In memory of Flo Britton, who was always a wonderful adventure partner and travel companion ❤️

Backed by careful research to maximize the impact of our dollars. It's an issue that is critical for out survival. Gotta make this one monthly 🔄🌍

Supporting this awesome organization again as they fight a series of anti-trans bills in the Maine legislature (including trying to ban trans youth from school sports programs) 🏳️‍⚧️🏳️‍⚧️🏳️‍⚧️🏳️‍⚧️🏳️‍⚧️🏳️‍⚧️🏳️‍⚧️

Making my previous donation recurring :) The Steel Yard is an amazing crossroads of magical people and ideas. It's a place were people come to learn new job skills, explore the industrial history of Rhode Island, create public art, and at least once a year, see molten iron flung into the air.  It's the kind of place where a welder who's been working on submarines for 40 years can be found collaborating with a young ceramic artist. It's so full of creativity, teamwork, and a deep care for the Rhode Island community.

Our fellow Americans in Maui need us. Grateful to know people will have a safe place to stay with the comforts of home during this hard time. 

I am so grateful for this opportunity to deepen my learning in becoming an even stronger Ally for Original Nations and their important contribution to humanity and see that educating the Western world on regenerative values will bring an importnat shift in how we relate to our environemnt as s sentient living being. All that we love, we don't harm and my hope is that our busines practices can start to reflect that. With much gratitude to the facilitators of this training and The Fountain community. In service to life, Christiane. 

Stand with us today to help achieve our vision of a world without Alzheimer's tomorrow.

The Alzheimer's Association is the leading voluntary health organization in Alzheimer's care, support and research.

Alzheimer's Association National Office

Supporting highly-impactful, evidence-based solutions to the triple challenge of climate change, air pollution and energy poverty.

## The Founders Pledge Perspective

Climate change is one part of a triple challenge surrounding energy production. Not only does most current energy production lead to damaging carbon emissions, the effects of which are devastating ecosystems and changing our planet beyond recognition, it also pollutes the air and leaves many of the world’s poor without sufficient energy. This adds up to an environmental and humanitarian crisis.

Thus, we face a triple challenge: we not only need to drive down carbon emissions to near zero by mid-century, and drastically reduce air pollution, but we need to do so while supporting work to reduce global poverty that will often be accompanied, or even driven, by increased energy consumption.

We aim to take a holistic approach that recognizes the global nature of this challenge, as well as the fact that, despite its urgency, we are still in the early days of climate action. This means that the solutions that we focus on will not only reduce emissions now, but will do so in a way that avoids future emissions, while also creating opportunities for the world’s poor and eventually ending energy poverty entirely.

We aim to do this in three ways:

- **Audacious advocacy**: By focusing our grantmaking on organizations leveraging large amounts of money through policy advocacy. There are highly effective organizations with budgets in the millions of dollars which have influenced government innovation budgets, orders of magnitude larger than their costs. By looking for opportunities with leverage like this, we can have an outsize impact.
- **Accelerating low-carbon innovation**: By finding and funding advocacy opportunities that strengthen the energy innovation eco-system or promote particularly neglected technologies. As the success of solar has shown for electricity, the availability of cheap, low carbon alternatives to our current energy sources can make a very significant difference. Efficient, low-cost technology can spread around the world without inter-governmental cooperation or expensive policies to spread around the world, making it a more robust strategy in a world where climate action will often not be the first priority of policy makers and the public.
- **Focusing on blindspots and bottlenecks**: By focusing on areas neglected by other stakeholders, we can ensure that fund dollars make as much difference as possible. While some technologies, such as solar, enjoy widespread popularity and significant policy support, this is not similarly true for other approaches, resulting in a huge imbalance in resource allocation. By finding and funding advocates for overlooked solutions, such as carbon capture and storage technology, we can ensure we are making the most of every tool available to us in the fight against climate change.

Managed by two members of the Founders Pledge Research team, the Climate Change Fund identifies and supports sustainable, evidence-based solutions to the “triple challenge” of carbon emissions, air pollution, and energy poverty.

## Our Approach to Grantmaking

When evaluating potential grants, we consider several key points:

- **Counterfactual impact**. Our grants are designed to create a meaningful outcome that would not otherwise have happened. In particular, we aim to make grants that otherwise wouldn’t have been made, rather than those which just take the place of other philanthropists’ donations. This means that you can rely on the Funds to create meaningful, real change, rather than just maintaining the status quo.
- **Impact-driven philanthropy**. The goal of this fund is maximal positive impact, irrespective of this impact being “sexy” or visible. This means we will focus on opportunities that others focused on clear attribution of their work or shiny outcomes might neglect. For example, we are very comfortable funding organizations to increase their general capacity and strategy when we perceive this as their bottleneck to higher impact, rather than being tied to specific outcomes or deliverables.
- **The organization’s funding gap**. Not all organizations are set up to scale up their programming and many can’t productively absorb large amounts of unsolicited funding. We evaluate all potential grantees’ capacity for growth and consider how much money they could put to good use.
- **Organizational strength**. Particularly with unrestricted funding, it’s important to have trust in the leadership and capacity of the organizations we support. We look at their track record of success and their transparency about failures as well as successes, and we only support those organizations which are exceptionally well run.
- **Time-critical opportunities and funding certainty**. While Founders Pledge members give to our top climate charities regularly, sometimes there are time-critical opportunities which require fast decisions. Or there are needs for certainty of funding streams to allow new hires and start new campaigns and programs. We will use the Fund to make grants that enable such short-term opportunities and stability for high-impact funding opportunities thereby increasing the impact compared to individual giving to specific organizations.
- **Portfolio approach**. Because most climate damage comes from particular severe outcomes – with a world of 4 degrees of warming being much worse than twice as bad as a world with 2 degrees – and because every particular strategy – such as energy innovation – might underdeliver, we pursue a portfolio approach to maximize positive impact. This means we will diversify our bets in ways that, when one approach fails (such as energy innovation), the others we promote (such as carbon removal) can be expected to be particularly important and still available. This maximizes the expected impact of your donation in a world characterized by huge uncertainty about the success of different high-impact solutions.

## Frequently-Asked Questions

**Can charities apply for money from the Fund?**

The Funds do not generally accept applications from charities. If the Fund Managers choose to open up an application round, this will be publicized. Charities are requested not to send unsolicited applications for funding.

**How frequently will you make grants from the Fund?**

Fund Managers will review grant-making decisions on a quarterly basis. Decisions will be made based on the value of Funds and the available options for high-impact grant-making. We may sometimes delay grant-making if we believe that waiting for more promising opportunities will be more impactful. Conversely, we may disburse funds outside of our quarterly review dates if we become aware of a particularly promising and time-sensitive funding opportunity.

**How will my contribution be used?**

All funds are granted out. The Fund is not an investment vehicle. The Fund does not use any percentage of contributions to cover staff time or other overhead costs. Every dollar contributed to the Fund will be used to make grants directly to end-user organizations creating a real difference.

## More Questions?

To learn more about the Founders Pledge Climate Change Fund, please visit [founderspledge.com](https://founderspledge.com/funds/climate-change-fund) or email the Fund Managers at [funds@founderspledge.com](mailto:funds@founderspledge.com).

Climate Change Fund

Maine's only trans advocacy organization, supporting and empowering trans people to create a world where they can thrive.

Our mission is to support and empower transgender people to create a world where they can thrive.

MaineTransNet is a community based organization led by transgender people for transgender people. We provide peer-to-peer support groups, social and community events, advocacy for the transgender community across Maine, and transgender cultural competency training for medical, mental health, and social service providers. We engage transgender people and our allies across Maine in the practice of community building and organizing for mutual liberation. Our work is rooted in a deep desire to care for one another, which leads us to focus our efforts on building systems of mutual support on a bedrock of accessibility, inclusivity, and hospitality. We view structures of power and oppression as interlocking, and believe in finding our leadership from among those people who experience this as a reality in their daily lives.

MaineTransNet

The Steel Yard offers arts and technical training programs designed to increase opportunities for cultural and artistic expression.

The Steel Yard is a non-profit industrial art center and shared studio located in Providence, RI. We’re an arts maker space and non-traditional craft school offering courses & educational programs in blacksmithing, welding, jewelry, foundry, and ceramics. 

Our public projects department fabricates functional, design-driven public-art for installation throughout Southeastern New England. These decorative bike racks, trash cans, benches, and fences are found at businesses and main streets from Western Massachusetts to Block Island, with custom metal sculptures installed along waterways, parks, schools and public spaces across the region.

We’re a community of artists, makers, and learners. We host an artist residency program for emerging and mid-level artists that provides full access to our studios and equipment. Our welding job training program pays under-employed Rhode Islanders to learn welding, shop safety, and associated skills with the goal of getting a good-paying job.

Our 3.8-acre award-winning campus is the perfect venue for public and private events and one-of-a-kind fundraisers like our annual Halloween Iron Pour.

the Steel Yard

Accessible giving infrastructure for a more generous world.

Follow our realtime impact at https://www.every.org/metrics - people have donated over $36M!

We provide nonprofits with free tools to fundraise more effectively, including our all-in-one donate button and peer-to-peer fundraising solution. Our website encourages individuals to take action and spread generosity by giving monthly and giving out loud to help nonprofits get steady funding and grow awareness. Our open API for fundraising powers a collective research effort to transform fundraising with nonprofit, academic, corporate, and grassroots partners.

We envision a world where every person and organization has the best technology to help them do more good, increasing the global giving rate from 2% to 3% of GDP.

Every.org

Helps you put your money where your morals are. Together, we can close the funding gap for Black-founded nonprofits.

Giving Gap

Airbnb.org’s mission is to unlock the power of sharing space, resources, and support in times of need. 

Airbnb.org opens homes in a times of crisis.  We facilitate emergency housing for people displaced by disaster or conflict, especially those from marginalized communities hardest hit by crisis.  Airbnb.org works with communities and nonprofit partners to offer emergency temporary housing.  We have housed over 250,000 guests during times of need.  

We do this by providing short-term, quality and free emergency housing to people displaced by natural disasters and conflict, inspiring and empowering people to act as hosts and support their community, and staying responsive to crises by innovating and leveraging our strengths.

We amplify recovery efforts for individuals by providing safety, financial relief, psychological wellbeing, and connections to the community.   Ultimately, by making connections between hosts and guests, we strengthen and build social cohesion in communities.

Airbnb.org is an independent and publicly-supported 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization that leverages Airbnb, Inc.’s technology, services, and other resources at no charge to carry out Airbnb.org’s charitable purpose.






Airbnb.org

Embark on an online transformative learning journey with our comprehensive educational options and tiered pricing structure.
 

The Fountain is launching our first-ever educational offerings with the support of Alexis Bunten, PhD and Ryan (Ra) James! We have curated three different options of learning journeys; the Re-Indigenization learning journey, (re)Biz and Allyship. These offerings are here to guide us and our businesses back into right-relation with Earth and our deeper human purpose here on the planet at this time. Our tiered pricing structure is built upon the acknowledgement of the geopolitical access and privilege within both the Global North and Global South contexts

More details below on the different course options:

Option 1:  Re-Indigenization Learning Journey (both courses, 3-month commitment)

(12) 2-hour live-call sessions | 9am PST
September 6, 13, 20, 27, October 4,11,18,25, November 1, 8, 15, 22
*additional resources available and optional talking circles*

Join us for the powerful combination of (re)Biz course led by Ryan (Ra) James and the Allyship training led by Alexis Bunten to deepen and transform your ways of viewing, thinking and acting in the world for the benefit of our shared Mother Earth.

Cost (for this entire 3-month learning journey) is depending on Geopolitical area and access:

Sliding scale - $400 (Global South) -- $5000 (Tier 1 Global North). And anywhere in between that makes it possible for you in an honest and integral way. 

Option 2:   (Re)Biz (standalone course, 1-month commitment)

(re)imagining climate education to (re)design business-as-usual

A 4-week online course in partnership with (re)Biz

(4) 2-hour sessions | Times 9am pst
September 6, 13, 20, 27
*additional library of resources & integration prompts*

Evolve the mindsets and the worldview of those who are seeking to create a more equitable and regenerative world through their work and lives. This (re)course is designed to equip leaders with the skills and visor to create a regenerative and biodiverse future for many generations to come.

Program Facilitated by Ryan (Ra) James

Cost (for this standalone course):

Sliding scale - $400 (Global South) -- $2000 (Tier 1 Global North). And anywhere in between that makes it possible for you in an honest and integral way. 

Option 3:  Allyship (standalone course, 2-month commitment)

An 8-Week Online Program

(8) 2-hour sessions |9am PST
October 4, 11.18,25 November 1, 8,15, 22
*additional 60-min talking circle on Fridays*

Decolonize together: exploring allyship and Indigenous wisdom
Expand your understanding of how Indigenous knowledge can help to transform economies, strategies for organizational re-Indigenization and allyship with Indigenous Peoples.

Program Facilitated by Alexis Bunter, PhD.

Cost (standalone for this course):

Sliding scale - $400 (Global South) -- $3500 (Tier 1 Global North). And anywhere in between that makes it possible for you in an honest and integral way. 

If you have any questions or thoughts, please feel free to email: Ryan@thefountain.earth for more information.

With gratitude,
The Fountain Team

Re-Indigenization Transformational Learning Journey

Founders Pledge is a global nonprofit empowering entrepreneurs to do the most good possible with their charitable giving. 

We equip members with everything needed to maximize their impact, from evidence-led research and advice on the world’s most pressing problems, to comprehensive infrastructure for global grant-making, alongside opportunities to learn and connect. We’re grateful to be funded by our members and other generous donors. 

Founders Pledge

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Life has been kind to me and it's my mission to share that kindness with the world. 