazine articles, not only speak up for Blue, but for these organizations to get the message out, because there's one part in an organization when they collect information and field data and whatnot that they collect information. They work it up. They do the data analysis, but then they do the reports for scientific literature, whether it be journal articles or gray papers for the scientific community and the conservation community. But there's also for the public, they have to let people know all the people who donate to them and all the people who provide information or money to them and funds and in-kind support, but they need to talk to those public figures and public in general and say, "This is what we're doing for the ocean. This is what we've discovered, and this is what we want you to know about." And it engages and build their communities to engage them more and one, get people to donate and people to help and volunteer so that they can continue the amazing work that they're doing. And that's essentially what the Speak up for Blue Institute is going to do for science and conservation. That's what we're going to do. We are going to take on these members, these members that will work with us are going to get wonderful experience in ocean conservation to help their careers and build experiences in their careers so they can start their career in ocean conservation, whether they're newly graduates or they've just transferred over from a different career and they want just some background, they want some experience so that they can go to different organizations or different government departments or wherever they want to start their career and have a little bit of experience to go into that. We're providing them with this kind of experience. What I love about this institute to start off is it's going to be virtual-based. So all the members who pay to do this work can work from home. They don't have to travel to here in Burlington, Ontario. They don't have to travel in the field to the field projects. They will be doing all this work virtually. So what's the good part about that for the students that are doing it, for these young graduates and people who may be transitioning careers, they don't have the funds to go and travel to different parts of the world to help these organizations. They just don't have the funds to do it. They don't have the means to do it because it's expensive. You look at flights across the states or flights across Canada, flights across the world range from anywhere between $500 and $4,000. And that's just to get there. And then you've got to survive when you're down there. So it becomes very expensive and what happens is it limits these organizations and the work that they can do. But they have a lot of report writing, a lot of social media stuff, they have a lot of stuff like website editing and whatnot that doesn't get done because they don't have the people to do it. So now we're going to help facilitate that by providing them with the people and the time to actually dedicate to building that up, building that infrastructure up, building those reports up, building that public engagement up. And that's what we're going to do. We're going to do that for these organizations for free. We're partnering with these organizations for free. And the members that are paying are going to get, that's essentially for our time, from Speak Up for Blue to their paying for our time, but we're also going to mentor them through this whole process, the whole, for the whole year that they're with us, we're going to mentor them on how to build their career. We're going to give them the experience that they want and need for the career that they want and they need. And we're going to help them get introduced to all the people that we know in the industry that will benefit their career. So I'm very excited about the Speak Up for Blue Institute of Science and Conservation because this is stuff that we wanted to do. All the information that we get from these organizations is going to be put into the media side and it's going to go into our magazines, our YouTube videos, and our podcasts, so that you'll get those information as well. So this is going to be great. I'm looking forward to it. This is the direction that we're going to go into, and I'm going to tell you why we're going to go into it, and why we're heading this direction. It is because it needs to be done. This hasn't been done before from a company that I've seen anyway. There's been media companies that have done this, and we're doing this. We're not just doing this for ourselves. We enjoy the ocean. We're doing ocean conservation. It's going to be fantastic. It's going to be fun. It's going to be hard work. We're going to love it. But we're doing this for ocean conservation in general. And we're doing this. It's not going to be huge. It's not going to be like a National Geographic right off the back because we're just not working with that type of money, but it's going to be small grass roots. That's why we're teaming up with organizations that are small and grass roots. We work with a lot of volunteer organizations, they have a lot of volunteers do field work and whatnot. We're going to work with some citizen scientists. We're going to even come up with some programs for citizen scientists. It's going to be amazing. It's going to be a lot of grass roots kind of stuff. And maybe it'll grow one day. I don't know. I'd love for it to grow one day, and we have a bigger staff so that we can accommodate more people. But at this point, it's going to be nice and grass roots, small and keep it small and grow it nice and slowly so that more and more people can get help and more organizations can get help and we can team up and collaborate with more organizations. So that's essentially where we're going to go. It's a lot of work. We have a small team. I want to introduce you to your team. Of course, it's headed by me, Andrew Lewin, Marine Ecologist, founder, SpeakUpForBlue.com. Of course, an entrepreneur, an ocean conservationist, an ocean printer, I like to call it. But it's also, I have two people who help me out a lot. Nathan Johnson, who you constantly hear on Ocean Talk Friday, is amazing. That man is awesome. He also has a full-time job down in Galveston, Texas, and I'm up in here in Canada and we communicate via email virtually most of the time. We actually never met in person. We're going to meet in person for the first time in August at the International Marine Conservation Congress in St. John's Newfoundland. You're going to see a lot of stuff coming out of there. This guy has helped us write our blog posts when we started doing Five Days a Week. He's helped with the research on a lot of the podcast. He's been on a lot of podcasts with us. He's writing. He's actually managing the magazine, which is going to be fantastic. He's writing a lot of the articles at the beginning. Once we get more people who can contribute to those articles, we'll be amazing. He's really helping us out. I'll tell you, right now, neither of us are getting paid for this kind of stuff. It's just amazing the amount of work that he puts into it because he loves it. It's the same way as me. We have the same passion for the ocean and ocean conservation. We like to be in ocean conservation. We like to talk about it. We like to do stuff for it. I think this is just a testament to both of us of what we like to do and where we'd like to take this company. He's helping out a great deal. Then we have our third and last team member, which is Kate Marholz, who is from Priority VA, Virtual Assistant. She's my virtual assistant. She's helped out with a lot of stuff that goes behind the scenes. It's awesome. She is just amazing in terms of creating a lot of our graphics for social media, helping out with doing the blood structure in the blog post and copying all that information, just giving a lot of time for me to really develop this company and where we want to go. She's been with us for almost six months. I've been with Priority VA, which is the company she works for, for a lot longer, for about a year and a half. She's just been amazing. She's been recent addition to our team and has been awesome and will continue to be on our team for a long time. She's just absolutely amazing. We have Kate. We have Nathan and we have myself. It's a very small team, however, we're so dedicated and we work our butts off to make sure that everything you guys want, everything that you guys need is in place. With the podcast, with the YouTube channel and this upcoming magazine that we're going to be launching, and then, of course, the Speak Up for Blue Institute, it's just going to be amazing. We're going to build this community and we're going to have you guys as a part of it and it's going to be fun. We're going to do this together. That's really what ocean conservation is, is small teams put together collaborating on an overall goal of protecting the ocean. Speak Up for Blue really focuses on the public, on you guys. The people who not necessarily have to be scientists just have an interest in the ocean and want to protect it. You understand or you will come to understand the issues that are happening around the ocean and through Speak Up for Blue through all of our media platforms. Once you understand those issues and you can understand what you can do to help solve those issues, that's what we're here to do. We're here to guide you through that process. It's going to be great. I want you guys to be a part of the Speak Up for Blue community. In the show notes for this podcast, I'm going to put in a link to a Facebook group that you could become part of. It's free to join. What I really want to do for this Facebook group is just build that community and build that following of people who are interested in the ocean. I'm going to put out some invitations to the people that I have on Facebook, the connections and whatnot. I'll be announcing it on the Facebook page, on the Twitter page, on Twitter accounts on Snapchat and all that kind of stuff. Basically we share articles, we'll talk about different issues, I'll do a couple of live casts from Facebook because now you can do Facebook Live. I think it'll just be a great time to just chat and comment. I like the Facebook groups because you can really interact well with the people and it'll be myself, Nathan and Kate in there and we'll be doing what we can to help you guys through this process. You guys will help us as well because I don't know everything. I'm the first one to admit it. I'm learning as I go through this stuff. This Monday we talked about a new discovery of coral reefs at the both of the Amazon River. That was an amazing discovery and it's already under threat. I didn't know about this kind of stuff. I didn't know that there were 80 blocks of oil and gas or oil exploration blocks sold to oil companies. I had no idea at the base of the Amazon which even if you take out the reefs is just ridiculous if you think about it because Amazon River is a powerful river and you don't want to mess anything up with that. Whatever might happen to that. We're always learning new things and I think we learn from each other. We can talk about different articles. We can raise awareness and help each other out and I think the Facebook group will really do that. It's really just dedicated towards the public. You don't have to be a scientist. You don't have to necessarily dedicate your career to ocean conservation. You just have an interest in the ocean and you want to know more of how you can better protect it and that's what we're going to do. We're going to talk about just the lifestyle that you can lead that will help the different products that are available that will help you get to there and that's what we're going to do. Follow us on Facebook. Get to the group. I'll put the link in the show notes on this page and you will get access to that. You can join and then just introduce yourself when you get in there and say what your goals are for that group. I want to see what your goals are. I want to see why you join the group. If you listen to this podcast and then you go join the group, let me know. Let me know where you listen to this room because I want to see where everybody's coming from. I think it'll be great, but that's really where the future of speaker for Blue is going. It's going towards really engaging with the public, putting out articles and information. I like to call just content on different platforms and reaching out to different people, expanding our reach as much as possible, informing people what there is to be done doing in an entertaining way and a fun way that is not talking down like a lot of people have done in the past. It's more of, this is what we need to do. This is how we need to live and I'm going to offer you ways that you can live that way. You don't have to listen to me. I'm not expecting you to just come up and be like, "Oh, Andrew said this, so we have to do this." Or so-and-so said this through his guests and whatnot. It's really just this is what's there. This is what's available right now. It may not be perfect. It may not be the right solution right now, but it's on our way to getting to that solution. So that's what we're going to do. That's what we're here to do. We're here to get better and better and better. And I want that through Speak Up for Blue. I want that through the Future Speak Up for Blue. The Speak Up for Blue Institute of Science and Conservation is going to be amazing. I'm expecting some amazing members to join. There will be links to join to that group. It is a paid group and some of you might think it's a little expensive, but the amount of information, the amount of experience you're going to get from that, if you want a career and ocean conservation, the network that you're going to build through there, the mentorship that you're going to have is going to be well worth probably beyond the price of what you're paying. So I am dedicating my time towards that. Nathan's going to dedicate some time towards that. He's also going to dedicate a lot of time towards the media part. And then Kate's just our overall. She kind of keeps us together and makes sure that everything behind the scenes kind of works more and more and more. And I think it's going to be great. So thank you very much for listening to the podcast. This is session 153. I want to thank every time you guys listen to us because we put a lot of work into this and you guys listen to it and you give us feedback on how we're doing and the articles that you like, some of the articles that you don't like sharing those articles. I really, I really appreciate it with the whole team appreciates it. And we want to thank you guys for continuing listening to us and supporting us. So we really appreciate that. So that's our episode for today. I hope you enjoy it. I'm going to be back live, of course, not live, but we'll be back Monday. I'll be back from Cuba on the Saturday and I'll tell you all about my trip. And then we'll kind of continue going from there. But thank you very much for listening to Speak Up for Blue's Podcast because that's what you've been listening to. I am your host, Andrew Lewin, founder of SpeakUpForBlue.com. Happy, happy Monday. Enjoy your week and happy conservation. [Music]
