Winter 2008
Voices in Philanthropy
Don Hickman
Program Manager for Planning and Preservation,
Initiative Foundation
The board of the Initiative Foundation in Little Falls recognized over a decade ago that natural resources, rural character and access to recreational amenities were “quality of life” values that represent one of our greatest economic assets.
Our foundation helps the environment through such initiatives as comprehensive land use planning; “conservation design” to accommodate a growing population while setting aside high ecological value lands; our Rural Wastewater Options program; our $1-million Green Business Loan Fund; and our strong interest in encouraging regional planning, active living by design and renewable energy, just to name a few.
In 1999, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency awarded the Initiative Foundation a grant to modify an existing community development program (the Healthy Communities Partnership) to help assist lake and river associations develop segment management plans. The central insight of the program was that many volunteer citizen organizations support water quality monitoring and/or education, but that these efforts are often sporadic, do not focus on a specific outcome, and seldom incorporate strategic thinking about how to expand the audience or impact of specific projects.
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Workers from the Rivers Council of Minnesota, now Minnesota Waters, ply the bottom of Watab Creek for "bugs" that indicate the health of the stream.
Photo courtesy of Rivers Council of Minnesota
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From the initial pilot round of what has become known as the Healthy Lakes and Rivers Partnership program, the foundation has now offered the program 18 times, serving 173 lake and river associations, and offered leadership and capacity-building training to 1,228 citizen leaders. The HRLP is supported by The McKnight Foundation, Laura Jane Musser Fund, McDowell Company and over 30 individuals who have graduated from the program.
In general, each round of the HLRP program supports up to eight geographically clustered (same county or watershed) groups, to help foster local networking and to identify shared values, opportunities and concerns. Performance-based grants are awarded for each of a series of milestones. Ultimately, each citizen group may earn up to $7,400 in grant support, although the last $5,000 of this amount is offered as a challenge grant to help leverage local support and funds.
As an example of a typical outcome of the process, the Big Birch Lake Association (Stearns and Todd Counties) conducted a “mass balance” analysis of its major tributaries, sampling both flow and a range of nutrients and total suspended solids to assess which tributaries had the most negative impact on the lake’s water quality. The sampling program identified that a single, relatively small tributary contributed over one-third of the overall nutrient load to the lake. They approached the primary property owner upstream of the tributary and negotiated a “gentlemen’s agreement” to pay the farmer to remove land from cultivation and place it in a vegetative buffer. Within two years, the lake recorded improvements of nearly three feet in transparency — one of the most dramatic improvements in water quality most of us have ever seen.
In recent years, one of the emerging issues of surface water management is how to respond to the expanding distribution and abundance of invasive exotic aquatic vegetation. Once harmful Eurasian milfoil or curlyleaf pondweed are established, it takes an aggressive treatment program and ongoing efforts (and funding) to keep them under control. My experience is that most curlyleaf control programs require at least three years to get established and ahead of the problem, and at least $20,000 to implement. For the past two years we have also participated in the Funders Network for Smart Growth and Livable Communities’ River Partnership of Community Foundations. One of the goals of this program is to share our successful strategies with the network’s 30 other community foundations based throughout the entire Mississippi River watershed to build one another’s organizational capacity to improve the economic, environmental and cultural vitality of communities along the river and its tributaries.
At the end of the day, I like to characterize the HLRP program as the “serenity prayer” of water management; rather than complain about what governmental agencies or nonprofits should be doing to better manage “your” lake, I ask that each citizen group focus on what actions are within their control and to focus on local responsibility and stewardship. We have found that, in general, local Soil & Water Conservation Districts, the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources, Minnesota Pollution Control Agency, and the nonprofit Minnesota Waters are all eager to work with informed groups, and welcome the opportunity to focus on education and implementation of best management practices rather than on the role of regulators.
Justin Weyerhaeuser
Trustee, Weyerhaeuser Family Foundation and Chair of the Foundation's Sustainable Forests and Communities Initiative
The Weyerhaeuser Family Foundation is just that, a family foundation. As such, it is our mission to represent the philanthropic goals of a large and diverse family. Our family’s roots are in the forest, so our foundation has long included programs aimed at preserving and protecting the environment among its priorities. Around 1995, the foundation board determined that the foundation could better fulfill its mission if it introduced two specially focused initiatives to supplement its mission of making grants in a broad range of general interest areas. One initiative addresses children’s issues and has recently focused on funding programs that assist children who have been affected by domestic violence. The other initiative focuses on sustainable forests and communities, more commonly referred to as community-based forestry.
While the community-based forestry idea has been around for some time worldwide, it was in its infancy here in the United States when the foundation began its focused grantmaking in the area. Briefly, community-based forestry arose as a response to the increasingly polarized disputes around forest management, forest product extraction, wildlife preservation, and the economic well-being of forest communities. Forest management issues were, and to some extent still are, discussed on a national level — with the federal government, special interest groups on all sides of the political spectrum, corporations, and the media largely disregarding the impacts being felt by those who live in forest communities.
Community-based forestry is a grassroots effort by members of rural communities to work with each other, with government agencies, with environmental groups, and with corporate interests to bring forest management out of the stratosphere and down to the watershed level. Community-based forestry aims to establish forest management practices that are environmentally, economically and socially sustainable. In essence, healthy forests and healthy communities go hand-in-hand.
The Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy in Minneapolis received a grant from our foundation this year for its Supporting Sustainable Biomass project. Forest restoration efforts require the removal of invasive plant species, shrubs and small-diameter trees. Much of the biomass material removed in such efforts is of comparatively low value, and as a result, many forest landowners opt not to engage in forest restoration projects. The IATP’s Community Forest Resource Center is well-positioned to educate private landowners about the emerging biomass market, to connect landowners with consumers and processors of biomass, and to facilitate biomass removal/forest restoration projects. The Weyerhaeuser Family Foundation grant this year will help the IATP in its efforts to support environmentally sound forest management practices that, ideally, will provide an economic and social benefit to the forested communities in which the IATP is presently operating.
The inclusion of collaborative efforts as a funding priority is quite recent. Nonetheless, just this year the foundation had the opportunity to make grants in support of two collaborative efforts that have, in their first years, already demonstrated success. One such program is the Forest Stewardship Council - Family Forests Alliance, which is a collaborative partnership of community-based forestry practitioners, FSC-US representatives, state and federal forest service representatives, and forest products industry representatives who have come together to facilitate FSC certification. The FSC-FFA has only been around a short while, but as a collaborative partnership it has already made great strides toward adjusting the FSC certification process to fit more squarely with U.S. family forest management practices and requirements.
While the Weyerhaeuser Family Foundation’s Sustainable Forests and Communities Initiative is very much interested in outcomes measurements, it has been crucial for us as a board to keep in mind the fact that many of the organizations and projects we fund are working toward a large-scale paradigm shift in forest management and environmental stewardship practices. Broadly speaking, perhaps the greatest success of community-based forestry in general has been the ability of community organizations to get environmentalists, loggers and government officials to sit down together to talk instead of yelling at each other. The opportunity to help fund programs that were bringing people and organizations that had previously been at loggerheads together for meaningful discussion is extremely attractive to our foundation.
Stewart Crosby
Board Chair, Carolyn Foundation
The environment is a focus area for the Carolyn Foundation because the family has an interest in environmental concerns. Many family members volunteer for environmental organizations, and a few family members work in environmental fields. The foundation started funding the environment in 1969, the same year that Congress established the Environmental Protection Agency.
The foundation’s first environmental grants went to national organizations to work on large, national issues like water and air pollution. In addition, the foundation supported local and regional efforts in the Pacific Northwest, the Midwest and the New England area, mainly because family members who live in these regions understand local and regional environmental issues.
For years, environmental grants received roughly 25 percent of the foundation’s grant funds. The trustees increased the environmental grant allocation to 30 percent in 2005.
The foundation created a separate environmental committee in 2002 that consists of six family members, and always at least one is a Carolyn Foundation trustee.
The Crosby family gathered in Colorado in 1999 to talk about what the priorities of the foundation would be in the future. One outcome was an interest in focusing on one issue for a longer period of time, which eventually became known as proactive grantmaking. The proactive grant process is now part of the foundation’s environmental program.
During the Colorado retreat, the family identified an interest in organic agriculture and renewable energy. The committee eventually determined that the Upper Midwest had solid programs in wind energy and that Minnesota was a leader in resources and legislative efforts focused on renewable energy issues. Advancing Community Wind, which worked with several nonprofit organizations in the renewable energy field in Minnesota, received a grant to create models for community ownership in wind energy, help change state energy policy, leverage more funding and encourage additional wind energy infrastructure development.
After the retreat, the trustees established the Northwest Pilot Project to explore the foundation’s ability to do proactive work. The foundation made two grants during the pilot project: one to the United Way of Clallam County in Washington state for the Prevention Works! Community Coalition, which focused on the needs of children who were impacted negatively by logging, and one to five groups in Oregon and Washington to work on watershed issues ranging from education to reducing mercury contamination.
After the initial pilot project, the board concluded that it is possible to be proactive and to leverage grants for greater change. The proactive program allows the Carolyn Foundation to concentrate on an issue, learn about that issue and fund organizations that are doing good work in the focus area.
© Copyright 2008 Minnesota Council on Foundations
Reproduction in any form without the written permission of the publisher
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