CORALES DE PAZ

Our story

We are Corales de Paz, a Colombian based NGO that practices meaningful diving with trained citizen scientists to monitor and restore coral reefs. Our community of meaningful divers are reef users trained as Reef Check EcoDivers (coral reef monitoring) and Reef Repair Divers (coral gardening) who are making their dreams of leaving a legacy of a resilient planet come true.

We believe in the power of people coming together for a common cause. By offering them the experience and training required, we help them to help us achieve a stronger and positive ripple effect. Our citizen science community is mainly composed by non-environmental professionals looking to “have a greater impact”, environmental professionals, usually recently graduated looking for work experience and the local community from the intervened areas. The latter two, usually have a hard time coming up with the costs of the training and we usually try and provide financial aid for them, but it creates constrains for our NGO. Consequently, we would like these funds to cover the training costs so they can be free for a minimum number of members of the local communities, students, and recent graduates so they’ll have a leg up when starting their career. In addition, we would also like to provide internships with a living stipend from these funds.

Why we're fundraising

We are fundraising to consolidate the team that builds resilient coral reefs

Why this project is important

By training people and communities, we can change mindsets and behaviors that will impact the local communities where we work and how people relate to their environment. In the same line, we build capacity for coral reef monitoring and restoration and create a global movement of trained citizen scientists ready to enter the conservation world as volunteers or professionals. Furthermore, as an organization, we can use as much help as we can get, but this must be qualified given that we work with live animals, development, and scientific research. Therefore, we require that interns and volunteers go through a training phase to lend a qualified hand to our cause or that of other organizations.

How the funds will be used

We are fundraising to consolidate the team that builds resilient coral reefs

Sustainable Development Goals

SDG 13

Climate Action

SDG 14

Life Below Water