What's New

In October 2009, the Surdna Foundation began a new chapter, focusing on just and sustainable communities. Building out of many comprehensive discussions about crafting this new mission for the Foundation, we made the difficult decision to discontinue funding some areas, including our ocean biodiversity and fisheries portfolio.  In looking back at the growth of the field, and looking forward to its future, we decided to conduct an in-depth assessment of our investment’s impact on the field.

Click here to read more and download the report...

 

Surdna's Strong Local Economies Program has released new funding guidelines and has begun accepting letters of inquiry.  The program will focus in two related areas:

Connecting people to opportunities that offer good jobs within reach for low- and moderate-income residents and provide sustainable development solutions that enable people to easily travel between their homes and jobs, schools, and day-to-day services; and

Creating economic opportunities that include a diversity of vibrant businesses and sectors, and improves residents' livelihood and access to quality jobs and training within a region.

Click here to see the complete guidelines...

Surdna's Board met in February to approve 81 grants totaling $9,321,288. ... read more

The Surdna Foundation helped to organize a day in the field for White House Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) Chair Nancy Sutley to see the models being developed at the city and state level in New York to accelerate energy efficiency, job creation, and household and business cost reduction through large-scale retrofitting.  Chair Sutley, accompanied by CEQ staff, visited New York City on January 15, 2010, to learn from the experiences and successes of practitioners on the ground.

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by David Foster, Executive Director, Blue Green Alliance

Copenhagen, COP 15, was my fourth United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change conference and provided quite a contrast from COP 11 in Montreal in 2005. That year I was the only representative of U.S. labor with an interest in supporting the UN process. By comparison, in 2009, the seven Blue Green Alliance union partners sent 28 representatives, including two national presidents, Terry O'Sullivan from the Laborers' International Union of North America, and Mike Langford of the Utility Workers Union of America. The rest of the delegation included ranking officers and high-level staff of the United Steelworkers, Service Employees International Union, American Federation of Teachers, Communications Workers of America, and Amalgamated Transit Union.

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The Surdna Foundation seeks a Program Director for its grant making program, Strong Local Economies. This is an extraordinary opportunity to join a respected and innovative foundation as it begins a new chapter in its long and successful history. In October, 2009, the Foundation adopted a new mission – to foster just and sustainable communities in the United States -- and launched three new program areas: Sustainable Environments, Strong Local Economies and Thriving Cultures.

Reporting to the President and working closely with board committees and staff, the Program Director for Strong Local Economies will sharpen the current program strategies for this new area, will develop new initiatives or themes that are consistent with the mission, and will deepen institutional knowledge in the program’s areas of focus in order to ensure maximum impact of Foundation dollars. The program will build on and integrate many elements of the Foundation’s former work in community revitalization and will work quite closely with the environment and culture programs.

Click here for full details and how to apply.

In October 2009, the Surdna Foundation announced new programs to support its mission to help create just and sustainable communities: sustainable environments, thriving cultures, and strong local economies. To help inform its grantmaking to build strong local economies, the Foundation commissioned Mt. Auburn Associates to prepare a white paper on the current structure and challenges of the nation’s workforce and economic development systems. This paper was originally presented as part of a November 9th- 10th, 2009 Board of Trustees meeting.

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By Phillip Henderson

Some years ago, I picked up the book The Reluctant Metropolis, by William Fulton.  Fulton describes in this very engaging history the way politics and power dynamics shaped the modern era of the Los Angeles megalopolis.  I grew up just down the road from downtown LA, in what was once the fruit trees and farmland of Orange County.  I had often read about how metropolitan LA had sprung up over the course of the twentieth century.  But as a person who arrived as a youth in the late 1970s, LA had always seemed a fully formed place, traffic, pollution, movie stars and all.  What Fulton's book made me realize for the first time was that LA, and in a larger sense the world, was being shaped right under my nose.  In fact, LA hadn't been the static, fully formed place that I'd experienced in my youth.  Many of the key factors that embody the current version of LA, from water policies, to demography, to tax and education policy, were slowly and imperceptibly (to me) being shaped and developed during that time.

By the time I picked up Fulton's book I had lived and worked for many years in Eastern Europe, arriving just a couple years after the fall of communism, so I'm not naïve about the pace of historical change or the possibility of deep upheaval in a society.  But I had never really considered that this was just as true in a place like Los Angeles or Chicago or Des Moines as it is in Bucharest or Berlin.  What had once seemed like a mature, solid, unchangeable country now seemed fluid, evolving.  Fulton had opened my eyes to the change that is happening everywhere.

Fast forward a few years to my time at the Surdna Foundation.  This is a foundation that has, for the last 20 years, taken on big social problems.  These are problems that no single foundation, certainly not one of the modest size of the Surdna Foundation, can solve on its own.  These are problems like climate change, transportation systems, structural racism that are many years, decades, generations in the making and require the concerted effort of dozens of foundations, governments, private companies, individuals, and movements to solve.

In my "pre Fulton" days, I would have perceived these problems as fixed, as a given, immovable and unchangeable realities of the society in which we live.  I would have thought that while change is possible around the edges of these problems - a new road here, a better rail line there - what we have is what we've got and that the core issues remain constant.  But in my "post Fulton" mind, I see things much differently.  I see now that the world we live in has been created slowly, one decision and one event at a time.  The shape of our cities, the way we live, the way we think about our neighbors is constantly evolving.  So we shouldn't be overwhelmed by the immensity of the kind of change we might need - a smaller carbon footprint for our cities, more holistic educational experiences for our kids, a deeper level of integration among Americans of all racial, economic, and social backgrounds.  We should not seek to change things all at once or overnight.  Complex societies can and do change, but they change one decision at a time, one building block after another.  When viewed that way, I see the role of the Surdna Foundation more clearly.  We are right to focus on big problems.  We can and should seek to ensure that the next decision about how our cities grow is a good one, followed by another good decision, followed by another and another.  Incrementally, over the next 5, 10, 20 years ensure that the incremental changes are in the right direction, following the best advice, the most advanced thinking.  Little by little, decision by decision, society is changing and we can help ensure that it changes for the better.

Foundations have the advantage of taking the long view.  Surdna Foundation has been around for 92 years and we expect to be around another 92 years.  That long term perspective allows us, no, it obliges us, to tackle the big dilemmas our society faces.

 

The Strategic National Arts Alumni Project (SNAAP) and Ellen B. Rudolph, Surdna Foundation program director for Thriving Cultures, received the Institutional Research Initiative Award from the Arts Schools Network at its recent annual conference in Washington, D.C.

Based at the Indiana University Center for Postsecondary Research, SNAAP is an annual online survey, data management and institutional improvement system designed to enhance the impact of arts-school education.

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Surdna's Chief Financial Officer, Marc de Venoge, was interviewed by Investment Consultant Cambridge Associates in its most recent client newsletter, C|A Perspectives.  In the interview Marc discusses Surdna's history and investment strategy.  To read the interview, Click Here.