We support efforts to help rural communities gain more secure rights over land and forests, especially for indigenous peoples, racial and ethnic minorities, and women.
We seek to improve natural resource governance, challenge irresponsible natural resource extraction, promote more equitable resource-related fiscal and tax policies, and curtail illicit financial flows. We support the ability of local groups and indigenous communities to have a role in related negotiations and policy debates, with an emphasis on women’s rights and participation. We work to ensure that oil, gas, and mineral producers respect the rights of communities—and that the benefits and costs related to mining, oil, and gas are distributed more equitably.
We also support efforts to promote climate change policies and investments that benefit rural and indigenous communities. In these ways, we help affected communities sustain their culture and reap economic benefits for generations to come.
We aim to strengthen the capacities of organizations working on issues of land tenure, extractives, natural resource-related tax justice, and climate change, and to cultivate philanthropy and other funders to amplify and sustain these efforts.
Our tropical forest and climate change work with the Climate and Land Use Alliance (CLUA) emphasizes global and continental activities linked to work in Brazil, Indonesia, Mexico and Central America, Colombia, and Peru. Our work on energy and mining focuses on global and continental activities linked to those countries as well as South Africa; and Nigeria, Senegal, and Ghana in West Africa.
What we don’t fund
We know nonprofit staff’s time is valuable, so we discourage using it to submit proposals that don’t fall within funding guidelines. In this spirit, we aim to be transparent about what our grant making does not support.
We do not fund initiatives that primarily focus on water resources and agriculture, or adaptation to climate change.