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US Dive Team is the parent organization for local dive teams across the country. Each one is run by the divers who live there — cleaning their own coastline, diving together, and bringing new people into the water. There's no head office telling them how. There's a formula, and it works.
A dive team is a handful of local divers who decided their stretch of water was worth showing up for. They pull trash off the bottom, run dives anyone can join, take kids who've never seen the ocean floor and put them in it, and collect the survey data researchers can't afford to gather themselves.
US Dive Team exists so nobody has to invent that from scratch. We keep the formula, the name, and the tools. Your city keeps everything else — your people, your beaches, your calendar, your decisions.
Every chapter is led by divers who live there. We don't assign leadership, take a cut of donations, or approve your dive plan. Nobody knows your water like you do.
A US Dive Team chapter in Miami means the same thing as one in Los Angeles: safety first, everyone welcome, and the trash actually gets dealt with instead of moved.
No franchise fee, no dues to us, no permission required. If you can get five divers to a beach on a Saturday, you can start a chapter.
We're at the beginning. Los Angeles is the first team on the water — the rest of this map is waiting on someone in your city to start it.
This is the whole method. It isn't complicated, and it isn't ours to gatekeep — every chapter that exists got there by working through these in order.
Go to the site you dive most and look at it honestly. That's the problem you're solving. Write it down.
Not twenty. Two. A team that starts with three people who actually show up beats one with a fifty-name mailing list.
"<Your City> Dive Team." Tell us and we'll list you here and set you up not just with a website, but the infrastructure to manage your team members, schedule dives, and allocate donation spending — all from the Divers Tech Service Operating System.
One entry point you'll return to every month. Consistency is what turns a cleanup into a team.
Pick a date, post it, show up even if it's just the three of you. Weigh what you pull out. Photograph it.
Find someone local who repurposes or recycles what you recover. A bag of ocean waste in a landfill is a job half done.
Breakfast after. Every time. The community is the part that keeps people coming back through a cold winter.
Run a dive any certification level can join, and mean it. New divers become the volunteers you'll need next year.
Partner with a local youth organization and get someone in the water who'd never have gotten there otherwise.
Log what you see — species, conditions, debris. Hand it to a local university or conservation group. Divers are field researchers with better access.
Waivers, insurance, and a nonprofit filing in your state. Ask us — we've done it and we'll share what we used.
Train someone else to run the cleanup, the dive, the calendar. A team that depends on one person isn't a team yet.
Send us your city and we'll get back to you with the starter kit: the twelve steps in full, the waiver and insurance templates we use, a chapter website, and a member roster you can actually run a team from. Then it's yours.
One reply from a person, not a mailing list. We're divers, not marketers.
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