Sea Forward Fund Deep Dive and Q&A

1. How can a small nonprofit access donor advised fund capital to diversify its revenue?

The simplest step is to make it easy for DAF holders to give to you. You could add a “give from a DAF” option to your website with your legal name and EIN, and ask your donors directly whether they have a DAF, especially at year end. You can also invite them to make recurring or multi-year grants, which gives you steadier income, and communities like DAF Commons are a good place to meet DAF holders who want to do more with their giving.

2. Have you seen any returns yet?

Most of our investments are in early-stage venture and impact funds, which usually take around ten years to return capital, so it is still early for us, and most of our gains so far are on paper rather than cash back in the fund. When returns do come back, they can be reinvested through Sea Forward, granted out, or returned to a donor’s DAF, which is how our Everblue Model keeps capital working.

3. How does Sea Forward’s multi-donor model work for people who don’t have a DAF?

You don’t need a DAF to join us. Through CataCap, you can open a donor account in a few minutes and contribute from $200. Your contribution is tax deductible when you make it, and you choose to allocate it to the Sea Forward Ocean Health Fund, where it is pooled with other donors and invested across our portfolio. You can follow your contribution and its impact on your own dashboard. If you’d like to go further, you can also invest in some of the funds and companies connected to our portfolio directly on CataCap, including SWEN Blue Ocean II and the Global Fund for Coral Reefs, or Coral Vita, where a few of our team members have made a personal investment. If you’d like to make a larger gift or talk through other options, you can reach us at hello@seaforwardfund.org.

4. How does an everblue fund approach liquidity and exits?

If you contribute through CataCap, you choose what happens to any returns related to your contribution. You can leave them in Sea Forward to be reinvested in ocean impact, or have them returned to your CataCap account to put toward another impact investment or grant to a charity. Either way, the money stays charitable, which is what makes it everblue: the same dollars can keep working for good. Most of the funds we invest in have terms of around ten years, so any returns tend to arrive gradually, and as more opportunities with greater liquidity become available to us, we will work to balance our portfolio. As with any impact investment, returns are not guaranteed.

5. How is Sea Forward governed, and how do the different partners work together?

Sea Forward is a multi-donor fund held at ImpactAssets, a nonprofit donor advised fund sponsor. ImpactAssets holds the assets, handles compliance and gives final approval on every investment and grant, which provides independent oversight. Our Fund Director recommends the investments, supported by a senior investment advisor and a science and impact lead who carry out our diligence. A separate grants committee reviews and selects our grants. We also share diligence and learn alongside peer investors such as Heading for Change and Builders Vision, and convene an Investment Advisory Circle with Toniic, where experienced impact investors review opportunities with us. CataCap is the platform that lets donors join from $200, and their contributions are pooled into the same fund.

6. What are the biggest barriers to ocean impact investing, and how can we overcome them?

The biggest barrier is simply that most people don’t know the ocean is an option, so it stays one of the most underfunded areas in philanthropy and investing. There are practical barriers too. Many ocean funds have minimums of a quarter million dollars or more, deals tend to be small and early stage, and it can be hard to compare impact across very different companies. We try to address each of these: pooling lets donors at all levels reach funds they couldn’t reach alone, sharing diligence with peers saves everyone time, and using a common framework like the 1000 Ocean Startups Ocean Impact Navigator makes impact easier to measure and compare. Institutional capital tends to follow proven markets rather than lead them, so we see our role as catalytic, investing early to help show what works so that larger capital can follow.

What are the most promising investment opportunities in the blue economy today?

We are seeing some of the most promising solutions in sustainable aquaculture and alternative feeds, which take pressure off wild fish stocks, and in seaweed, which is being turned into everything from crop fertilizers to plastic alternatives. Ocean data and AI are also moving quickly, helping fishers, fish farms and coastal managers make better decisions. Beyond those, we’re excited about circular economy solutions that keep plastic out of the ocean, cleaner shipping and ports, ocean renewable energy, and coastal resilience and restoration, such as growing coral to restore reefs. Many of these are still early stage, which is part of why pooled, diversified funds are a good way in.