During New York Climate Week, Maliasili and Synchronicity Earth launched a report ‘From Pledges to Practice: Shifting Conservation Funding Approaches to Better Support Local African Organizations’.
In 2021, at the COP26 climate summit in Glasgow, a group of environmental conservation donors made a historic $1.7 billion pledge to support Indigenous Peoples' and local communities' forest guardianship. But getting conservation funding to lndigenous or local community-led groups can be a challenge, particularly for larger funders. Commissioned by the Ford Foundation on [...]
“Money earmarked for Indigenous people that sits in a bank because of worries about Indigenous ‘capacity’ is water sitting in a locked fire hydrant while a city burns down because you’re worried the firefighters can’t handle the job.” This is how Tapestry Institute’s Standing Our Ground for the Land: An Indigenous Philanthropy describes a key [...]
“The most important things in the world that need doing cannot be done by large organizations. They will be done by many, sometimes hundreds, sometimes even thousands of smaller groups.” So said Andrew Steer, CEO of the Bezos Earth Fund, when the new fund made a pledge to spend $10 billon to tackle climate [...]
With a wave of new pledges of large grants to environmental organisations, as funders, we need to reflect on how our philanthropy can be improved. Building trust between donors and grantees plus reshaping the donor community so it can better support the organisations working on the ground are the foundations of a philosophy and [...]
There has been a lot of discussion in the media of late about the value and role of philanthropy. Is it well-directed? Can it have impact? If a key purpose of philanthropy is to find solutions for some of the most complicated problems of our time, will it ever be enough? [...]
An uncharitable view of the charitable sector is that it is unprofessional and ineffective. According to this perspective, if charities only acted like businesses, they would have a greater impact. In this issue of Philanthropy Impact magazine, former Synchronicity Earth Executive Director, Laura Miller, and former Head of Due Diligence and Risk, Michele Sanders [...]