Action Session with Oceans & Amazon Entrepreneurs: Will Pearson, Gator Halpern, Carolina Rosero

Hello, we're starting. First, just thank you so much for coming to this session. This was not the easiest session to get to — pretty much every session at a Summit event can be difficult to get to because there's so many good things going on. But for those of you who showed up to this room, it means a whole lot to us, to the entrepreneurs here, and I think to our whole community that really cares about climate, that we have a group that's really ready to dive in. So all of you in this room are remarkable people already, and I can't wait to learn with you and just jump into all of the co-learning and collaboration we're about to get into later in the session.

So first, introduce myself for anyone I haven't met. My name is Shira. I'm the executive director of Summit Impact. We are the social good 501(c)(3) arm of Summit. Our mission is to activate the power of this community to create a more regenerative and equitable future. We do that through a fellowship program that we launched a few years ago that has since supported 108 fellows from 23 countries around the world. We've also recently launched Impact Labs — we have a criminal justice lab, we have a democracy lab, both really fascinating pilots with such incredible fellows. And we're now launching a climate lab in January of 2024. So if you're here, you're the first to know that we're launching that lab, and you are officially invited to join us as we build it — to help us focus in on which topics we're going to really put at the center, to nominate fellows when we open applications and nominations, and perhaps to even join the Leadership Council of the lab.

So we have a lot going on, and you'll notice somewhere in this room there will be a poster with a QR code that you can scan. You can sign up to join the Climate Collaboratory, where you'll hear all of the updates about climate, about Summit Impact, and get to be part of this group. Okay, so that's all for Summit Impact and everything we're doing.

Now for the good stuff. We're here today to really dive in with the most incredible entrepreneurs and social change leaders. I've gotten to know each of them over the past few months and more recently, and they are phenomenal people. Our goal today is not just to sit here and listen and hear from them, but to start with that and then to get into their work — to hear the big questions they're holding and to try to help evolve what they're doing in the world, to see if we can share perspectives, move things forward, and that each of these entrepreneurs and leaders can leave this room feeling more supported, more inspired, and thinking about things in a new way thanks to the input from all of you.

So the way we're going to do that is each entrepreneur will come on to the stage, they'll have five minutes to tell you a little bit about what they're doing, and then at the end, once all three have spoken, we're gonna go into breakouts. Then we'll come back together and share back what happened in those breakouts, and I'll tell you a little bit more about them when we get closer. So who's excited for that? Who's ready?

[applause]

All right! So our first entrepreneur coming up to the stage is Will Pearson. Will is the founder and co-CEO of Ocean Bottle, an amazing organization that you might recognize from all of the incredible water bottles that you've seen on the ship. Yep, we got one right here, one right there.

With Ocean Bottle, Will and his partner Nick over there are really addressing the plastic crisis facing our oceans, and much more. We're spending all of this time out at sea while we're at this event, and it's really the perfect time to attune to the power and significance of our oceans and what we can be doing to really protect them. Getting to know Will a bit as we prepared for the session has just been such a joy, because the way they are attuning to the oceans is profound, and what they're working on is so important.

They also built a company that is one of the first UN Sustainable Ocean Principles signatories, and a recent recipient of the Green Product Award in 2020 and the Red Dot Design Award. There are lots of great green products out there these days — it's a special thing to get to meet people who are building with a certain level of depth and winning the awards that indicate that they're actually leading the field forward. So with that, we're gonna get to hear from Will about everything they're building and how we can really scale the incredible work that Ocean Bottle is doing. Let's give Will a very warm welcome.

[applause]

Hello everyone, and thank you so much for — well, Shira has now left the stage, but I was going to say thank you so much for that really, really warm welcome. And thank you for carving some time out of your afternoon to come and listen to this talk. It's been a long day in the sun. This is actually quite nice to be inside, although it's really bright up here.

I'm just gonna talk to you all a little bit about ocean health, really what that means for planetary health, and actually all of us. I'm then going to tell you a little bit about what we're doing at Ocean Bottle — obviously we're fortunate to have a few of these around on the ship.

I think it's very easy for most of us to feel incredibly disconnected from the ocean in our daily lives. We live in concrete jungles — maybe some of you are actually lucky enough to live on a beach or by the ocean. I think I would probably live in the ocean if I could, but right now I live in central London and I genuinely feel very disconnected from the impact that we're creating and what we're trying to do.

The ocean covers 70% of the planet and 99% of the habitable biosphere. Every other breath of oxygen that we take actually comes from the ocean. And 78% of global animal biomass actually lives in the ocean — just let that sink in for a second. I think it's very easy that we disregard it. People depend on it directly — three billion people actually depend on the ocean for their livelihoods, their incomes, the food that they eat. And basically, without life in the ocean, there truly is no life.

So I started Ocean Bottle together with Nick — he's the guy in the green shirt back there, waving. Before starting Ocean Bottle, I actually spent a year working at sea as a deckhand. So I traveled out from Malta in the middle of the Mediterranean all the way out to the Maldives, and it was an incredible experience, connecting with the ocean more deeply. But also, there was just plastic everywhere. The owners of the boat that we worked on were just chugging Evian bottles. I was the person handing them over to the people on shore. And later that year I saw rivers just choking with plastic, and obviously as soon as the seasonal rain comes, all that plastic just gets washed straight out into the ocean.

So I really wanted to do something about it. I came back to London. It was around the time of David Attenborough's documentary Blue Planet 2, and it really — I don't know if it kicked off out here, but it sent shockwaves through the UK and Europe and Norway where I'm also from. That really sparked things off for us because we thought, how can we actually enable individuals to create a global impact on this problem? How can we enable people to actually make an outsized impact that's bigger than what you could do individually?

So this formed the genesis of Ocean Bottle. For every single bottle that we sell, we fund collection equivalent to a thousand plastic bottles in weight — so that's 25 pounds of plastic. Huge amount — if you visualize it, you could basically fill a small car. And collectively, that really, really adds up.

We actually collect the plastic in coastal communities around the world — in Indonesia, in the Philippines, in Ghana, Kenya — areas that really struggle with access to proper waste management and plastic collection services. So we're actually enabling people to earn an income and exchange that plastic for valuable rewards, and even access to things like education, healthcare, and financial services — creating both a huge social and environmental impact.

At the moment, we're busy scaling out our product portfolio to create more ways to connect with the ocean. But what we've really wanted to do since the beginning was enable people to see the impact that they've created behind the scenes — to actually add traceability so that you can see where your plastic is being collected, who collected it, what they got paid for it, what social resources they'll have access to. So we've been very busy building a traceability ledger, and we're excited to launch that and enable people to actually see where they've made a difference.

But what we're actually able to do with this is open that up and enable all other brands to add plastic collection to any product or service. Anyone attending a Virgin Voyages cruise could add plastic collection to their trip. You could go to Coachella. Amex could sponsor plastic collection for you. You could even buy a sofa from IKEA that also funds plastic collection. So the opportunities around that are kind of endless.

If we really don't take action now, by 2050 there's expected to be more plastic in the ocean than fish. We know that it's a really heavily underfunded area — it's kind of like the underdog of the Sustainable Development Goals and actually all of the environmental space. The ocean only receives 0.01% of all Sustainable Development Goal funding over the last few decades. So we really need to dial this up if we actually want to take care of this super important resource.

The final thing I'll leave you with before I close off: we've collected about 20 million pounds of plastic to date, and that's basically enough plastic bottles to circle the planet about four times. Quite a lot of plastic, right? I think we're a small team in London, still just a drop in the ocean. So what we really need to do now is scale up our efforts exponentially. Thanks to Summit At Sea, by providing everyone an Ocean Bottle this weekend, we've actually prevented over 2.1 million plastic bottles in weight from entering the ocean. So yeah, that's what I'll leave you with.

[applause]

Thanks so much for listening. Really, we want to engage your brilliant minds in this session. So we're looking at: how can we engage consumers and businesses in the US to scale up our impact 10x? That's what we're going to be asking you to help crack. Thanks for listening.

[applause]

Thank you, Will. One more little round of applause for Will and everything they've done for us to feel great about being here at this event.

Okay, next up we have Gator Halpern. Gator is the founder and president of Coral Vita, a company that is changing the fate of our world's coral reefs by creating a technology-enabled commercial model that can scale reef restoration. He is working to reverse global reef degradation and ensure that communities around the world can continue to benefit from healthy coastal ecosystems. Gator is one of our Summit fellows. He's also an Earthshot Prize winner and a United Nations Young Champion of the Earth, and based in the Bahamas. So let's give Gator a big welcome, and he's going to share more about Coral Vita.

[applause]

Thank you, Shira. Good afternoon, everybody. Thanks for coming. I'm Gator, and I thought I would start this presentation by talking a little bit about the Bahamas. I've been super fortunate to call this magical country we're all enjoying home for the past five years. This is a picture from Grand Bahama where I live and where I have a coral farm, about 50 miles north of here.

One thing you might have noticed on Bimini today — or if you haven't noticed it yet, after this session, go upstairs and look out on the islands — they're incredibly flat in the Bahamas. Each island, the high point of elevation is a handful of meters. And that's because it's not a tectonic situation creating this land mass. These islands were literally grown by coral. The only reason they exist is because the ocean level used to be — if you were on the beach dancing today, the water used to be above your head. And below your feet was a thriving coral reef.

Then the ice caps formed tens of thousands of years ago, the ocean level dropped, and out of the ocean rose the islands of the Bahamas. The corals that created these reefs dried up and left behind their calcium carbonate limestone skeletons. So literally, the beach we were all hanging out on, where we were dancing — the Bahamas and coral islands around the world came from these ancient coral skeletons that grew these islands out of the ocean.

And today, these reefs are still the only reason that these islands are able to thrive and that communities are able to live here. In the Bahamas, this is again our island of Grand Bahama — there are these barrier reefs that line the shore, and they're incredibly important ecosystems for communities like those here. They're called a barrier reef because they're the barrier between the open ocean and the shoreline. Without them, the waves crash right on the shoreline — stronger storm surges, erosion. This is what protects the communities that live on these coastlines.

It's also the main driver of fisheries in the tropics. Most fish we have in the Caribbean are bred and born in coral reefs. Without these coral reefs, there are no major fisheries throughout the tropics. And they're also super important economic drivers of ecotourism. In the Bahamas alone, there's about $300 million of tourism based directly on the reef, and that's a huge part of the GDP.

So literally, we wouldn't be here, these islands wouldn't be here, and the people of the Bahamas could not survive without these ecosystems, which are really a cornerstone of all life on Earth. 25% of all species in the ocean are in coral reefs, and they only cover less than 1% of the ocean floor. More biodiverse than rainforests — these are incredibly magical ecosystems supporting a billion people all around the world.

Unfortunately, they're not doing so well. Coral reefs are really the first major ecosystem that we're seeing collapse around the world in just one human lifespan. Since the 1970s, half of the world's reefs have already died. And due to climate change and other human impacts, it's projected that over 90% of these ecosystems will be dead by 2050. And that's if we keep to the 1.5 degrees warming. If we get to two degrees warming, that number goes to 99% or even higher. So this is an existential crisis for the world.

I'm not going to leave you on the bad news, though, because there is something we can do to reverse this. Reef restoration has been shown to bring reefs back to life. You can plant these corals just like you plant trees and see a forest come back to life — you can plant coral and watch this ecosystem come back to life. This is a real picture.

Unfortunately, the existing models for reef restoration don't really scale. Traditionally, you hang these corals off of ropes in the ocean or stack them on little trays. It's amazing — there are a lot of organizations doing really great work around the world with community-based projects. But when you think about the scale of the issue, it really barely scratches the surface, and there's not too much you can do to make those corals more resilient.

At Coral Vita, we are creating a different model for reef restoration where we're building commercial land-based coral farms where we're able to do some really cool things. This is some pictures of our farm here in the Bahamas. We can grow corals up to 50 times faster — that translates into growing corals in months and years rather than decades and centuries to make mature corals to put back in these reefs. And we can also do a process called assisted evolution to actually breed these corals together and make them more resilient against the warming and acidifying oceans that threaten their survival — making genetically diverse and resilient corals that can be scaled for large-scale reef restoration.

We're building a suite of technologies and tools that will allow us to scale this up and do it all around the world. We have camera systems and sensors running throughout our farm that we can use to optimize the conditions of growth, to see which corals are most resilient, and to do so in a cost-effective and efficient manner.

We're based here in the Bahamas — would love you guys all to come see our farm in Freeport if you get the chance. But we're now starting to spread our wings and deliver these services and technologies in different parts of the world.

Our issue today that I wanted to brainstorm with you all — I thought we could have some fun with it — is: how can we really start a global movement for reef restoration? How can we use the amazing storytellers in the audience and creative thinkers to really drive interest around this issue and get more support for what we're doing?

A few examples: this is a full page in The Guardian that ran last year with Corona — we have a Corona Reef here in the Bahamas. That was one cool thing. We also have a partnership where every Cariuma shoe you buy plants some corals out on the reef, which is cool. And then there's actually coral NFTs you can buy that'll pay for reef restoration. But these are just a few ideas to get the brainstorm started, because they look amazing but really they're just scratching the surface of getting a little bit of support into this field. We really need to create a restoration economy — we need to be planting hundreds of millions if not billions of corals out in the reef to keep a significant amount of these ecosystems alive. So really excited to brainstorm with you guys and dive into how we can galvanize this movement and create a reef restoration economy. Thank you.

[applause]

Thank you, Gator. All right, so hopefully you're feeling a bit inspired by our first two entrepreneurs and incredible change leaders and climate activists — people who are really guiding us towards both a recognition of the state that we're in and a possible path forward.

So our last person to present is my friend and another Summit fellow, Carolina Rosero. Carolina is the director of the Amazon at Conservation International and focuses her work and her brilliant mind on how we can create better economic structures to protect those who protect our world. She is a bilingual gender specialist dedicated to environmental sustainability policy and programming. Her expertise focuses on aligning conservation practices with human rights and linking development and poverty alleviation as fundamental requirements for maintaining healthy ecosystems and biodiversity.

Today she's going to give us a taste of her incredible work in the Amazon and share a bit about how we can question what we value and the economic systems that represent the answers we really want to be holding in the world. So let's give Carolina a big welcome.

[applause]

Thank you very much. Good afternoon, everybody. I'm Carolina, I'm from Ecuador, and I'm gonna take you away from this amazing ocean setting that we've been in these past few days and take you to the Amazon.

Conservation International is an organization — we work using science-based information, we work with partnerships, and we work really linking conservation with human well-being. That's the heart of our work: how can we put communities at the heart of the work that we do for conservation?

In case you don't know, Ecuador is also home to the Galapagos Islands — that's usually how most people recognize Ecuador. But aside from that, we also have an incredible Amazon ecosystem. The Ecuadorian Amazon takes about half of Ecuador's continental territory, so it's a really large space. In this area, which is probably about the size of Louisiana, we have more than 7,000 plant species, 183 mammals, a wide diversity of birds, reptiles, and amphibians. Ecuador is considered one of the world's mega-biodiverse areas.

So it's got really important ecosystems, biodiversity, animals. But more than that, we also have really high cultural importance. The forests that are remaining in the Amazon are in the hands of indigenous people. We have 10 different groups, and more than 60% of the Amazon belongs to these indigenous groups who really are stewarding and have been stewarding the Amazon for decades.

Part of our work — we can't do conservation if we're not working with the people who are really taking care of these ecosystems. And so that's why I want to talk to you a little bit more about what we're doing and how we can really bring a more interdisciplinary approach to conserving the Amazon rainforest. Because conserving forests isn't only about taking care of trees and carbon and biodiversity — it's really talking about how can we alleviate poverty.

I'll tell you a story about one of the communities that I went to. It's the Achuar community. You can only go there by having a chartered propeller plane. You land in the middle of basically a field — there's a dirt landing strip. It's not accessible. If you want to walk, which is what most of the people do, you take days. Or you can take boats by river, eight to ten hours.

And we were in an assembly meeting talking about the importance of conservation, really talking about the great work that the communities are doing and how we can support them in monitoring the forests and continuing to safeguard their territories. And one of the indigenous leaders came up to me afterwards and he said, "You know, this is amazing, and we are completely and deeply committed to conserving the rainforest. We've been doing this for years. We're culturally linked to this — it's our pharmacy, it's our store, it's where we live, it's our home. But we can't continue to conserve the rainforest if our children are getting sick, if we don't have an income to be able to pay for the needs that we have here on a day-to-day basis. We can't leave our community if we don't have money. We can't have education for our children if we don't have an income."

So every time we talk about conservation, we see the need to be able to really address all of these social issues that are intrinsically linked to the well-being of the people that are safeguarding the forests.

Taking advantage of this wide array of people that are here from different sectors, it's really important for us as a conservation organization to really step out of our silo of talking to the people who are already committed to conservation, who are already having the same discussions in the same groups. We need to be more creative and innovative. And so we wanted to ask you: how can we have a more interdisciplinary approach to conservation? How can we partner with the tech sector, with the education sector? How can we address domestic violence issues that women are facing in these communities to be able to have better conservation?

Part of this is really making an economic viability for bioeconomy initiatives — how can we support communities in using biodiversity, non-timber forest products like essential oils from palm trees that come from the Amazon? How can we promote ecotourism so they have economic alternatives that aren't just based on timber?

Whenever we're considering the Ecuadorian Amazon in particular, we see that Ecuador's GDP really comes from the oil and mining industry that comes from these areas that are really negatively impacting these communities. So how can we have a different economic model to safeguard the Amazon?

With that in mind, I wanted to give you three specific cases so you can put a face to the name of some of the women that we work with. Yavida, on the left, is from the Siekopai nationality in the northern Amazon. She is working with other women in implementing a ceramics initiative. When we're talking about clay and pottery with indigenous communities, we're not talking about just finding clay anywhere — it's completely tied and immersed with these ancestral practices of first finding where this clay is, because it's oftentimes very far from where the communities are. And then from that, they tell stories as they build and create this pottery — where they eat from, where they drink from. Part of that is intrinsically linked to passing on this ancestral knowledge from family to family, from generation to generation.

Another woman is working with other indigenous women on basically making honey. She's working with bees, and they're selling honey. She tells a story about how the bees sing and they are completely tied to the well-being of their ecosystems.

And then we have an amazing Kichwa woman from the center of the Amazon region. She's working with indigenous women leaders. Her community isn't far away from the city — it's actually being threatened by the expansion of one of the Amazon cities. She's working with other indigenous women in bringing back the traditional foods that they had, that they're losing because they're now only purchasing chips and rice and pasta. So they're really losing that diversity of products that they used to have in their chakras, their traditional farms.

These three women, aside from having the challenge of bringing back this ancestral knowledge that's tied to the ecosystems, are also women facing very real challenges for their families and their communities — having an income so that they can provide for their communities. They also face domestic violence and political violence because they are women leaders, and traditionally indigenous leaders are male.

All of these processes are really linked to the question: how can we start bringing in different sectors? So again, that's our question to you: how might we create a new economic partnership program at Conservation International? How can CI be one of the organizations at the table so that we can embed these economic systems in our conservation work? We're really talking about partnerships and alliances — how can we bring the tech industry, how can we be more creative and find solutions so that we can really support these families and improve their livelihoods so they can continue to safeguard the forest? I think that's it. Thank you.

[applause]

All right, thank you everyone for your attention, for tuning in, for listening to the details of what each of these incredible people are working on. Now is the time for us to get into some discussion, to get to know who's in this room, to get to know what we can learn from each other.

How this is going to work: we're going to separate into three breakout groups, one with each of these lovely people over here. Gator will have a group with chairs right over in this corner. Carolina will have another group of chairs right over here on this side but kind of central. And Will will have a group backed by those couches with some chairs pulled up to it. Each one is going to have a facilitator with them, and they're going to walk us through a series of prompts. They're going to restate the prompt and the question.

These are the three prompts above us for each group. The first one: how might we engage consumers and businesses in the mission to 10x their impact for the ocean? That's Will. The second: how can we create a global movement for reef restoration? That's what Gator will be working on. And Carolina's: how might we create a new economic partnerships program? Really everything she spoke about, converting from extraction to conservation with an economic model. So we're going to break out. You'll have a facilitator who shares what to do, and mostly it'll just be time for discussion. Ready, set, go!

[breakout session]

To kind of wrap us up, we're going to hear again from each of our speakers and presenters to share some insights that came up in their breakout groups. Then I'll close this out and we'll continue the conversations into the night. First I'll hand the mic to Will.

I'm trying to hand you the mic — getting carried away with the results that I was just getting. Really excited! So we had a really nice conversation, a little collective over there. It really started with — I think one of the people on the team said, actually, we're not just a bottle company, we're an impact platform. And I think that really resonates with us because that is exactly why we started the company. We started with this so that people could make an outsized impact and be connected on a physical and tangible level.

So yeah, we are actually kind of planning to launch as an impact platform, but I think the way that we communicate that is interesting, and what that can mean for basically scaling up as well and achieving goal number one. Then we spoke a little bit about storytelling and the importance of storytelling for us and our mission, and actually how we really connect people to the impact that they're creating and the ocean more generally speaking.

One of the people there grew up close to the beach, so he was like, I feel really connected to the ocean. But actually, there's huge disparities in terms of how people feel about that. There were some ideas around our NFC tag that sits in every single bottle — we basically wanted to enable people to fund more impact beyond purchase. So we have an Ocean app, and I think we really want to build out real community around that and continuous impact.

And the final idea was around actually having a more visual cue on the product, so you can kind of see it and know straight away this isn't just your average water bottle — this is made with sustainable materials, or you could even have on it "this bottle's funded collection of a thousand plastic bottles in weight." So we had some amazing takeaways and some great ideas for how we can scale up our impact and actually connect people more generally and just build community, which I think is important for us. Thank you, Shira. Thanks, everyone.

[applause]

Thank you. So if you want to continue the conversation with Will about storytelling, about what it means to be a bottle and not just a bottle, to be a full impact platform, and some of the new ideas they have around building community — even if you weren't in his group, please continue that thread.

All right, Gator, do you want to share a couple of ideas that came up in your breakout group?

Thank you. So we had a pretty wide-ranging discussion over there. I'm just gonna highlight a couple of key points that came up. One great one was: can we try to tie in three generations — this multi-generational impact? The older generation, tie it to legacy and impact and kind of major funding and donation. The second, working-level generation — can we get them involved through corporate programs, come out and have team-building activities, understand what's going on? And then the children — tie in their interests and educational programming and things that we do at the farm. So try to hit it on those three levels.

Something else we talked a lot about was: can we really create some visual connection of what's happening? Some rating system on the reef, some way of showing how healthy a reef is? When we're having people support it, can we see the change — even if it's just some star rating system or something that makes it more tangible? Or even trying to create some type of product out of it that shows you get something for the support you're doing. Those are just a few of the ideas that came out of an awesome group of people. Thanks for chatting with me.

[applause]

Thank you. I love that one about how do you see progress, how do you see the change. So if you want to talk to Gator about any of those ideas, find him on the ship tonight and continue the conversation.

All right, Carolina.

Thank you very much, and thanks to the group. I think one of the main things that came out of our discussion was: how can Conservation International support and really facilitate a space for coordination and collaboration among different sectors? How can we play that role instead of trying to implement everything ourselves, which is not necessarily the most effective and efficient way to do things?

The second is to be better about telling the story. How can we get the message out there about the importance, about what's happening, about these initiatives and how they contribute to conservation and improving livelihoods? Whether it's through documentaries, a YouTube channel, having influencers and famous people really take on and embody this message.

There were also a couple of great ideas with regards to how we can perhaps think about a different type of product. Not just something that's very small, very isolated, low dollar, low investment, low turnover — maybe having something bigger. Think outside of the box, something where you can have more income for the communities. And also think about the medicinal plants and how they might be able to contribute to finding cures for different diseases, thinking about psychedelics and everything else that we've been discussing these past few days.

And then finally, how can we bring in education and capacity building, tie that in with the community? So really appreciate the space, appreciate your time, and I'm very grateful. Thank you very much.

[applause]

All right, let's give it one more big round of applause for all three of these incredible leaders.

So this, in our opinion at Summit Impact, is how it begins. We really dive in with each other. You'll see these three words — I think they're on the poster board there: belong, learn, activate. We always want to invite you into rooms like this where you really feel like you belong, like you are part of a community, like there is a core group of people within the broader Summit ecosystem who really care, who want to take action together. And everyone is welcome to join us — everyone is welcome in this room, from all different angles, from all different ways of looking at these challenges and wanting to solve them.

Then we learn together. Every experience like this is an opportunity to mature our own ideas and perspectives, to think in new ways, to see things differently from each other and from the people leading us. So we hope that every time we gather for collective learning, we're also expanding our capacity in various different ways.

The last word, which of course is the most important, is activate. That's our big goal at Summit Impact: how do we activate this network, this community? So my invitation to all of you is to just continue the conversations. Return to these three, see how they're doing in a few months, see how the ideas were landing. Let these relationships be the seed of continued action and activation. Some of those things might come up soon, and some might come up in the next 10 years, because that's how Summit tends to work. But let these be seeds of not just belonging and learning but also the activation that can move forward.

To keep things going with us at Summit Impact, you can scan the QR code over there as I mentioned. You can join our Climate Collaboratory — a core group of climate-focused people who are going to be really advising on our programs in the months ahead. We would love to be doing this with everyone in this room. We would love to have you be part of it.

I think with that, I just wanted to close with something kind of special. I hope you like it. This is our last Impact session on the ship and of the event — this is the last official session we're hosting. And I want to share with you our favorite quote at Summit Impact, from Margaret Wheatley. It's on a lot of our materials. We literally read it every week at our team meeting, just to return to this idea:

"Despite current ads and slogans, the world doesn't change one person at a time. It changes when networks of relationships form among people who share a common cause and vision of what's possible. This is good news for those of us intent on creating a positive future. Rather than worry about critical mass, our work is to foster critical connections."

So thank you.

[applause]