We are pleased to announce the latest round of Catalyst Fund grant awards, with 15 Landscape Partnerships receiving support to accelerate their efforts to protect the ecological, cultural, and community values of the landscapes they call home.

Launched in 2019 and now concluding its sixth annual grant cycle, the Catalyst Fund aims to accelerate the pace and effective practice of collaborative landscape conservation and stewardship across the United States. Catalyst Fund grants are intended as strategic investments in strengthening the collaborative capacity of place-based, community-grounded Landscape Partnerships. 

Generous support for the Catalyst Fund has been provided by the Doris Duke Foundation and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. A portion of the Fund is specifically dedicated to supporting Indigenous leadership in landscape conservation.



Click below to see detailed descriptions of the grant awards. 

2024 CATALYST FUND GRANT RECIPIENTS



Algonquin to Adirondacks Collaborative, $25,000 over two years

Building collaborative capacity for landscape connectivity in the binational A2A landscape.

Alliance for the Mystic River Watershed, $25,000 over one year

Building a community of care: Transformational collaboration in southeastern Connecticut.

Bristol Bay Guardians, $25,000 over two years

Strengthening Indigenous stewardship & habitat conservation in Bristol Bay, Alaska.

Green Heart of the Everglades, $25,000 over one year

Stakeholder engagement and advancing Tribal co-management to safeguard the cultural significance & ecological uniqueness of the Everglades.

Kodiak Archipelago Regional Leadership Forum, $25,000 over one year 

"Nunapet Carliarluki": Deep democracy to advance Indigenous conservation & stewardship and community development. 

La Red de las Islas del Cielo, $25,000 over two years 

Formalizing a binational Landscape Partnership for the Sky Islands region.

Lowcountry Native American Heritage Corridor Coalition, $25,000 over two years

Building capacity within South Carolina's Lowcountry to advance conservation & stewardship that honors Tribal values and priorities. 

Metrowest Conservation Alliance, $25,000 over one year 

Strategic planning to accelerate conservation & stewardship efforts in eastern Massachusetts.

Piscataway Land Collaborative, $25,000 over one year

Supporting Indigenous stewardship to conserve & revitalize the "lungs of Maryland."

Pueblo Caja del Rio Coalition, $25,000 over one year

Advancing holistic Pueblo-led efforts to ensure the cultural integrity & ecological health of the Caja del Rio landscape in New Mexico.

Ribbons of Life, $25,000 over one year

Strengthening the coalition to protect the culturally & ecologically significant Upper Rio Grande watershed and its riparian corridors.

Russian River Confluence, $25,000 over one year

Building out collaborative structure and governance to restore the health & resiliency of nature and people in the Russian River of northern California.

Southern Appalachian Landscape Conservation Coalition, $25,000 over one year

Strengthening the framework for protecting & connecting the Southern Appalachian Landscape. 

Wabanaki Commission on Land and Stewardship, $25,000 over one year

Developing Wabanaki principles and practices to guide collaborative work in the Dawnland.

Woodlands Partnership of Northwest Massachusetts, $25,000 over one year

Securing the foundation for an innovative public-private model for forest conservation & natural resource-based economic development in western Massachusetts.

As we reflect on this grant cycle—and indeed on the last six years of grantmaking and capacity-building within the Catalyst Fund—we continue to believe that the place-based, community-grounded Landscape Partnerships that apply to the Catalyst Fund are essential vehicles for delivering the holistic conservation, stewardship, and restoration successes needed to respond to the interwoven biodiversity, climate, and environmental injustice crises.

And we continue to feel that collaborative capacity investments are a critical, foundational (and too often missing) element. Such investments open the aperture of opportunity and potential: By supporting the core functions of bringing people together across interest, perspective, and cultures, and enabling effective collaboration over time, collaborative capacity creates the space to develop and bring forward the bold, innovative, and previously unimagined (or perhaps even previously unimaginable) projects that are capable of addressing complex, pressing challenges. In short, this is how we bring forward systems-level solutions to the systems-level challenges we face. 

So we invite you to join us in celebrating the above Partnerships that are receiving grant awards—as well as all of the more than 80 Partnerships that submitted proposals during this grant cycle. We are incredibly inspired to see the important work that all are pursuing in landscapes across the country—and heartened by what this commitment to advancing genuinely collaborative approaches to sustaining the health of our natural landscapes and our communities says about our capacity to rise to meet the scale of the challenges we are facing.

We look forward to staying in touch, and encourage you all to keep an eye out for our next grant cycle in early 2025!

Jonathan S. Peterson

Director

Network for Landscape Conservation

The Network for Landscape Conservation is the community of practice for practitioners advancing collaborative, cross-boundary conservation as an essential approach to protect nature, culture, and community.

www.landscapeconservation.org

Contact Jonathan Peterson, Network Director, for more information.