| Grantee | The Green Connection ↗ |
| Grant Amount | $500,000 |
| Duration | One Year |
The Who Stole Our Oceans project was launched by The Green Connection in 2020, with four focus areas or streams of work namely:
1. Community Empowerment
2. Targeted Advocacy
3. Strategic Legal Interventions
4 . Strategic Media Outputs
The GC theory of change aims to build grassroots community voices to speak out against local environmental injustices and to engage government processes and policies to bring about social change.
The strategy also includes a strong legal/advocacy role where expert and technical knowledge can be sourced and made accessible to communities to further empower them. The GC has also been able to use the courts successfully and having both in house legal advice as well as teams of public interest lawyers has enabled society to build and expand our capacity to tackle the onslaught of offshore oil and gas exploitation rights. The successive wins both in court (shell and searcher) and through the appeal processes (Karpower, Searcher) have provided hope to marginalised communities who have never been able to win against the big guys. This has drawn more community voices, including the voices of organised indigenous leadership to stand up against the oil and gas industry.
The GC is a small team (less than 10) of dedicated and passionate activists and 2022 was a year of inundation due to the relentless efforts from the fossil fuel sector to destroy our oceans. For 2023, the aim is to work smarter rather than increasing the workload. Building our network of allies and pacing ourselves for a marathon together with some additional capacity will ensure we maintain our excellent results.
