Blog

OMG, I’m a blogger. I’ve dreaded this moment. With 90M blogs, I always wondered, why would anyone want one more option – from me? But Small Change Fund’s Ruth Richardson is a force of nature – with a compelling value proposition for social change. So here I am, blogging about small grants at 6:00 A.M.

Small Change Fund, the newest member of the Greengrants Alliance of Funds, has the kind of ‘hybrid vigor’ that is contagious.  With its new website and blog, Small Change Fund will become a new portal for vigorous debate about how small causes can have big effects – like the ‘butterfly effect.’ And they’ve asked me to start that debate – I’ll be SCF’s first guest blogger until March. I plan to use this opportunity to tell you what I’m doing, what I’m thinking, what I’m reading, and to throw out a few questions to kick around.

On Wednesday I was in Palo Alto to meet with the Skoll Foundation about small grants, and the Moore Foundation (about small grants), and then in Sausalito to meet with the Association of Small Foundations and Northern California Grantmakers about international grants (and small grants of course). Finally, it was the Global Fund for Women and Marion Rockefeller Weber’s Flow Fund Circle to discuss her ideas for ‘capillary philanthropy’ – a system which gets money to the deepest roots of communities without the burden of “impact and accountability reports.”

I’m reading What Would Google Do? at the suggestion of Steve Gunderson, the President and CEO of the Council on Foundations who recommended it to his Board which is meeting in Washington in March just ahead of the “Foundations on the Hill” initiative. My question is do you think the internet and social media can change the world? John Tierney touches on this in a recent Science Times article – “The Madness of Crowds and the Internet Delusion.”

He talks about You Are Not A Gadget, the latest book by Jaron Lanier (the internet guru who coined the term “virtual reality” who now believes that unpaid web content is being exploited by the “lords of the clouds” like Google at the expense of individual creativity – he questions the original hailing of the idea that wonderful possibilities would be realized once the internet allowed the world to instantly share their work, their dreams, their passions. What do you think?

Small Change Fund is a new way to make big change. Small Change Fund is a unique online gathering place for Canadians who want to help make change, in Canada and abroad. We offer a virtual meet-up for people with dreams, people with dollars, and people with know-how.

We make giving simple.
Call it bottom-up investment, grassroots grant-making, place-based funding, micro-philanthropy. Whatever its name, it’s a new way of giving. We open up the giving process so you can have a hand in solving the problems you care about most. You read, you choose, you give. You can give money, you can give time, you can give support. It’s that simple.

We put you in touch.
Did you know that less than 1% percent of Canadian giving goes to grassroots groups and only a fraction of that goes to support environmental and international causes? As the only Canadian organization of its kind, Small Change Fund puts you in touch with people on the ground, people who are best able to figure out and fix the problems in their communities.

We multiply your gifts.
Small gifts can equal big change. Your support – whether time, money, or encouragement – combines with that of other supporters across the country to create enormous change in communities. We multiply your gifts so that whatever the size, you are encouraging others to give and are combining your support with others for big impact.

We back you up.
Small Change Fund has the backing of advisors from coast to coast to coast. They bring decades of social and environmental expertise to the projects you see on our site – local scientists and activists, leaders of small networks, journalists, photographers, and national environmental leaders – they are the heart of Small Change Fund. They help you make good decisions, connect you to projects in their communities, and lend you their wisdom, experience, and expertise.

We create community.
When you join Small Change Fund, you become a member of the Small Change Fund  community. We take care of the practical stuff so you can focus on the fun stuff, like making friends with people who share your values. And the Small Change Fund community isn’t confined to our borders. Our community is the global village. Because we also work with the Global Greengrants Alliance of Funds – an alliance that supports grassroots projects around the world – Small Change Fund is at once local and global.

Start something big with small change. Visit us at www.smallchangefund.org!

Great news! After a hard-fought struggle, Global Greengrants grantee, Kitchenuhmaykoosib Inninuwug (KI), just won its fight to say “no” to a mining exploration company that has finally given up its staked claims to land near the KI community in Northern Ontario in exchange for a financial settlement with the province. Last year KI’s chief and five councilors were jailed for refusing to allow platinum mining exploration that would threaten the health and livelihood of their Indigenous community, 200 km from the nearest road in the Boreal Forest of Northern Ontario – North America’s largest wild forest. This became one of the highest profile Indigenous land rights and environmental justice struggles in Canada.

Greengrants has supported Ontario First Nation communities through ten grants totaling $44,400 over the last five years.

KI was one of the campaigns supported by Greengrants for $5,000 grant in 2008. Another great example of what a small grant can achieve!

Small Change Fund’s partner, and founder and President of Global Greengrants Fund, Chet Tchozewski, is featured in Yale’s Environment 360. As Chet gears up to attend the COP15 meetings in December, check out what he believes to be crucial, yet realistic goals for addressing climate change. What do you expect from Copenhagen? Read the article in environment 360.

Global Greengrants Fund, Small Change Fund’s international partner, hosts a call on Indigenous rights. Indigenous peoples around the world are holders of incredibly valuable environmental knowledge. Their very identity is linked to the land they have inhabited for generations—land that too often is threatened by oil and gas development, mega-dams, climate change, and other socio-environmental issues. The unfortunate reality is that many indigenous peoples often lack the legal rights to protect their resources from corporate and government development. This is not only the case in high profile locations such as the Amazon and the Congo, but also in the very remote northern regions of Canada and Russia.

On 18 November 2009, supporters from around the world participated in an amazing conference call to hear directly from those on the ground in the Far North – Ekaterina Evseyeva whose work focuses on the impact of oil and gas pipelines in Russia, and Judy Da Silva, who is a member of the Grassy Narrows First Nation in Northern Ontario. Listen to the call on the Greengrants website.

Ruth Richardson, Co-Founder of Small Change Fund, blogs about a new model for grassroots change-making.

She asks, “Who’s going to do it? Who’s going to fund solutions to our most pressing social and environmental challenges?” It’s a good question based on one asked by Phil Buchanan, President of the Center for Effective Philanthropy. Who’s going to provide the investments in critical social change given the stark realities of the economic downturn, of governments looking to foundations to support essential services, of foundations looking to the private sector to fund innovation, of the private sector scrambling to cope with the shifts in their financial forecasts?

Her answer? We are. All of us. Read the blog at White + Hirji.

Tracy Glynn, Small Change Fund Advisor, highlights the dangers of aerial spraying. On September 4, people working in the woods of northern New Brunswick, including more than 50 women planting trees, were doused with chemicals from a helicopter spraying the public forest to kill the hardwoods for a softwood plantation.

“A man reported fish kills along a stream here after the last spraying. It is not normal to do that to the forest. We can’t prove we are sick because of the spraying but cancer and pesticides have been linked. People are starting to question why do so many people in our community, in northern New Brunswick, have cancer, and rare cancers,” says a local resident. Read the full article at The Dominion.

Nina-Marie Lister, Small Change Fund board member, is profiled in Design Observer. In her article Water/Front she talks about our relationship to water. “Almost all major cities embrace the water: Rome was founded on the banks of the Tiber, Paris is bisected by the Seine, London by the Thames; Los Angeles sits on the edge of the Pacific, Hong Kong straddles the Pearl River Delta. And almost all urban waterfronts are bound up with the dynamic, messy history and complex legacy of industrialization.”

But with a message of hope, she shows us that for the millions who live, work and play at the water’s edge, there is a new approach to waterfront design that offers the prospect of a renewed, more resilient relationship, in subtle but powerful communication with the waters that sustain us. Read her article in The Design Observer.

On 30 October 2009 Small Change Fund attended All My Relations: 2009 Gathering. Organized by the Circle on Aboriginal Grant-making, All My Relations brought together engaged donors, First Nations’ community leaders, and international speakers to discuss the challenges facing Aboriginal communities – especially around issues of land and youth – and to build the future of the Circle.

Stay tuned for materials from the gathering.

Greengrants’ West Africa Advisor and friend of Small Change Fund, Nnimmo Bassey, named Hero of the Environment in 2009 by TIME Magazine! Congratulations Nnimmo!!!

It wasn’t an oil spill that made Bassey an environmentalist. It was a massacre — the 1990 assault by Nigeria’s armed forces on the village of Umuechem, where residents of the oil-rich Niger Delta had accused the Shell Petroleum Development Company of environmental degradation and economic neglect. In two days of violence, 80 people died and nearly 500 houses were destroyed. “We woke up from a sleep and … everything was collapsing around us,” says Bassey, 51, head of Environmental Rights Action, the Nigerian chapter of Friends of the Earth.

The deaths convinced Bassey and his colleagues that they needed to broaden their efforts. “We realized that if people don’t have a safe environment to live in, then they don’t have literally any other rights,” he says.

Read the article from Time Magazine.