Coral Cay Conservation is now part of Marine Conservation Philippines
Coral Cay Conservation worked with coastal communities, volunteers, and researchers on reef conservation projects around the world, including a long-running programme in Southern Leyte, Philippines, based at Napantao from 2008.
CCC's operations closed in 2022. What remained was a significant archive: survey data, published research, training materials, and the record and fond memories of thousands of volunteers who took part in its work over 36 years.
Marine Conservation Philippines has since acquired the Coral Cay Conservation name and its digital archive, to preserve that history and keep it accessible, both to the people who were part of it and to those who still want to volunteer for reef conservation today.
This page is not a relaunch of Coral Cay Conservation as an active organisation. It's a home for its legacy, a place to revisit past projects, browse the scientific records and reconnect with fellow alumni.
For everyone who spent a season counting fish, filling in survey sheets, or falling asleep to the sound of the sea at Napantao, that work still matters. The reefs are still there, and they still need people who care enough to get in the water for them.
The CCC story does not end with an archive. It continues every day in the ocean, where we are still doing the work: training people who care, surveying reefs and protecting what's left to protect.
If Coral Cay gave you something, whether a skill, a friendship or a changed sense of what you're capable of, there's a way to give something back: join us as a volunteer, or support the work with a donation. The next chapter of this story is still being written, and there's a place in it for you.
Coral Cay Conservation was, for me, more than an organisation – it was two decades of work with coastal communities, volunteers, and researchers on reefs around the world, including here in the Philippines, where a number of our former volunteers and staff went on to further conservation work of their own. When I took on Coral Cay Conservation in 2011, I inherited a mission I cared about deeply, and when I made the difficult decision to close its operations in 2022, it was never because that mission stopped mattering.
Since then, I've been glad to see that work picked up by others who share the same commitment to reefs, to communities, and to careful, honest conservation science. In Marine Conservation Philippines, I recognise a lot of what made Coral Cay Conservation what it was.
I'm glad to see Marine Conservation Philippines carrying that spirit forward, and I'm pleased for this page to stand as a marker of that continuity – Coral Cay Conservation's history, and its ongoing legacy, now carried on through their work. To the people who cared enough to volunteer with Coral Cay Conservation, MCP is a deeply serious organisation, and I could not wish for a better successor NGO in the Philippines to carry the torch forward.