Coasts . Communities . Conservation

Who are we?
Terra Conscious is a conservation - social impact responsible travel enterprise founded in February 2017 by Puja Mitra and Roshan Gonsalves, based out of North Goa, India.

We offer responsible marine and coastal travel experiences conducted in partnership with local communities to enable informed and sensitive engagement with the marine environment for both the visitor and local tourism operators.

We work primarily with local community boat partners who are empowered , through our Boat Operator Partnership Programme to transform their practices into being more sustainable and ethical. We also support our travel experiences with complementary social impact programmes, such as our Marine Wildlife Stranding Response & Monitoring Network (run in collaboration with Drishti Marine, Goa Forest Department and IUCN - India) that focus on creating awareness, building capacity for various stakeholders to enable them to address marine and coastal conservation challenges and engage in grassroots action.

Mission

• To enable and promote marine and coastal conservation through responsible conservation oriented travel experiences conducted in partnership with local community partners.
• To build awareness about marine wildlife and conservation challenges.
•  To apply a social-ecological lens in understanding conservation issues that impact local livelihood, species and habitat and enabling collaborative conservation action on the ground.

Why do we need your help?

We are a small start-up, with big dreams and passion to make a difference, so please do help us to achieve our goals by helping us to build our organisation and strengthen our programmes.

Specific support - To strengthen, expand and grow these two programmes depicted below.

What will we do with the money raised?
We are essentially asking for your help to raise some seed capital for us, that can help us stabilise and enhance these programmes in the coming year, with the aim of building up our revenue stream as well, so that in future we can support our social impact programmes in-house.

Organisation Building
- Hire a coordinator for both programmes - covers cost for one year
- Hire two field staff - covers cost for one year
- Cover our running costs, such as office rent, phone, internet, fuel for a period of one year, till our revenue model is more stable and can support the expenses we incur for our social impact programmes as well.

Boat Operator Support - Boat Maintenance + Equipment
- Purchase equipment such as additional hydrophones (we have only 1 , and since we have 8 operators who have 3 boats between them, in case all boats go out on the same day , we need to provide the same equipment on all boats), binoculars (2 sets per boat), projector, screen - which are necessary for the boat trips as well as for our capacity building and outreach work.
- Purchase 30 lifejackets to replace the old ones that the boat operators currently use
- Assist them in painting their boats and re-doing the boat awnings
- Conduct 5 training workshops to expand our Boat Operator Partnership Programme into additional locations in Goa.

We have demonstrated proof of concept in one year since inception, and have now added 8 boat operators to our programme and conducted 17 trips successfully last season . We have also trained 555 lifeguards/beach cleaning staff to monitor our coasts and report strandings of cetaceans (dolphins, whales and porpoises) and sea turtles and also facilitated the training of 12 animal husbandry vets to perform marine necropsies and treatment. We have done this with just 2 founding members and 4 interns and some funding support for the lifeguard capacity building workshops from IUCN-India. Our interns have moved on to their Masters Programme now, and after one year of running our enterprise, we now need your help to hire a team, expand and manage these programmes and continue the social impact we want to make in this space of community empowerment and marine conservation in Goa. 

Boat Operator Partnership Programme                                            

You can email us at terraconscious.contact@gmail.com or call on +91-8308600699 if you would like more information on these programmes. 

Thank You
Puja Mitra & Roshan Gonsalves

Founder - Director & Co-Founder, Terra Conscious