Starting a Non-Profit Business in the Environmental Conservation Industry

Video Transcript

"My name is Koyel Mandel. I'm a fisheries economist with a non-profit group called Ocean Conservancy. We're a nationally known non-profit organization and we work for Wild Healthy Oceans. We are headquartered in Washington D.C. and we have offices from the Pacific to the Gulf of Mexico and on the East Coast. If someone wanted to work on their on in the environmental sector, there are two ways you can go. You can either be a private consultant. In which case you provide the service to other non-profits, government agencies, other private corporations. They would hire you for specific analysis or lobbying for a particular policy that's up in the senate or congress for debate. So, that's a role you can play. Or, if you want to start your own non-profit organization you can also go with that. Again, with that, you have to have experience in the field for quite awhile before you know different people that work in the industry and also have the mechanism for generating funds for your non-profit. So, again, being an expert in the field obviously helps and also have to have all the contacts right from the grassroots. Knowing all the litigators, all the constituents, all the fisherman if you're working with fisheries, and up the food chain to senators, congressman. All political connections, knowing all the lobbyists. So, you have to be pretty well-connected to start a non-profit of your own. So, that's the advice that I would give. Again, work in the sector for long enough that you feel confident that you know everything how the policy works, how the management works. Then, again, one more thing I would recommend is find out where you can play a different role because there are so many non-profit organizations. So, you have to be creative. You have to find a role where you you can make a change and you feel there's a vacuum that no one has filled up, that's where, if you see a potential that's when you would want to start a non-profit of your own and start working in that arena."