Who We Are
Sarah Schumann is a 15+ year veteran of the Rhode Island and Alaska seafood industries as well as a passionate advocate for the ocean ecosystems that sustain wild fisheries. She has had the joy of working as a deckhand on gillnet, lobster, seine, and oyster farm boats in both states, operating her own small-scale shellfishing operation in Rhode Island, and spending nine summers as a salmon cannery machinist in Bristol Bay, Alaska.
Sarah is a bridge-builder and systems-thinker who has catalyzed numerous collaborations and seeks to apply her passions and talents wherever they are needed at any given moment. She founded the nonprofit Eating with the Ecosystem in 2011, which she ran as board president until 2018. She coordinated the first-of-its-kind Resilient Fisheries RI strategic planning process with Rhode Island's fishing industry from 2015-2018. She serves on NOAA's Marine Fisheries Advisory Committee and the Advisory Council for the Responsible Offshore Science Alliance, and was previously very involved in the Fish Locally Collaborative.
Sarah is the author of two books: Rhode Island's Shellfish Heritage: An Ecological History and Simmering the Sea: Diversifying Our Cookery to Sustain Our Fisheries. She is the founder and editor of the online multimedia journal Ecosystem-Based Fisheries Marketing.
Sarah holds a BS in Marine Affairs from the University of Rhode Island and a MSc in Nature, Society, and Environmental
Policy from the University of Oxford.