Tomás Tigchelaar Lourenço, our guest for this episode of the podcast, is not a photographer, but he is using the power of photographs to effect some powerful change in the world.

In December of 2017 Tomás started the @GiveSealifeAHand Cleanup movement on Instagram.

This movement started during a beach walk in Portugal, when talking about ocean plastic pollution, he said something like “If fish had hands, this problem would have been long solved.”. Moments after, he looked at his hands and realized he had to give sea life a hand.

After a cleanup, he made a hand out of the trash he collected and tagged it #GiveSeaLifeAHand. Two years later he now has more than 150 hands from 95 different countries around the world and carried out 9 GiveSeaLifeAHand talks at primary schools in Portugal and Curaçao reaching over 300 kids with this message.

Hi motto is “Cleanups are the easy part, making them unnecessary is the difficult one.” Therefore his goal is to have a picture of a hand from every country in the world and reach the youth with this message through school talks.

We spoke with Tomás about this project, but also about other environmental and socially aware initiatives he’s involved with, including The Human Library organization and @flyplantbased.

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