Please add your name to the www.alotmeant.com map and rescue a coral today!

www.alotmeant.com

Please watch the video, follow us on social media or even better, from your phone or desktop, send a gift of a diver foraging a piece of coral and giving it a chance to live now!

Haydon's Story

My brother, Haydon, built a dive school in Koh Tao, Thailand after leaving school after his A-Levels and working hard supporting a tree surgeon in the day and as a security guard at night to save up the money to make it happen.

Koh Tao is a beautiful small island in the gulf of Thailand and Haydon lives there with his partner and my three nephews. Not that many people live on Koh Tao but it usually has a vast amount of visitors each year as it is a famed diving area. His dive school was a success.

Haydon chose positive action

Covid obviously impacted Haydon's business dramatically as tourism was stilted throughout the globe. Just before it happened, Haydon had attended a course about coral preservation with a view to adding an eco-tourism strand to the business and got a licence for the activity from the Department of Marine Conservation. So instead of doing nothing when Covid hit he chose to take positive action.

I didn't know before ALotMeant that the coral was so important! Rainforests are responsible for roughly one-third (28%) of the Earth's oxygen but most (70%) of the oxygen in the atmosphere is produced by marine plants.??

"Reefs are a source of food and income for over 500 million people.” Richard Vevers - Chasing Coral, Netflix Original

So Haydon set up teams of local volunteers to use the dive school boat in the first few weeks after Covid hit to forage for damage coral, build and deploy structures, and save and extend the reef one coral at a time. It already looks amazing!

ALotMeant

Haydon called me worried about the impact of Covid and said he was going to set up a JustGiving page to get money for the volunteers to do more as they were struggling. I said, wouldn't it be cool if we could make it sustainable rather than charitable. We didn't have the money to support the project so we organised a one hour meeting with some super people to see what we could do. ALotMeant was born!

In the vein of the 'million dollar pixel page' when the internet first started, we created a digital map and built a website where you can purchase a diver to go down, forage a coral and rescue it for just ￡17. My Dad put some money to help us set up the website and the incredible team of people have all given their time each week to help us build the website - thank you so much! We didn't set up as a charity as we would love to make ALotMeant truly sustainable, paying people to save more coral and trying to do it in as many places as possible.

We are not sure what we can do or how successful we will be, but ALotMeant offers the opportunity to rescue a coral, gift that to a friend or loved one or just do something from where you sit now to attempt to help and make a difference. You can add your name and picture, URL or business logo to the map and please do share with everyone you know. We might even manage to build a whole reef together...

I would like my daughter to experience the ocean the way I have so far in my life and I am moved by the things this project has taught me about the ocean - not just the importance but how time is running out. This is my small effort to actually try to do something thanks to my little brother.

Haydon - well done, I am super proud of you and let's hope we can try to make a difference for our children!

If you get a moment, please do take a look, support if you can and whether we are successful or not at least we are trying to take action and make a positive difference.

www.alotmeant.com