Who is to replace Audrey Matura-Shepherd to become OCEANA’s Country Director?

Audrey Matura-Shepherd

Earlier in the newscast, we told you about OCEANA’s stance on the LGBT issue. But OCEANA’s Vice-President of South and Central America Alex Muñoz is in Belize. Muñoz says that they are reviewing about thirty applications from very interesting applicants. The successful candidate will pick up where former VP of OCEANA Belize Audrey Matura-Shepherd stepped off. But whoever it is will not be the new VP. In fact, that person will be OCEANA’s new Country Director, and the entire organizational structure of the company will be changed. Muñoz explained the logistics of the new structure, and says the new Country Director will have no less authority than the former Vice President did.

Alex Muñoz, VP, South and Central America, OCEANA

Alex Muñoz

“OCEANA is growing as an organization all over the world; we are opening new offices. And we have decided that our executive structure is no longer functional to handling the new offices effectively. So we have defined new ways to make the office in each country report to different people. I will be the one that leads the Caribbean and the Belize office will report to me. So basically we are looking for a leader in the form of a country director, but in no way that means that the new person will have less authority than the former vice president hand. The new leader of OCEANA will have the same authority like Audrey Matura-Shepherd and that person will have our full support. Actually, the Belizean office will grow hopefully. We want to make this a bigger and better office and we ill encourage all the activities possible. And we expect that leader to be not only a strong leader but actually somebody that is really creative in terms of defining strategies and the best way to protect the oceans. In terms of spending, we expect that person to do the better job in allocating resources to our priorities which is protecting the oceans and specifically to each one of our complaints—fighting offshore oil drilling and introducing changes to the fisheries legislation. And the spending was defined like that in the past and it should keep being defined like that in the future. This is the case not only for Belize, but actually for each one of OCEANA’s offices. We are solely focused on ocean conservation.”