Engage with governments and stimulate community is message to environmental funders

Rebecca Symington, executive director of Mlinda, a private foundation based in Paris that works to inspire and enable custodianship of our planet, reports on the 4th annual Environmental Funder's Network retreat.

The 4th annual Environmental Funder's Network retreat  that took place on the 19th and 20th of January at Trafford Hall near Chester,  was the largest ever, with 54 participants, including representatives from Belgium, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Portugal, Switzerland and the US, as well as UK funders. 

The speakers, Michelle DePass, Jonathon Porritt and Alastair McIntosh, were inspiring in their individual ways about tackling current challenges and opportunities.

DePass, formerly of the Ford Foundation, and now leading the US Environment Protection Agency's international work, encouraged environmental philanthropists to engage with government agendas - whether forming strategic partnerships with statutory agencies, or building joint advocacy campaigns with other civil society constituencies. Porritt and McIntosh, both renowned activists, gave contrasting and complementary perspectives on how to achieve sustainability through value-driven collaboration: the former nudging grant-makers to engage with innovative businesses and the latter to rebuild responsible communities. 

Porritt’s entertaining manner belied the seriousness of his message: "we must engage with the business environment to make sure the values that drive their efforts to help us reach sustainability are not usurped". He cautioned against blind faith in business innovation and technological progress, arguing that real energy sustainability cannot be achieved by progress in technology alone.  We must help ensure that change remains ‘authentic’ and ‘value-driven’, pushed by a combination of mobilisation from civil society and business.  He pointed to the effectiveness over the long term of partnerships forged, for instance, to certify Palm Oil Plantations in Indonesia, though this point proved contentious with some in the audience.

McIntosh‘s perspective was altogether more personal and closer to home. He used his experience of re-building the lives of disconnected individuals living in a fractured community in Glasgow to illustrate that responsibility for one’s environment must be grounded in a sense of place and belonging. He argued convincingly that fostering a sense of place leads to a sense of identity which in turn allows values to be developed and only then can a sense of responsibility for one’s environment, in its broadest meaning, be instilled.  He called on grant-makers "not to just fund a project but to stimulate a community”.

Ideas on new forms of collaboration made their way into conversations in the margins as well. I left the gathering unsettled by a renewed sense of the enormity of the challenge of changing both large scale business practices and public behaviour yet also encouraged that a healthy community of peers open to collaborate and share the load.

• EFN published Where The Green Grants Went 5 (WTGGW5) last month that  records a big increase in the proportion of environmental philanthropy going to tackle climate change, averaging 21% of green spend over the three years to 2009/10 - up from less than 9% in 2005/06 to 2006/07.