Clarissa Kusel
About Clarissa Kusel
I am an entrepreneur by training and an innovator by nature. If I could summarize the underlying themes that have driven both my career and personal life, I would say I am a community builder, I am a sustainable change-maker, and I revel in thinking beyond, and outside of the box. After graduating from the beautiful University of California, Santa Barbara I joined SEE International, a non-profit centered around eliminating curable blindness as their International Operations Manager. There I shadowed our ophthalmic partners like the Moran Eye Center and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine to understand how I could scale programs to make a bigger impact on a local level. In 2018, I launched USA’s first LINKS program: a program designed to strengthen international eyecare programs by linking them with educational institutions. Relationship building was its core competency. Through this work, I recognized the irreplaceable value of having a diverse group of voices contribute to the decision-making process. A myriad of social inequalities prevents this access, leading me to seek out the Diversity & Inclusion Certificate from eCornell equipping me with the skills to coach the recognition and prevention of unconscious bias in the workplace. In early 2017, I brought these techniques into my own hobby: surfing. Motivated purely by frustration, I co-founded a social platform called The Ocean is Female. I taught myself the basics of Wordpress website design and Instagram marketing to build a platform to counterbalance the monoculture found in the surf industry. This project aims to redefine female surf culture by sharing the many diverse stories of women around the world who are defining for themselves what it means to be a female surfer. This passion project led me to pursue a Master of Science in Social Entrepreneurship at the University of Southern California, Marshall School of Business. I am working to apply my skills and experiences to think beyond what we have submitted ourselves to believe is “all we can do” to build a social enterprise that changes our social and environmental landscape for the better. May 2020 we officially launched our ocean-friendly marketplace, SeaBlue Collective. This marketplace works closely with small businesses to make their supply chains more ocean-friendly and sell these products to an ocean-loving community. Our vision is build an economy where prosperity is measured not in dollars and cents but in the health of our oceans and the vitality of our communities. Stay tuned.