Conservation and the Environment

Program Staff

William Robertson IV, Program Officer
Doreen N. Tinajero, Program Associate

History

The Foundation's program in Conservation and the Environment (C&E) evolved from interests originally stated by the Avalon and Old Dominion Foundations as including the preservation of natural areas and the support of "organizations concerned with increasing man's understanding of his natural environment, his relation to it, and the effects of his activities upon it."  Through the early 1970s, a substantial fraction of grants supported land acquisition.  Between 1974 and 1979, grants supported research in energy, natural resources and the environment including the oceans, and institutions working in these fields.  From 1980 through 2002 the program supported basic research on how natural ecosystems work.  We emphasized support of leading institutions, innovative research, and training of promising doctoral and postdoctoral researchers.  Grants were originally restricted to the US but gradually expanded to include Latin America and then South Africa.  Within the broad field of ecosystems research and training, we generally limited our grants to botany and terrestrial ecosystems because of their key importance to overall ecosystems and because other funding sources paid the least attention to them.

Current Programs

Please note that overhead, indirect costs, or administrative charges are not allowed on any grants in this Program Area.  The activities described here are the only areas within which we are currently accepting inquiries.  The Foundation does not support advocacy or make grants for work in areas such as energy, global change, biodiversity, sustainability, invasive species, wildlife, management, agriculture, development, pollution, or policy.

We are in the process of ending several of our program activities, and grants in those areas are only open by invitation to extant grantees.    

Our Junior Faculty and Research Bridges to South Africa programs currently have more proposals than we can deal with fairly, and we are not currently accepting new proposals.  We will evaluate these programs in June 2009.  Please revisit this site after that if you are still interested in these programs.    

The African and Latin American Plants Initiatives are partnerships of  120 herbaria from 40 countries working to create a database of high quality images of plant type specimens of African and Latin American plants.  The grants are limited to institutions holding African and Latin American plant type specimens.  The resulting database is available to scholars through www.JSTOR.org. We will be glad to hear from any institutions holding African and/or Latin American plant type specimens that we have not yet reached.

Program Contact Information

We prefer that initial inquiries be by email and contain a concise description of the idea being presented along with a cost estimate.

Please direct all inquiries to:

Before writing, please review the Foundation’s general requirements for grant proposals in the Grant Inquiries section of this Web site.