Last month the Network for Landscape Conservation announced 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.
Even as unprecedented levels of public funds have been directed towards the restoration, stewardship, and conservation of our lands and waters in recent years, the influx of project delivery funding has only served to underscore a gap that needs to be filled: the on-the-ground capacity to get the work done. The Catalyst Fund aims to build capacity and help local Landscape Partnerships contribute toward achieving national conservation goals.
Catalyst Fund: an innovative and critical funding source
The Network for Landscape Conservation launched the Catalyst Fund Program in 2019 to accelerate the pace and practice of collaborative landscape conservation and stewardship across the United States. The Catalyst Fund couples financial support through a competitive grant process with an in-depth Peer Learning and capacity building experience. The CF focuses on strengthening the collaborative capacity of place-based, community-grounded Landscape Partnerships. These investments are intended to better position Partnerships to achieve long-term conservation and stewardship success, building in landscapes across the country the enduring collaborative infrastructure and social capital needed to address systems-level challenges like the biodiversity, climate change, and environmental injustice crises. A portion of the Fund is dedicated to supporting Indigenous leadership in landscape conservation and stewardship.
With this its sixth annual grant cycle, the Catalyst Fund has supported 85 Landscape Partnerships from throughout the United States, totaling more than $2 million in support. The Catalyst Fund seeks to boost Partnerships that demonstrate a genuinely collaborative approach to protecting the landscapes they call home. These Partnerships are working on a broad range of issues and priorities that are relevant to their home landscapes, ranging from climate resilience, wildlife corridor protection, landscape connectivity, watershed enhancement and management, cultural revitalization, Indigenous co-stewardship, forest health, and more.
Highlight: Peer Learning commitment and Annual Retreat
Collaborative landscape conservation and stewardship is an emerging practice, and practitioners often feel as if they must wrestle with figuring out the what and how of this work on their own. Recognizing this, the Catalyst Fund has embraced an emphasis on peer learning. NLC supports a peer learning cohort for grantees in each grant cycle, providing regular networking and exchange/learning opportunities for the grantees. Through monthly virtual meetings and an in-person annual retreat, the cohorts connect with one another to share support, insight, knowledge, exploration, and inspiration–all of which strengthens practitioner capacity and confidence to carry out the complex, challenging, and essential work of building and stewarding collaboration for landscape outcomes.
2024 Grant Awards!
Every year, the Network receives submissions from across the United States–all of which reflect inspiring work aimed at shifting trajectories within landscapes in response to the climate and biodiversity crises and the legacies of environmental injustice.
Check out the 2024 Catalyst Fund Grant Awards Here
As the Network reflects on this grant cycle—and indeed on the last six years of grantmaking and capacity-building within the Catalyst Fund—it seems only clearer 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. As NLC Director Jon Peterson notes,
“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.”
The Network for Landscape Conservation is a fiscally sponsored project of the Center for Large Landscape Conservation. Generous support for the Catalyst Fund is provided by the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation.
Top photo: Tent Rocks, Cochiti Pueblo, New Mexico. Credit: Unsplash
