Grassroots Organizing for a Clean Energy, Forest Positive, Socially Just Future

Grassroots organizing has frequently been able to move the needle on pressing social issues, and it is increasingly clear that organizing plays an essential role in environmental action and advocacy. Despite its importance, grassroots organizing receives only around 5% of environmental funding. The Bioenergy team seeks to partner more closely with grassroots organizations and support frontline communities in the southeastern United States and British Columbia, Canada, where the strategy supports civil society organizations working towards a clean energy and forest-positive future with social justice at its heart.

In order to develop new partnerships, the Packard Foundation’s Bioenergy strategy is issuing a request for project proposals to grassroots organizations based in the US South or B.C, Canada that have programs focused on one of the following topic areas:

• Forest protection and community land rights
• Frontline community organizing and power-building around social, environment, or climate justice
• Combating extractive energy industries (i.e. oil, gas, bioenergy

The Bioenergy team recognizes that organizations led by or explicitly serving communities of color receive only a tiny fraction of philanthropic funds in the U.S. This holds true in the environmental field, even though people of color care deeply about environmental and climate issues and are often on the frontlines of unhealthy extractive industry, environmental degradation, and climate catastrophe. Similar trends are seen in hyper rural communities.

Applicants must be headquartered in Alberta or British Columbia, Canada or one of the following states: Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, or South Carolina. Organizations led by Black and Indigenous people, and other people of color, as well as organizations located in geographically remote locations, are strongly encouraged to apply.