Ozeankind® e.V.

Ozeankind® e.V.
Ozeankind is an environmental education organization. We work with children so they understand how their everyday choices connect to the state of the ocean, and so they start acting on that understanding themselves. Education leads our work. Plastic and the ocean are the context children learn in, not the goal in itself.

Our approach follows three steps: understand, put into context, act. Children first grasp how plastic reaches the sea and what it does there. They learn where it fits into their own lives and consumption. Then they decide for themselves what to change. We treat children as agents who make decisions, never as recipients of aid.

In Germany, our Plastikrebell education programme has reached around 10,000 children since 2020, distributed through school partnerships. Every summer in Kiel we run a camp that combines snorkelling with hands-on environmental education, so children experience the Baltic underwater and understand what threatens it. In Berlin we run CleanUps as citizen science, where children collect and record data rather than simply pick up litter.

On Zanzibar we work with our local partner organization Ocean Kind Zanzibar, which runs six SwopShops. Children bring collected plastic and exchange it for school and hygiene materials, and take part in environmental education while they do. More than 6,800 children are registered across the six shops, and eleven local women work there as staff. The plastic problem on Zanzibar is largely local and driven by tourism, and the SwopShops make the response visible in the places where it matters.

We orient our work around the global sustainability goals, above all quality education and responsible consumption. Children who understand the ocean grow into people who protect it.
https://ozeankind.de