Changemakers Series
In honour of CharityVillage®'s 15th anniversary, we celebrate this sector's changemakers, individual men and women who have made significant contributions to the nonprofit and charitable arena, making change and a difference in the lives of many. Due to their hard work and innumerable accomplishments (sung and unsung) we have seen this sector grow and evolve in the past 15 years, establishing itself as a force to be reckoned with. They make us so very proud and for that we salute them.
If you would like to nominate someone special to be featured as a future Changemaker, please visit: www.surveymonkey.com.
Robert O'Brien
By Julie Stauffer
August 30, 2010
Robert O'Brien had no background in ecology or environmental science when he launched Ocean Net in 1997. But, as he says, you don't need to be a biologist to recognize the environmental sins being committed on the planet. The former businessman and keen sailor established Ocean Net to tackle the problem of waste he saw washing up on Newfoundland shores.
Over the past 13 years, the grassroots organization has attracted 22,000 volunteers, cleaned up 1,600 sites around the province and hauled away more than 450,000 kg of waste. As if that wasn't enough, Ocean Net has organized annual Youth and the Oceans conferences for junior and senior high school students, developed a ten-point challenge to encourage Newfoundlanders to shrink their environmental footprint, and had the third Friday of September designated as Ocean Net Day in Newfoundland and Labrador.
No surprise, then, that the organization has racked up more than a dozen provincial and national awards, while O'Brien himself has been recognized with Earth Day Canada's Hometown Hero award and the government of Newfoundland and Labrador's Lifetime Achievement Award, among other honours.
After devoting himself to Ocean Net for more than a decade — a full-time, unpaid role — O'Brien is ready to scale back his duties and pass the baton to Memorial University's Marine Institute, which is taking over the day-to-day running of the organization. CharityVillage® recently chatted with Robert O'Brien about the power of individual action, changing attitudes to waste, and the crucial role of hot dogs in ensuring Ocean Net's success.
CharityVillage®: What inspired you to found the organization?
Robert O'Brien: You know, I hate going anywhere and you see this nasty waste dumped — dumped in the woods or dumped on the beach or dumped on a street. It's everywhere.
And you just can't stand by and say well, that's not my job to clean it up, it's the job of the person that threw it there. That person that threw it there, they ain't gonna come back and clean it up. Not a chance. And City Hall, they're just as bad. They try their best, I suppose, under the circumstances, but without the public jumping in, everything will be lost.
I think there was a three-legged stool analogy of society. One leg of the stool is government and one leg is business and one leg is volunteers. Take any one leg away, and society will collapse. So we need volunteers out there, working, working all the time.
To instill an ocean conservation ethic was our banner cry. So we just set out to educate by action. We looked at the beaches and the shorelines and a lot of the little outport towns that were right there on the ocean, and it was a real eye-opener to see the mess that was on the shoreline. Something had to be done. So 1,600 communities later, Ocean Net has established its name throughout the province.
CV: Can you paint me a picture of the kind of waste that you were seeing on those beaches?
ROB: You can use your imagination. Plastic of course is really the terrible thing that is coming in on beaches by the truckloads. It floats, most of it, and is washed up on the shores, so you just have to keep picking it all up and bringing it out to waste sites, recycle where you can. And there's furniture and there's car parts, and there is tricycles and there's shopping carts...it goes on. Fishing nets, fishing twine and rope and lines.
And then there's oil spills. No one knows where it comes from; oily bilges being discharged from boats. The seas take up about, I don't know, 70 or 80 per cent of our planet, and it gives us life, and you have this used as a cesspool or a dump. Figure that one out.
"Ocean Net would never exist without people jumping in and just getting out there in the trenches and not afraid to get their hands dirty and instilling pride in themselves and in other volunteers." |
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So we have about 22,000 volunteers throughout the island, and they just get out there and clean up and help others too to get involved. Ocean Net would never exist without people jumping in and just getting out there in the trenches and not afraid to get their hands dirty and instilling pride in themselves and in other volunteers.
More and more, we're getting better educated. I think there's definitely an attitudinal change towards the marine environment and lifestyle — a new respect starting to evolve.
CV: How did you go about motivating that many people and getting them engaged?
ROB: [laughing] We'd feed them hot dogs.CV: That's the secret?
ROB: Well, we'd have a little mussel boil or a hot dog roast. And of course you had to make it fun.
The first cleanup was on Topsail Beach, just outside of St. John's a tiny bit. A wonderful place. In fact I grew up there. I used to swim there in the ocean. So we were cleaning up, with lots of media and television coverage, newspaper coverage, and lots of people turned up.
The Coast Guard exhibited their safety and marine mobile displays, and we had divers in the water and we had, oh gosh, hikers walking with their colours on. We had mussel boils, hot dogs, and Don Wherry.
Don had the Sound Symposium here at the university; he was a professor of music. He passed away recently, but Don was an absolutely amazing man. Dick Hall asked him, would he create a performance piece, and he did.
It was called Time, meaning that time is ticking down and if we don't smarten up, we're going to run out of time. So he had percussionists in a 20-foot-diameter circle, and they stood around this big circle and they performed this piece with an interpretive dancer inside.
The circle was made from garbage — fishnets and stuff like that — as a visual display of garbage that was coming up on the beaches, and there were chimes, like a tripod of tree branches with all sorts of metal that would make noise. Anyway, he performed that piece and it was wonderful.
So that was the launch. We cleaned up the place, and there was lots of exposure to Ocean Net. And then we kept on moving from there, kept on cleaning, cleaning, cleaning and cleaning, and then we moved out along the coastline.
We tutored people as we went along. We started all kinds of junior directors and senior directors and community heroes and gave out awards. And we had eco-champ awards for the high schools, and we recognized them with little plaques and so on and gifts for the Youth and the Oceans conference.
CV: I know that Ocean Net put a big emphasis on students and youth. Why was that so important?
ROB: Well, we made presentations in schools and for organizations like boy scouts and so on and cadets. Certainly the youth conferences at the Marine Institute at Hampton Hall yearly, they were very influential. And then we moved the youth conferences out to Cornerbrook, which is on the western side, and down to Burin, which is on the south coast, and up in Labrador, so getting lots of exposure.
They're so passionate, the young kids. They're like, "Wow, where did this come from? This is terrible!" We should give the reins over to the youth to run the place for a while. You'd see great changes, positive changes, in the environment.
CV: When you look at everything that you've accomplished, what are you most proud of?
ROB: Well, I'm really, really delighted that the Marine Institute stepped in and helped move us along. We signed the resolution, and they are definitely now the facilitator of Ocean Net — their branding of Ocean Net is MI Ocean Net — and they continue the legacy.
Justin Dearing, who is a brilliant, educated young man and very personable and very clever and smart, he is now contracted by the Marine Institute on a full-time basis to continue his line of work with Ocean Net, as in the past; and there's a new website being created.
They're in a much better position than we were to get funding, because we were not a registered charity and some companies, because of their policy, would not support us. And you know, we always have telephones and Internet to pay for and of course salaries, so as a volunteer, I was starting to wear down.
So now Ocean Net is in a much better position to function. It's not a one-man organization any more. Now it's a big team, a big organization supporting the initiative and adding to it with other events.
CV: So looking forward for Ocean Net, you're feeling optimistic it's going to continue to do good things?
ROB: Very much so, yes. I think that Ocean Net will be around for a long, long time, and I think it will grow under the auspices of the Marine Institute.
Julie Stauffer is a Guelph-based freelance writer with extensive experience in the nonprofit sector.
