For Maxwell Bracey (BBA ’12), there’s nothing more powerful than a plunge into the ocean.
“It’s a whole different world under the water,” says Bracey, a certified scuba diver and instructor. “It’s quiet, and nothing down there really cares about what’s happening up here. Being able to experience that is humbling.”
He’s passionate about sharing that experience with others—especially those who have historically been underrepresented in water activities. It’s what led him to create DiverSeaFy, a nonprofit organization dedicated to creating access for youth of color to scuba diving.
“I wanted to see more people who look like myself have these opportunities,” says Bracey. “My vision is to create a world where the ocean environment is accessible to anybody, regardless of race or socioeconomic status.”
It’s a vision for the future, Bracey says, that reckons with an ugly American past: one that saw people of color barred from public pools and beaches, causing a lasting effect on who gets to participate in water-based recreation. But the mission also offers a hopeful future—one aimed at fostering inclusiveness while inspiring a new generation of conservationists in the age of climate change.
“The ultimate goal is to create a symbiotic relationship between our students and the ocean environment,” Bracey says. “The health of the ocean is essential to all life on Earth, and we need all hands on deck advocating for it.
An ocean of possibility
Bracey’s story has taken him across the world’s oceans, but his interest in aquatics started on a markedly smaller scale.
“My parents weren’t super keen on letting us have pets in the house, but I was able to have fish,” says Bracey. “I had a fish tank in my room and loved watching them.”
As the Southern California native began thinking beyond high school, Bracey discovered a summer educational program offering ocean adventures—including scuba—and college credits. With the support of his family, he earned his diving certification in 2007, joined the program, and made plans to study marine biology in college.
But his direction shifted after falling for UW–Madison on a campus tour. While the landlocked university couldn’t offer him a marine biology degree, it could provide a robust marketing education through the Wisconsin School of Business, which appealed to Bracey’s creative side. He took the plunge.
At WSB, Bracey was inspired by his brand management classes, which introduced him to marketing’s potential to foster belonging, shape opinions, and inspire action on important causes—all of which would eventually power his environmental activism.
“One of the best decisions I ever made was to go to Wisconsin,” says Bracey, who also became involved with peer mentorship and the MKT marketing society.
After graduation, Bracey spent nearly four years at the FX television network, where he worked in promotions, writing, and production. But a book about finding purpose through international travel would set him on a different path.
“It just resonated with me,” says Bracey. “I didn’t necessarily have a ton of money saved to do something like that, but thought teaching scuba diving could be a way to make it work.”
Over the next couple of years, Bracey would travel to places like Honduras, Bali, and Hawaii while funding his wanderlust through diving instruction. While he savored the experiences, he was struck by what he saw—the negative impact of human activity on the ocean—as well as what he didn’t see: other people of color going on dives.
That’s when his personal and professional interests merged, causing a new idea to float to the surface.
Recreation, plus conservation
Stuck at home during the pandemic, Bracey wrote the business plan for DiverSeaFy and launched the organization in 2020. Balancing a full-time job and fundraising, he utilized his marketing expertise to recruit and sponsor an initial cohort of five divers in 2021. Since then, he’s trained dozens of teenage divers off the coast of California’s Catalina Island, where Bracey himself was certified more than 15 years ago.
He’ll be the first to tell you that the activity isn’t cheap. Divers need specialized equipment, boats, pool training, and in some cases, swimming lessons—all of which DiverSeaFy covers. But the payoff comes when students take their first ocean dive. Whether it’s observing rare fish or seeing how sunlight filters through an underwater kelp forest, there are awe-inspiring sights and surprises at every turn.
“On one dive, a sea turtle actually came right up to our group. I’d never seen a turtle there before, even after hundreds of dives in that spot,” Bracey says. “It was like the ocean saying, you know, these students belong here.”
“My vision is to create a world where the ocean environment is accessible to anybody.”
—Maxwell Bracey (BBA ’12)
Through both recreational and environmental clean-up dives, Bracey hopes to inspire a sense of duty among his students to protect natural spaces—and maybe ignite interest in conservation careers. But he’s also happy seeing them build the confidence to try new things, which is something he’s also embracing for himself. Days after graduating DiverSeaFy’s ninth cohort of divers in July, Bracey began a full-time MBA program at UCLA focused on sustainability and social impact.
During this new adventure, he’ll continue diving, building DiverSeaFy, and flexing his marketing skills to make the case that everyone has a role to play in conservation.
“We think the planet is here to serve us when it should be the other way around,” he says. “Everybody should consider themselves an environmentalist, and being able to rebrand and shift how we view ourselves in that greater landscape can make a huge difference.”