Deadline: 16-May-25
The Network for Landscape Conservation is pleased to share the Request for Proposals for the Catalyst Fund, which is made possible through the generous support of the Doris Duke Foundation and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation.
The Catalyst Fund strives to accelerate the pace and practice of collaborative landscape conservation and stewardship across the United States by investing in Landscape Partnerships. The Fund couples financial support (through a competitive grant program) with capacity building support (through in-depth Peer Learning) to catalyze Partnership efforts to achieve long-term conservation and stewardship goals. A portion of the Fund is reserved specifically to advance Tribal-led Partnerships.
A portion of the Catalyst Fund is dedicated to supporting Indigenous leadership in landscape conservation and stewardship, and they welcome proposals from Partnerships that are Triballed. Such Partnerships may focus wholly on sovereign Tribal lands and/or on conserving and stewarding Indigenous interests, territories, and rights across a broader landscape.
Purpose
- The Fund drives strategic investments towards strengthening the collaborative capacity of place-based, community grounded Landscape Partnerships. These investments are intended to better position Partnerships to achieve long-term conservation and stewardship success, building in landscapes across the country the enduring collaborative capacity needed to address systems-level challenges like the interwoven biodiversity, climate, and environmental injustice crises.
- Grant requests should be focused on strengthening Partnership collaborative capacity—which can be understood as those elements that allow groups of partners to be able to function effectively across organizations/entities to achieve a shared purpose.
- Funds can be used for supporting Partnership coordination staffing and/or for costs associated with other collaborative process activities such as: convenings; communications; partner and community engagement; governance development; and strategic planning and prioritization. Funding should not be requested for direct project implementation, such as land acquisitions.
Funding Information
- Approximately $400,000 is available for grantmaking in 2025, with 16-17 grant awards anticipated.
Fund Parameters
- Landscape Partnerships: The Catalyst Fund seeks Landscape Partnerships1 that reflect the following characteristics:
- Place-based: Focuses on a geographically explicit landscape.
- Long-term Conservation Purpose: Pursues a long-term and multi-issue conservation and stewardship vision and purpose, with clearly identified goals and outcomes that encompass people and nature.
- Collaboratively Governed: Embraces collaborative leadership and participatory engagement and decision-making.
- Community-Grounded and Inclusive: Engages a breadth of collaborators and partners on the landscape, bridging interests, perspectives, and cultures to find common ground.
- Informed: Uses ecological, cultural, traditional, and/or social information to guide its work and build a shared foundation of knowledge.
Eligibility Criteria
- General Applicant Eligibility: Applicants must be U.S.-based non-profit organizations with IRS 501(c)(3) status. Recognizing that many Landscape Partnerships may not have formal IRS status, an eligible organization may apply on behalf of a Partnership.
- Tribal Eligibility: Tribal-led Partnership throughout the United States can apply under the above general eligibility. Additionally, for Tribal-led Partnerships in the American West, 2 eligibility broadens: Federally-recognized Tribes and Tribal organizations under IRS Code, Section 7871 may apply directly as well.
- Requests: Applicants may request one- or two-year grants of up to $25,000 in total. Previous Catalyst Fund grant recipients are not currently eligible to reapply.
For more information, visit Network for Landscape Conservation.