Deadline: 08-Jul-2024
The Summerlee Foundation is seeking applications for the Animal Protection Program to help the most overlooked, underfunded, and heavily exploited animals.
Much of the funding goes to small and medium-sized lean and agile groups where they believe their contribution can be utilized quickly with an out-sized impact. They believe in balancing urgent, direct care for individual animals with efforts to address the root causes of suffering to affect enduring, systemic change. They know they can’t often rescue, adopt, or rehab their way out of core problems.
Program Areas
- Wildlife
- Focus on advocacy/educational campaigns and ethical research protecting North American wildlife, including big cats, bears, coyotes; efforts to reform state wildlife agencies that set policy and management practices; wildlife rehabilitation facilities
- Animal Sanctuaries
- Focus on domestic and captive wild animal sanctuary facilities; must be verified or accredited by the Global Federation of Animal Sanctuaries (GFAS)
- Farmed Animals
- Focus on efforts to decrease cruelty and reform practices in industrial animal farming
- Cats
- Focus on sterilization and Trap-Neuter-Return, primarily in rural or underserved communities and primarily in the United States and Canada
- Dogs
- Focus on sterilization in Latin America or First Nations communities
- Emergency Fund for Animal Cruelty
- May be awarded through the Annie Lee Roberts Emergency Animal Rescue Fund administered by Greater Good Charities
Funding Information
- The cat grants average $5,000. All other grants average $10,000.
Geographic Location
- Most of the funding is within the United States, with smaller amounts directed elsewhere in the Americas. Special emphasis is placed on communities that are the most challenged and underserved.
Eligibility Criteria
- Must be a 501(c)(3) public charity. They do not fund individuals. Animal sanctuaries must be accredited or verified by the Global Federation of Animal Sanctuaries. They generally do not fund capital campaigns, endowments, buildings, government agencies, organizations with large cash reserves, reintroduction of ‘listed’ endangered species, and land preservation. Organizations should have animal protection as their primary purpose.
- They also respectfully ask organizations to wait 18 months between receiving a Summerlee Foundation grant and applying for another, although they recognize that some exceptions may be necessary to this general rule. This spacing allows them to reach more and new organizations rather than fund the same (though solid) organizations year after year.
For more information, visit Summerlee Foundation.
