Celebrating Three Years with SAGE

Last month marked my three-year anniversary with SAGE. I’ve spent the last few weeks reflecting on what this time has meant to me and about the significance of our contributions to the seafood sector and the broader gender equality movement. 

On paper, I’ve done a lot since beginning my work with SAGE in March of 2023—I’ve designed programs and curricula, given numerous presentations at conferences all over the world, met lifelong friends who work in all parts of the seafood supply chain, and learned a huge amount about the sector and the people and communities who comprise it.  

Personally, my most notable achievement was the publication of an article I wrote last year about gender equality in the seafood sector. These are all accomplishments that have been detailed in our social media posts over the last few years.  

Notably, they occurred during a time of deep divide and precarity, which has shifted the funding landscape and political will away from what SAGE offers. The context under which we managed to get this work done should not be ignored, as it was and continues to be a heavy and complicated lift. 

But if I look a little further past the surface of what we’ve done and how we did it, I see a kaleidoscope of the parts making up the whole of our mission. The growth I’ve experienced as a gender equality practitioner has certainly come in the program planning, the conference strategizing, the presentation building, the networking, the figuring out of next steps. 

That growth, however, has become electrified by the moments in between: the sparks of joy and creativity that come in the form of building something from the ground up, tweaking it, changing course, and trying again. The moments when I watch people in the audience develop an understanding of the importance of what we’re doing and sit up a little taller in their chairs. The dinners with seafood friends who are new to the sector and those who’ve been in the sector their entire adult lives, the way all their faces light up when they talk about sustainability, progress, human rights, or a new job opportunity at their company.   

Many of us stay in this sector because of what we think is possible. This is something I admire and celebrate about SAGE. We are a small organization trying to do really big things, things that challenge, inspire, and enable me to be creative and curious daily. And ultimately, things that are possible.  

So, my biggest takeaway is that in the last three years I haven’t felt stuck—we’ve tried programs and initiatives that haven’t worked, we’ve tried reworking them, we’ve let them go, we’ve taken our time, we’ve adapted to the circumstances, and we’ve changed our approach. While there have certainly been moments where we feel defeated, we haven’t given up. The light of possibility glimmers just ahead of us, and we continue moving toward it.