The journey to creating ilili, has not been easy and it has been plagued by the very familiar impostor syndrome and the trials and tribulations of the philanthropy world. There really is not much out there on how to start an organization, how to assemble a board and how to strategically think of your mission. How do you start an organization with zero funding and how do you convince funders that your idea is worth investing in? These were all recurring thoughts in my head bac

for Honduras, where the Shark Sanctuary Legislation, was met with severe resistance since its inception. In 2016, the Government decided to amend the legislation to allow “incidental captures to be commercialized”. However, within the legislation incidental captures were defined as an indefinite number of sharks. This significantly complicated the situation and made enforcement more difficult. To this day, fishers continue getting their incidental captures seized with several

A few months ago, our friend Andrea Laitano from Andrea Laitano Photography ,took some  headshots of me (Gaby). In this session she brought some beautiful ocean inspired jewelry. I immediately fell in love!  At the same time, the jewelry designer Erin Siegel, saw some of the photos and asked if I could be a model for some of the pieces. Unfortunately, I was in the middle of my Phd  qualifying exams and my brain was mush at this point. Curious to learn more from each other, we