We have had our heads down and busy working hard this Summer so much that we almost missed an important mile stone and celebration: ISLA turned five years old!

Our official birth date is August 25, 2008 and since our humbling beginnings we wanted to take a brief moment to highlight some of our past successes as well as look forward to the bright future ahead!

In total, we have 16 project sites in 8 countries. We have had 115 ISLA volunteers dispatched to these sites that are responsible for conducting workshops and training courses for over 300 participants. We also have over 100 Certified ISLA Lifeguards that are proactively making a positive difference in their communities!

On top of these incredible efforts we can look back on the positive impacts of local education initiatives we have launched for students to learn about ocean safety, the tens of thousands of dollars of equipment donated, our swim schools, and our Junior Guard scholarship that has directly affected and changed the lives of some incredible young people.

An exciting avenue we are also ecstatic about is our Global Drowning Tracker that is working and making great progress to unify the efforts of drowning prevention on a global level! We launched this project at the National Drowning Symposium Conference in Florida earlier this year, and then presented it to a United States Congressional Committee Hearing on Water Safety in May. This next month we will be taking it to the World Conference on Drowning Prevention in Potsdam, Germany to continue to rally support for this tool and put an end to this preventable global epidemic and social issue.

Most important, we are so thrilled about the coming future! Continuing to meet and work with passionate people around the globe, continuing to raise awareness through national and international media outlets, and continuing to advance professional lifesaving development to areas in need around the globe, we know that the future is only going to get better.

So happy five years to all the team at ISLA and all of our amazing friends and connections around the globe! We are thrilled to have made such an impact but know that the greatest is yet to come!