Setting Sail: OEF’s Stable Seas Program Reaches New Milestone

The Stable Seas program at OEF has reached a new milestone. Because of the team’s success in demonstrating how information about the relationships between multiple aspects of maritime security and on-shore violence can shape the preparedness of government leaders, it is being spun off as an independent entity after a successful incubation period at OEF.

As of May 1, 2021, the Stable Seas program’s research  tools, name, logo, website, and flagship information products will transfer ownership from OEF to a new independent entity being formed by a consortium of core partners anchored by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), a long-time OEF partner whose mission focusses on global peace and security, human rights and development by making the world safer from drugs, crime, corruption and terrorism. 

The new iteration of Stable Seas will take the form of a new transnational nonprofit to be called the Stable Seas Foundation. This new entity will build on the brand's reputation for empirical and rigorous maritime security research, but it will do so as the hub of a new consortium that will involve international partners and funders from some of the world's leading maritime-focused universities, think tanks, and intergovernmental organizations.

The Stable Seas Foundation will take on production of reports such as the Maritime Security Index, the Maritime Terrorism Portal, the State of Piracy report, and the derivative analysis of each, with collaboration from the core partners.

Current Stable Seas program team members will continue to work on current projects for several months until OEF’s Stable Seas programmatic efforts in Colorado are wound down and drawn to a close. Some of OEF’s program team members are likely to be candidates for employment by the newly established Stable Seas Foundation.

“Through the Stable Seas program team’s excellent work, One Earth Future has demonstrated how problems previously seen as either disconnected questions of law enforcement and national security, are actually part of systemic weaknesses that are increasingly driving conflict and insecurity at sea and on shore,” said OEF Founder and CEO, Marcel Arsenault. “National governments around the world have noticed these relationships and worked with Stable Seas to refine and further develop their strategies and related training programs. I commend the extraordinary Stable Seas team for their dedication and accomplishments, and join them in thanking our esteemed partners in the work of this important initiative over the years for all of your collaboration and support.”

OEF Executive Director and COO, Jon Bellish, said, “This is one example of how a program team’s impact can be recognized for its contributions to address a critical threat in the world beyond what we could achieve ourselves. Though for One Earth Future in this case, the success is bittersweet. Because of these developments, OEF has made a decision to close Stable Seas as an OEF program, and we will lose treasured staff members here in Colorado, even as the program’s impact lives on.” 

Because One Earth Future operates as an incubator of programs that contribute to peace in various locations around the world, embedded into that organizational design is the idea that the specific projects in our portfolio will evolve over time.  We expect individual programs to demonstrate measurable results from their models for impact, to grow with the help of other organizations until they work at the scale of the issues they’re addressing, and eventually to graduate from the OEF incubator and become self-sustaining. We think that with this transition, the Stable Seas program of OEF has reached that point.

One Earth Future Foundation (OEF) is a private, non-profit operating foundation established in the U.S. State of Colorado in 2007 and funded by Canadian philanthropist Marcel Arsenault and his wife, Cynda Collins Arsenault. Committed in its mission to foster sustainable peace, One Earth Future is an incubator of innovative peacebuilding programs focused on designing, testing and partnering to scale programs that work to eliminate the root causes of war. OEF works in networked partnership with innovative world leaders, global development agencies and community leaders to solve complex problems at the root of armed conflict through orchestrated collaboration. OEF operates from offices in Colorado, Colombia, Vienna, Somalia, and Washington, DC. and holds ECOSOC Special Consultative Status with the United Nations. For more information, visit oneearthfuture.org.