2025 SEE Turtles Annual Report

President’s Letter

2025 started about as rough as it gets. With the new administration, we were bracing for bad news on many fronts. We didn’t have to wait long before the news we anticipated arrived. SEE Turtles, like many nonprofits around the world, had our funding cut off from the U.S. government. Our staff spent years building an award-winning program to address the tortoiseshell trade and we were thrilled to receive a three-year $240,000 grant — the largest total grant our organization has received.

The loss of that grant was difficult. Our Too Rare To Wear program will be scaled back drastically until we are able to secure new funding sources. SEE Turtles was able to weather this setback without cutting staff or core programs, primarily due to the generous emergency support provided by some of our longest-term donors. We also stepped up to find funds for several of our partners who also lost funding — many of these programs would have shut down without this infusion of support.

As the year progressed, the future of our organization came into sharper focus. Our staff organized a scouting trip to a brand new continent for the organization, Africa. In Kenya, we met with local partners and saw firsthand the impact of our work. During that trip, we laid the groundwork for our first Africa conservation trip.

We were thrilled to see this Kenya trip fill in less than 2 weeks, becoming our most profitable trip to date. We also relaunched two popular trips from the past, Galapagos and Cuba, both of which sold out. With these and our other trips, 2025 was our best year yet for our conservation tours, generating more than $400,000 for the organization and local partners.

Our other programs thrived as well, despite the headwinds. Billion Baby Turtles surpassed 20 million hatchlings saved to date and welcomed several new partners. Before our grant was suspended, we made major progress on our SEE Shell App and supported the great work of partners in Costa Rica, Panama, and Colombia in combating the illegal sea turtle trade. We also issued our first grants to projects focused on reducing the impacts of fishing on sea turtles.

As the year concluded, we finalized the largest investment in our 17-year history: the acquisition of student travel company EcoTeach. The original vision of SEE Turtles—imagined by our late co-founder, Dr. Wallace J. Nichols—was to support coastal communities through conservation travel. While we have advanced that mission over the years, this milestone positions us to finally achieve it at scale.

EcoTeach has long been a supporter and collaborator of SEE Turtles. This acquisition will allow us to significantly expand our conservation travel program, generating far greater impact for sea turtle conservation and coastal communities. It also strengthens our financial foundation by reducing reliance on grants.

Over the next several years, SEE Turtles expects to double its staff and budget, positioning the organization among the most impactful sea turtle conservation groups worldwide. None of this would have been possible without the support of our community. Every donor, company, traveler, and foundation that believed in our work has made this success possible.

Brad Nahill, President, SEE Turtles