Save the Oceans!

You founded Sustainable Ocean Alliance in 2014, while you were still an undergraduate at Georgetown. When and how did you discover that protecting ocean health was your life's mission?

It's funny, because I always remember back when I was in Ecuador. I was born in Ecuador, in Quito to be specific. When I was a little girl, my grandma used to take me to the ocean and we went to these beautiful pristine beaches of Ecuador. I just remember growing up loving and being surrounded by nature, by the environment, by animals, and I'm feeling so at home in that pristine environment, that when I moved from Ecuador to Chicago, I remember looking outside the airplane window and asking the flight attendant, where are the mountains, because I was looking for the mountains where Chicago was all flatland. And so it was a pretty rude awakening for me going from the amazing ecosystems that Ecuador has to offer to a flatland Midwest, a city in Chicago. And so I think that the love for the environment to the importance of it was with me from a very early age. And it wasn't until I went to elementary school and I watched Al Gore's movie 'An Inconvenient Truth' that my eyes were opened to climate change.

Yeah. It's a great documentary.

Absolutely. I encourage everyone to watch it if you haven't done so already. There's a part two that came out recently. For me, learning about climate change as a kid, I was 12 years old at the time, and understanding how threatened my environment's health and penguins, the penguins that I love and adore are, I realized right there and then that climate change is the biggest threat to my generation, and I ultimately felt a responsibility to do something about it.

That is such a great story. So that was your true north. How important would you say having a true north is to leadership success?

I think it's so critical for people to develop self-awareness, for people to know and understand who they are, and ask themselves those hard questions, right. Because you're not going to find your true north unless you are looking at yourself in the mirror and doing things based on your own standards, and doing things based on your own passion, your own motivations, as opposed to following those of people that are around you, of people on social media, and people that may not necessarily be leading you in the right direction. So I do think that in order for you to find your true north, you truly have to first develop that self-awareness.