The Hope Summit 2024: Reshaping Our Relationship with the Ocean Through Community-Driven Solutions

“When we protect our waters, we protect ourselves.” – Dr. Wallace J. Nichols

The Power of Hope

Hope is a powerful thing. 

As Australian musician Nick Cave tells us, 

"It is adversarial. It is the warrior emotion that can lay waste to cynicism… It says the world and its inhabitants have value and are worth defending. It says the world is worth believing in. In time, we come to find that it is so."

For the third year, community leaders, experts, engaged citizens, and young people gathered in Charleston, South Carolina for The Hope Summit, sharing the common goal of developing and accelerating community-driven solutions to the many complex and intersectional challenges facing our world.

Organized and hosted by my nonprofit, the Carolina Ocean Alliance, The Hope Summit 2024 invited its attendees and participants to “reshape our relationship with water, waterways, and the ocean through community-driven solutions.” 

For me, hope at The Hope Summit comes in three forms. 

The first kind of hope comes from community-driven solutions that give us the agency and dignity to be the change we need to protect, preserve, and restore what we love. 

The second kind of hope comes from the people who remind us why we committed our lives to servant leadership and stewardship of what we love. 

The third kind of hope comes from faith and ecology, showing us that we are part of something greater than ourselves: interconnected communities of living beings, each with our unique superpower to serve our community and work toward a brighter future.

The Hope Summit’s recurring thematic emphasis on community comes from my core philosophy that “to heal our world, and ourselves in the process, we must see ourselves as a part of the natural world, not apart from it, redefining ‘community’ through ecology, understanding that we are part of a vast interconnected web of life that surrounds, supports, and sustains us.”

By understanding and working with the natural systems that connect us, humanity can adapt to a changing climate, protect and restore key ecosystems, halt biodiversity loss, and promote a regenerative and equitable future for communities worldwide. Through a systems-based understanding of the world and an emphasis on community-driven solutions and governance, we can uplift and empower local leaders and traditional ecosystem managers to restore and steward their lands, wetlands, rivers, estuaries, islands, and oceans while creating viable pathways to prosperity for frontline communities.

The future must include people because we are a part of this world and are responsible for protecting what is in danger, restoring what was lost, remembering what was forgotten, and uplifting the regenerative powers of our world to heal, grow, and forge a future that our children and grandchildren can shape in their image.

Honoring Dr. Wallace J. Nichols

One of the inspirations for this year’s theme, Dr. Wallace J. Nichols, was set to be the Summit’s keynote speaker before tragically passing away in the Summer of 2024. In his bestselling book, Blue Mind, Dr. Nichols wrote, 

“Preserving, protecting, and restoring our waters are tasks for many lifetimes, and sometimes the effort can seem overwhelming. But as long as we stay connected with all of the many, many blessings that water provides, and continue to keep that love in the forefront of our minds and hearts, as long as we remind ourselves to hope, then our stories will help connect others to water and encourage them to do what they can to help care for this beautiful Blue Marble world.”

You could feel Dr. Nichols’ presence throughout the weekend with Blue Mind infused into the very soul of this year’s event. 

The Film Festival, The Summit, & More

The Hope Summit 2024 opened with its first Film Festival, featuring an opening program of short films from the International Ocean Film Foundation Traveling Program followed by the feature screening of River, a stunning cinematic and musical masterpiece exploring humanity's relationship with the waterways that shaped us, how we sought to control them, and how the key to our future must be restoring the health of those rivers as we restore our respect and reverence for them. 

After the screening, Zach Bjur (CVSC), Brooke Blosser (Coastal Conservation League), and Joel Caldwell (The MARSH Project) discuss the challenges facing the Lowcountry of South Carolina's waterways, to the communities most intimately connected to them, and what those communities can do to restore their waterways.

The following morning, attendees joined community members for a natural history walk along Halsey Creek, one of the few surviving tidal creeks on the Charleston peninsula, to learn how a dedicated group of neighbors are “speaking for their local creek” to establish an ecological corridor from their creek to the more heavily degraded Newmarket Creek a few blocks away. 

The MARSH Project was among two dozen local and visiting nonprofits, community-serving organizations, and sustainable businesses that joined the Carolina Ocean Alliance in the heart of downtown Charleston for its third Hope Summit Community Festival. Visitors could learn about coastal wetland conservation and restoration, the small businesses leading the charge to restore native plant species to our community, public-private partnerships to reduce waste and litter, the campaign to protect the world’s largest deep-sea coral ecosystems, and many other inspiring efforts to heal and nourish regional human and non-human communities.

The last two days of The Hope Summit 2024 featured a two-day conference that began with Blue Mind's deeply personal and intimate experiences before scaling out to regenerative governance strategies to empower citizens to be active participants in the future of their communities, country, and planet. 

Reshaping our relationship with water—particularly waterways and the ocean—became an exercise in community-building. Through a multi-disciplinary approach, borrowing from ecology (or as Dr. Nichols put it, “just as rivers join on their way to the ocean”), we combined science with the experiential, the head and the heart, to make the Blue Mind experience tangible and emphasizing the need for a holistic, intersectional approach to healing our communities and our planet. 

This includes the spiritual and traditional ways of seeing, knowing, and interacting with our waters as shown by Hermina Glass-Hill, Tori Hunt, Marilyn Hemingway, Queen Quet, Beth Remmes, and Lydia Locklear. This also includes the world of science, data, and policy. In some cases, we needed to look to our past to find solutions for the future like how Dr. Nic Butler, Katie Zimmerman, and Emma Berry showed the power of dormant ferry and marine transit to reconnect fragmented communities and restore equitable pathways lost to automobile-based societies. 

Investing in the Future

The conference reaffirmed Carolina Ocean Alliance’s commitment to invest in the future of community-driven solutions by funding the development of our community’s young leaders.

With the launch of The Hope Summit Next Generation Fund this year, nearly 100 students and early professionals attended the conference with sponsored passes including Carissa Cabrera and Alex Filardo of FutureSwell and SOA Young Ocean Leaders led by SOA North America Regional Representative Mark Haver. 

The Youth Experience at the Summit

Here are some powerful testimonials from some of our star Young Ocean Leaders who attended this year’s Hope Summit:

Kyle Rezek, SOA UNC Hub Leader: 

“This was my second time attending [The Hope Summit] and it was great to see it grow in both size and activities. Grey Gowder has shown us that there is Hope all around us, just as water surrounds us, and it is up to us to find it, harness it, and spread it.”

Hannah Connell, SOA Boston University Hub Leader: 

“The Hope Summit reaffirmed my belief that our relationship with water and our relationship with each other is inextricably linked. This is part of a larger movement that goes beyond our individual actions. It’s about coming together, embracing our collective responsibility, and driving change that will ripple across generations.”

Mickey Rogers, SOA Pacific Northwest Hub Leader: 

“The [Hope] Summit brought together so many SOA North America leaders and a wave of renewed commitment and passion for ocean advocacy. My personal takeaway, inspired by a message shared by Hermina Glass-Hill, Founder of Susie King Taylor Women's Institute and Ecology Center, is that you do not need to be a scientist to be an advocate, however, scientists do have a responsibility to be advocates.”

The Hope Summit 2025

With another Hope Summit completed, planning is already underway for The Hope Summit 2025, which will be held in Charleston, South Carolina from September 24-28, 2025, and will explore the theme, “Community-Driven Solutions Through Resilience, Regeneration, and the Restoration Economy.” 

Attendees will enjoy a two-day conference, an expanded film festival, a full day of arts and culture at the Arts & Creative Solutions Expo, many official side events and Hope Summit Experiences, and a celebration of World Rivers Day at our Community Festival. 

Tickets and conference passes will go on sale in Spring 2025 with Next Generation Fund applications opening in the Summer 2025.

Learn more at www.thehopesummit.org and follow @thehopesummit_charleston @carolinaoceanalliance for updates. 

Full recordings of The Hope Summit 2024 Conference panels and speakers will be free to stream in Winter 2025.

Sustainable Ocean Alliance is a proud official sponsor of the Hope Summit.

Summit Media Partners: FutureSwell, Carissa Cabrera, and Alex Filardo