HAWAII MARINE ANIMAL RESPONSE

Our goals include the preservation, recovery and stewardship of the species within our focus. In the context of our organization and our mission, “Preservation" is defined as maintaining the health and population of the species. For those species that are endangered or threatened, “Recovery" is defined as growth of the species population and setting this growth on a trajectory leading to de-listing of the species from the protections provided under the U.S. Endangered Species Act. We also seek “Stewardship" of these species - the care, understanding and support of these animals by an engaged community as well as non-profit and government partners.

We are battling the threats to these species and accomplishing our goals using several key strategies: (1) build, manage and deploy field response team capacity to address animal activity, data collection, escalations and interventions on Hawaii shorelines and in near-shore waters; (2) engaged the public through robust outreach and education activity and resources, (3) manage hotlines and reporting resources to gather critical animal sightings, observation data, animal condition and potential health threat information and photo-documentation to enable species population research, animal management, and (4) build, manage and deploy rescue and stranding response capacity to help save animals from death and injury.

Hawaii Marine Animal Response (HMAR) is the largest Hawaii-based non-profit marine species response, rescue, outreach and education organization, measured both in terms of our team's size but also based on the size of our geographic range of operations. Our team members are well-trained, engaged, motivated and passionate. We maintain important relationships and agreements with key governmental organizations such as the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service and the State of Hawaii which allows us to perform meaningful and measurable activity to implement our mission, objectives and goals.

Since our founding in 2016 we have …

- received more then 46,000 phone calls into our hotlines regarding protected marine animals that may need support.
- had team members deployed in field response and support activities more than 21,000 times.
- performed or supported over 1,700 rescues, escalations or interventions.
- engaged in face-to-face outreach and education with members of the public more than 260,000 times.
- developed a workforce value resulting in approximately a 250% return on investment from the government funding we receive.