Our Values and Focus Areas
EQUITY AND ACCESS
Improve access, dismantle barriers, and drive equitable outcomes to advance individual and community well-being regarding housing, employment, nutrition, education, healthcare, the arts, and the natural environment.
COLLABORATION
Prioritize the nurturing of multi-racial, multi-disciplinary, community-rooted collaborations that depend on shared power, resources, decisions, access and knowledge.
SELF-DETERMINATION
Support efforts where local and regional priorities at all stages of development, decision-making and implementation are determined by those directly affected, especially in historically marginalized and under-resourced communities.
CULTURE OF IMPROVEMENT
Nurture a culture of examination, learning, understanding, and improvement including evaluation internally and externally.
What does it take for a person to thrive?
We need a safe place to sleep, food on the table, and access to healthcare. We need the opportunity to learn, grow, and express ourselves creatively. We need to live in a community with a strong civic voice–one that can advocate for itself, tell its own story, and shape the conditions of its own life. We need land and water that are healthy, and a relationship with the natural world that sustains and renews. And we need the gathering places, the hearths, the anchor institutions that hold a community together and make it feel like home.
No single-issue area addresses all of that. No single organization can accomplish all that. But a community of organizations, working across all these dimensions simultaneously, can.
OUR FUNDING AREAS OF FOCUS
Our five funding areas of focus emerged from collaborating with our nonprofit colleagues and watching how the field shows up, year after year, nurturing people, communities, and nature. Over 25+ years of grantmaking, we've had the privilege of supporting this community, and it has taught us how to see more clearly what we value and why.
We are not shifting direction. Nothing is changing. What we are doing is naming, more precisely, five dimensions of community life that we believe, taken together, make it possible for people to truly thrive. When we step back and look across our grantee community as a whole, this is what we see.
CIVIC POWER — systems-change work, often involving organizing and policy, fundamentally about who has power over the conditions that shape community life. This includes communities asserting their right to determine their own conditions, movement-building, narrative change, community identity, cultural and artistic assertion, and creative placemaking, all of which are forms of building power.
EDUCATION & LIFELONG LEARNING — education, youth development, adult learning, arts education. We believe that learning is not confined to classrooms or credentials but happens across a lifetime and in every corner of community life. An informed, educated, and creatively alive community is a powerful one.
STABILITY & BELONGING — housing, food, healthcare, crisis support, support for domestic violence survivors & vulnerable populations, personal wellness, because no one can organize, learn, or thrive without a foundation of safety and sufficiency.
REGENERATION & CELEBRATION — ecological restoration, land rematriation, emotional & spiritual healing of people and communities, restoration of sovereignty and relationship, and equally, the celebration and amplification of what is already whole, vibrant, and thriving, and growing toward its fullest expression.
NOURISHING THE FIELD — these are the organizations whose strength, presence, and rootedness lift the work of other organizations. They are the organizations other organizations draw from. They are gathering places, sources of sustenance, and community hearths. Their impact is felt in the health and vitality of the entire ecosystem they anchor.