The Surfrider Foundation is dedicated to the protection and enjoyment of the world’s ocean, waves and beaches through a powerful activist network. The Surfrider Foundation is a community of everyday people who passionately protect our playground – the ocean, waves, and beaches – that provide us so much enjoyment. They ensure beaches are accessible, keep our water clean, protect our ocean, preserve our coasts and keep plastic from polluting our waterways. They focur their efforts in 5 key areas: beach access; clear water; ocean protection; coastal preservation; plasic pollution. Campaigns define us as an organization. The campaigns are: (1) Blue Water Task Force – water testing, education and advocacy program. Our chapters use this program to alert citizens and officials in their communities about water quality problems and to work toward solutions; (2) Ocean Friendly Gardens – this program (OFG) sees landscapes and streets as solutions to water pollution. OFG standards use this simple approach everywhere possible: contouring landscapes for rainwater retention; creating living soil to sponge up water, filter pollution and sequester carbon; and installing climate-appropriate plants to create wildlife habitat and a sense of place; (3) Ocean Friendly Restaurants – stop using plastic. One restaurant, one customer at a time, it increases awareness, drives behavior change, and ultimately creates scalable impact to reduce our plastic footprint; (4) Rise Above Plastics is designed to eliminate the impacts of plastics in the marine environment by raising awareness about the dangers of plastic pollution and by advocating for a reduction of single-use plastics and the recycling of all plastics; (5) The Smartfin (citizen science) is a surfboard fin with sensors that measure important ocean properties that help researchers and coastal communities understand trends in ocean health.
