About Us

Fawn Liebengood grew up in Portland, Oregon captivated by marine life. As a kid, she was constantly begging her parents for another book about marine life, driving for hours to the Aquarium, or freezing her butt off in the cold Oregon rain standing on a ship’s bow looking for whale spouts. She wanted to be a marine biologist but chose to pursue a career as a Psychologist because it seemed like a more stable career.

While Fawn was studying Psychology, she had the opportunity to go to Hawaiʻi with her school choir. While there she met a US Marine and they fell in love. It was through dating him and seeing firsthand the struggles our military and veterans go through, that she developed a deep passion for supporting our military community and her desire to help our military community flourished.

As Fawn was preparing to take her entrance exams for graduate school, she was hit by a car in a crosswalk. She spent the next few months recovering on the couch with her dog, a Yorkie named Bug. She knew the car accident was a sign to return to work she felt truly passionate about. As she recovered, Fawn began seeing the marine life she loved so much entangled in fishing line or starving to death after ingesting microplastics. She felt compelled to step up and do something about the marine debris epidemic plaguing our oceans. Fawn would not become a Marine Biologist, but she would help protect the marine life she loved so much from marine debris.

After recovering from her car accident, Fawn spent two years working with the Single Marine and Sailor program (SMSP) at Marine Corps Base Hawaiʻi taking participants on recreation and volunteer activities around the Hawaiian Islands. In 2014, Fawn co-founded 808 Cleanups, a 501(c)3 environmental nonprofit organization committed to restoring Hawaiʻi’s natural beauty by empowering volunteers to conduct decentralized cleanups from mountains to oceans. She has led hundreds of environmental cleanups across the Hawaiian Islands and helped volunteers plan and organize their own cleanup events. After leaving SMSP, she continued supporting military volunteers by offering them regular volunteer opportunities to clean up Hawaiʻi’s coastlines and reefs.

Fawn came up with the idea for BOW while attending the Sixth International Marine Debris Conference in 2018. After cofounding 808 Cleanups, Fawn felt drawn to do more to prevent marine debris and more to support our military and veteran community. But at the time, she couldn’t figure out how all three passions fit together. Fawn was presenting her poster on “Harnessing the Power of Community to Fight Marine Debris” when a woman approached her. This woman ran similar cleanups in Florida working with homeless volunteers to help clean up Florida’s parks. As she was speaking, a lightbulb went off and Fawn came up with BOW, the world’s first military-focused environmental nonprofit organization. Fawn created BOW to improve our military and veterans’ quality of life through marine debris cleanups.

Fawn wanted to understand marine debris from a comprehensive perspective in order to drive behavioral change, empower communities, and make a difference in the fight against marine plastic pollution. In pursuit of this dream, she moved to San Diego to attend Scripps Institution of Oceanography’s MAS Marine Biodiversity & Conservation program and graduated in 2020. She wrote a thorough nonprofit business plan for Blue Ocean Warriors as her Capstone project. During the pandemic, she founded and built BOW. BOW received its 501c3 status in 2022 and began programming in 2023.