Oceana was established in 2001 by a group of leading foundations — The Pew Charitable Trusts, Oak Foundation, Marisla Foundation (formerly Homeland Foundation), and the Rockefeller Brothers Fund.
In 1999, these foundations commissioned a study and discovered that less than 0.5 percent of all resources spent by environmental nonprofit groups in the United States went to ocean advocacy — an appalling statistic. No organization was working exclusively to protect and restore the oceans on a global scale.
