The hardest marine policy problems in Alaska aren't technical. They're human.

They involve communities that have fished the same waters for generations watching permits migrate out of their villages. Tribes navigating federal regulatory processes designed without them in mind. Organizations with strong science and weak community trust. Fishermen who know what's happening to the resource but have no meaningful pathway into the decisions that affect it.

Jamie O'Connor founded Intertidal Consulting to work on exactly those problems that fall at the intersection of policy, community, and governance, where the stakes are highest, and the easy answers run out.

She brings an unusual combination to that work. A fifth-generation Bristol Bay set-netter and owner-operator of Fish Lady Fisheries, Jamie has fished commercially her entire life and understands the water, the business, and the culture from the inside. When the community at Ekuk had no collective voice in the fishery that defines it, she built one, founding and chairing the Ekuk Beach Fishermen's Association to advocate for equity and sustainability in Bristol Bay from the beach up. She also spent years working the other side of the table, advising Senator Lisa Murkowski on fisheries and environmental policy, directing the Alaska Marine Community Coalition's Working Waterfronts program, and serving as AMCC's Deputy Executive Director. She has represented coastal communities on the North Pacific Fishery Management Council Advisory Panel, and her research at the University of Edinburgh — where she earned a Master of Science in Marine Systems and Policies with distinction — focused on fishery access as the foundation of community resilience and well-being.

Jamie trained as a journalist at the University of Alaska Anchorage, and that background runs through everything she does. She translates complex policy and science into language that moves people, whether she is writing a community survey report, preparing testimony, crafting organizational messaging, or telling the story of what is at stake in Alaska's fisheries to an audience encountering it for the first time. The ability to communicate across audiences — harvesters, researchers, legislators, funders, Tribal leaders — is not incidental to her policy work. In many rooms, it is the policy work.

That combination of harvester, organizer, Senate staffer, NGO leader, researcher, and communicator is what Intertidal's clients are hiring when they bring Jamie in. Not just a consultant, but someone who has stood in most of the places the people across the table are standing, and who can move between them.

Intertidal serves coastal communities, Tribes, nonprofits, research institutions, and public and private-sector partners across Alaska, the Arctic, and the North Pacific. Jamie is based in Homer, Alaska.