How this founder turned his environmental passion into a thriving nonprofit

Pete Malinowski didn’t plan on founding a nonprofit. He just wanted to bring oysters back into New York Harbor.

After a childhood spent on his parents’ oyster farm, Malinowski became an instructor at the Harbor School, the New York City public high school on Governors Island with a maritime-focused curriculum. He used oyster farming and restoration as a way to teach students about marine ecosystems. The school’s location provided an ideal environment for his work. “Historically, New York Harbor was full of oysters,” he explained.

He soon realized that a true restoration of oyster reefs to the harbor would require far more resources. In 2014, together with Murray Fisher, the school’s co-founder and then-director, Malinowski co-founded the nonprofit Billion Oyster Project, and serves as its CEO today.

“At the start, it wasn’t about a nonprofit,” Malinowski said. “It was ‘Can we train students to restore oysters to New York Harbor? Can oysters survive in New York Harbor? Can they reproduce? Can we build reefs? Do the reefs work?’ It was all just sort of answering these questions and moving forward.”

In a conversation with Founder Brew, Malinowski discusses his biggest challenges and priorities as a nonprofit founder, from permits and bureaucracy to the benefits of using the grant writing process to sharpen a nonprofit’s purpose.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

What was your funding like in the early days and how has it changed?

There’s always been a fundraising element to Harbor School, and that was Murray’s job, after starting the school, to bring in those extra resources. When we moved to the island, Murray started New York Harbor Foundation, which was a nonprofit to raise money for the school’s on-water programs. Then we started Billion Oyster Project together, and that became a second initiative of the New York Harbor Foundation. What ended up happening is that Billion Oyster Project became the most effective way to drive resources to the school.

Since the beginning, Billion Oyster Project has been entirely philanthropically funded. It’s grants, corporate partnerships…city, state, and federal agencies, private foundations. Individuals are a big part of our funding…We’re a public charity; people give money to Billion Oyster Project. We do events to raise money.

We have been working on trying to understand alternate funding sources, and there’s a few really interesting opportunities…Any construction project that harms the environment is generally required to offset that damage by doing an environmental benefit project…We want to position Billion Oyster Project as an option for those construction projects that can offset their environmental damage by paying us to build oyster reefs. There certainly is competition, and this is an early stage thing that we’re trying to figure out.

What is the hardest thing you do?

Getting permission to put the oyster reefs on the bottom of New York Harbor is the hardest thing we do. If we were just allowed to restore as many oysters as we could, wherever we wanted to, we would have restored a billion oysters a long time ago.

We have several full-time staff members who that’s all they do—submit hundreds to thousands of unique pages of permitting documents every year, carry over 100 active environmental permits, get permission from New York State Department of Environmental Conservation, the Army Corps, the Coast Guard, the Department of State, Small Business Services. The amount of red tape and permission is insane, and it’s the biggest limiting factor.

What recommendations do you have for aspiring or first-time nonprofit founders?

We were fortunate to get some grants early on that created a runway for Billion Oyster Project, which had to do with timing, our positioning at the time. We wrote one big grant application and got a couple $100,000 from the Royal Bank of Canada, and then directly following Hurricane Sandy, we got some disaster recovery money to work on resilience oyster reefs as a resiliency tool, and then some water quality improvement money from the Department of Environmental Protection to do an oyster reef in Jamaica Bay.

We created Billion Oyster Project on the backs of those, and then very soon after got a National Science Foundation grant to develop our education programs. That was within six months of launching Billion Oyster Project. Those provided us with a runway and several years of funding that we could build around.

Grant writing is a really great way to hone your pitch, understand what resonates with funders, and get feedback on those and improve them and dial in your messaging, and that also leads to funding. Write 100 grant applications, and you’ll learn a lot from that process.