Saving The Seas

It was reported at the U.N. Ocean Conference in 2022 in Lisbon, Portugal that “Climate change, biodiversity loss, and pollution is exacting a devastating toll on the world’s ocean — critical to food security, economic growth, and the environment.”

Fishing for Families in Need (F4FN), a Boca Raton initiative founded by Lucas Metropulos in 2007, when he was just 15, was created to address this situation through the education of youth with the help of volunteers in the United States and the Caribbean.

Metropulos started his first class in 2008, teaching six children from the Fuller Child Development Center in Boca Raton to be ethical anglers and good stewards of the sea. Since then, he’s taught thousands of kids, ages 9-12, through hands-on and virtual classes — and provided thousands of fresh fish meals to local soup kitchens, like Boca Helping Hands, through an innovative fish waste reduction program.

Visiting a friend in the Bahamas at age 15, he learned about the issues facing marine life (like coral reefs dying) and gained a new appreciation of underwater habitats in his own community.

F4FN was officially renamed “Marine Education Initiative (MEI)” in 2019 as a nonprofit to lead new efforts to provide millennials and youth with opportunities to advance their knowledge and experience of protecting marine ecosystems.

“My brother, Nicholas, MEI’s executive director, and I use the power of aquaponics — using fish feces as nutrients injected into the water to help plants grow and hydroponics — growing plants using just water and nutrients,” Metropulos expresses. (He serves as MEI’s Board Chairman but earns his salary as a fundraising consultant to nonprofits.)

MEI’s Aquaponics Center relocated this year to a 7,500-square-foot facility in Delray Beach to provide more educational access and expand the organization’s food security programs.

“We’re growing microgreens in a vertical stack and expanded amounts of lettuce and kale,” says Metropulos, who turns 31 this month and recently earned his MBA from Duke University. “Sustainable agriculture (like aquaponics) is our overall theme. We harvest the crops and donate them (50,000+ meals of fresh greens — to date) and have the ability to make program revenue.”

Groups visit the center to learn about the crops and MEI brings together many diverse people (volunteers, interns, the community) to support a worthy cause.

“Being able to educate kids — growing more crops with less space and less resources, like water — is the future,” Metropulos explains.

For more information about the Marine Education Initiative, call 561-405-5576 or visit marineinitiative.org.