Patagonia

// Limit: 1 //  A. Favela (School of Plant Sciences)

Patagonia accepts one proposal per group in a given fiscal year (May 1–April 30), with deadlines varying from program to program. Patagonia's typical grant size also varies from program to program but generally ranges between $5,000 and $20,000.

Patagonia funds only environmental work. We are most interested in making grants to organizations that identify and work on the root causes of problems and that approach issues with a commitment to long-term change. Because we believe that the most direct path to real change is through building grassroots momentum, our funding focuses on organizations that create a strong base of citizen support.

We support small, grassroots, activist organizations with provocative direct-action agendas, working on multi-pronged campaigns to preserve and protect our environment. We help local groups working to protect local habitat, and think the individual battles to protect a specific stand of forest, stretch of river or indigenous wild species are the most effective in raising more complicated issues—particularly those of biodiversity and ecosystem protection—in the public mind. We look for innovative groups that produce measurable results, and we like to support efforts that force the government to abide by its own—our own—laws. Your efforts should be quantifiable, with specific goals, objectives and action plans, and should include measures for evaluating success.

Because we're a privately held company, we have the freedom to fund groups off the beaten track, and that's where we believe our small grants are most effective. We support the use of creative methods to engage communities to take action, including film, photography and books. However, media projects will only be successful in our proposal process if they are tightly linked to a direct-action campaign on the issue, with specific goals that go beyond education and awareness.