How a sarong importer ended up doing this

The short version: I kept showing up, and eventually the work found me.

The long way around

For twenty years I ran 1 World Sarongs, importing from artisan workshops in Indonesia and Thailand. It was a business, but the part that held me was the sourcing trips: sitting in a workshop in Bali, watching a family stamp wax onto cotton the way their grandparents did, then paddling out at a break down the road where the water was visibly worse than the year before.

You do that enough times and the two things stop being separate. The communities making beautiful work and the coastline they live on are the same story. Protect one badly and you lose both.

Showing up before being asked

In late 2024 a friend at Conservation International sent me a draft donor letter for the surf program he was building. He asked for thoughts. I sent back two full rewrites, unasked and unpaid, because the letter mattered more than my afternoon did.

That turned into helping name the program, then a funding proposal for marine protection in the Mentawai Islands, then a contract. I have been part of the Surf Conservation Partnership ever since.

Surf for the Ocean, Huntington Beach pier, June 2026.

Getting it onto the sand

Strategy documents are the easy part. The hard part is a city permit, a certificate of insurance naming the right parties in the right language by the right date, a canopy vendor who will hold a price, and thirty prize boxes in your own garage because the campaign does not have a warehouse.

Surf for the Ocean ran three events on the Huntington Beach pier in 2026. I handled the permitting, the insurance, the vendor sourcing and procurement, the creative production and the sponsor asks. Boards, wetsuits and a booth came in donated because I asked people I already had relationships with, and gifts came in from my own network on top of that. None of it is glamorous and all of it is the job.

Where this is going

Surf parks are the interesting frontier. A new generation of them is being financed and designed right now, and the environmental posture each one takes is being decided in rooms that mostly do not have a conservation voice in them. That is a solvable problem, and it is where I spend an increasing share of my time: Surf Park Summit, the developer conversations, the entitlement and community side where goodwill either gets built in early or bolted on late.

The through-line from the sarong workshops has not changed. Find the people who already care, make it easy for them to act, and make sure the community at the far end of it is better off than when you arrived.