Resources

We look for investments and funding opportunities that:

• Move towards healthier land in the short and medium term.
• Be structured to avoid exit pressures that would jeopardize medium to long term viability.
• Enable people and animals to stay on the land, and hopefully increase their numbers.
• Increase diversity of various kinds at various scales.
• Lead to sustainable activities and entities – financially, socially, and environmentally.
• Support the greater regenerative food system ecosystem.

• Does this investment/grant place priority on beauty, diversity, complexity, and relationships over risk, return, scale and efficiency?
• What form(s) of capital are called for?
• Does this opportunity catalyze the movement of money from other sources?
• Where does this opportunity fit in the ecosystem?
• Is this opportunity part of a region or network that would benefit from the addition of capital?
• How much leverage is there?
• Are there others who can or would provide this capital?
• Who are the decision-makers? Who benefits? Whom might this hurt? To whom does the wealth accrue? (Truthfully answering this set of questions may take some personal work in understanding critical race theory and privilege).
• Are there ways for some of this financial return to be more distributed?
• Are we embracing nuance, a diversity of perspectives, and are we addressing impacted communities?
• Does this address the root cause of the problem or are we just stemming the tide and/or cleaning up negative impacts?
• Is there room to fail?

Reflections from Sallie...

The real question is why wouldn’t you spend down, assuming that you want to address an issue. The NoRegrets Initiative was launched in 2016 with a 10-year timeframe for granting out all the funding.  We recently extended the timeframe to 15 years because of additional unexpected philanthropic capital. Our work is to regenerate the agricultural soils of North America, which will help to mitigate and adapt to climate change, along with many co-benefits, all of which we would like to see happen as quickly as possible. If we are working philanthropically, we must believe that our funding is important in creating change or addressing a need.  In either case, what is the rationale for waiting?

Since we work on an issue related to climate change and the collapse of biodiversity, perhaps, the urgency of the situation is more obvious. The more we can slow the pace of climate change, the more time we have to adapt and mitigate. It is now clear that the world is going to experience enough change in climate to cause much chaos and grief, in the best case.   Any improvement made now has a much larger effect than change made in 10 years. To think about perpetuity in this situation defies logic. But the same question exists no matter the issues being addressed.  

Foundations who create endowments to last into perpetuity would seem to have goals not related to mission. Unless 5% of your endowment is enough to solve a problem, why not do more?  If it is enough to solve the first problem, why not work on a second one? There are plenty out there. The only reason that I can understand is that the true work is around legacy, relevance, and power rather than mission.

There will be problems in the future and resources available to address them. There are several issues today that literally threaten the existence of humans, including our children and grandchildren. Why not mobilize everything that we can now for both the people of today and the future? This is what I have to do to live without regret.