Youth Ambassadors on Capitol Hill: A New Wave of Ocean Advocacy
In the latest episode of Rising Tide the Ocean Podcast, David sits down with oceanographer and Blue Frontier board member Joy LeiLei Shih to talk about the Youth Ambassador program before turning the microphone over to the 2026 ambassadors themselves — Avery, 13, Jack, 13, Liam, 14, and Kianna, 16 — fresh off an Ocean Week trip to Washington DC.
The conversation digs into what it actually looks like when teenagers work the halls of Congress: three days, a dozen meetings, and a clear-eyed mission to educate elected officials and their staff on everything from plastic waste to sea turtle protection. The ambassadors also recount their direct meetings with Senators Padilla, Schiff and Schatz, and Representatives Raskin, Huffman and Liccardo — exchanges that were, by all accounts, anything but perfunctory.
It's a rich conversation and a timely reminder that ocean youth — even those still navigating middle school hallways — aren't simply leaders in waiting. Given the right support and mentorship, they're more than capable of leading right now.
The capital smelled like ambition that week. Down the marble corridors of Congress, past the portraits of dead legislators and the hustle of aides with nowhere enough time, a group of teenagers was making their case for the ocean.
They were the Youth Ambassadors of Blue Frontier, and they had come to Washington with a purpose most adults spend their careers sidestepping: holding power accountable.
David Helvarg, investigative journalist and host of Rising Tide: The Ocean Podcast, was there to watch it happen.
The program itself was born in 2022, the brainchild of Joy LeLe Shi, an oceanographer and Blue Frontier board member who had traveled the same road these young people were now walking. Her own arc from youth advocate to professional leader wasn't lost on her. She'd built the Ambassador program to shorten that distance for the next generation.
For many of the Ambassadors, the Hill visits were their first taste of citizen lobbying — what Blue Frontier calls its "outside-inside" approach to activism, the belief that street-level pressure and backroom conversation aren't opposites but partners. The young advocates earned face time with Senators Padilla, Schiff, and Schatz, and with Representatives Raskin, Huffman, and Liccardo. They weren't escorted in for a photo and ushered back out. They talked.
Ambassador Avery left Senator Schatz's office struck by the genuine back-and-forth over sea turtle signage and marine education outreach — the kind of meeting that doesn't end with a staffer handing you a pamphlet. Kiana drove deeper still, pressing on consumerism and plastic pollution in the ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles, naming names and asking for accountability.
The work doesn't stop when they leave Washington. Kianna channels the crisis into art, transforming plastic debris into pieces that children can hold, examine, and reimagine as something other than waste. Jack and Liam have launched the Barry Trail, threading environmental stewardship into the connective tissue of community. Another Ambassador traced the problem to its source, conducting a plastic audit in a single Los Angeles school that ultimately moved district policy.
Small actions, large consequences. That's the theory, and so far the evidence is holding.
There was a moment, Helvarg noted, when Jack stood outside what had once been JFK's office — a young person in a building built for history, aware that he was standing in a place where history is still being made or squandered, depending on who shows up and what they're willing to say.
These Ambassadors showed up. And they said it plainly: the ocean is in trouble, and the people who hold the levers of power need to hear that from someone who will still be alive to face the consequences.
The rising tide, it turns out, has a voice.
