Council on Foundations Honors Leaders With Distinguished Grantmaker, Scrivner and Ylvisaker Awards

We are delighted to share the news with our members that the Council on Foundations has named the recipients of its Robert W. Scrivner Award for Creative Grantmaking and Paul Ylvisaker Award for Public Policy Engagement. The awards were presented on April 27 at the Council's annual conference in Toronto.

Chet Tchozewski, founder and executive director of the Global Greengrants Fund, is the recipient of the 2004 Robert W. Scrivner Award for Creative Grantmaking. The award honors grantmakers who possess a combination of vision, principle and personal commitment to make a difference in a creative way through grantmaking.

Tchozewski helped pioneer foundation strategies for international re-granting as a simple and effective means to support the growth of civil society organizations in developing economies and emerging democracies. Since 1993, the Global Greengrants Fund has distributed more than $5 million in grants, utilizing a global network of volunteer advisors to create more than 1,000 local grassroots organizations in nearly 80 countries.
" The work of the Global Greengrants Fund is critical in combating poverty and environmental destruction in developing countries," said Ridings. "Chet Tchozewski's persistent vision and ability to challenge conventional grantmaking practices has enabled grassroots organizations in remote parts of the world to receive support that may otherwise be unavailable."

The Rockefeller Brothers Fund is the recipient of the 2004 Paul Ylvisaker Award for Public Policy Engagement. The award honors a foundation that demonstrates excellence in affecting public policy by using creative and effective strategies.

The Rockefeller Brothers Fund is being recognized for its Innovative Brownfields program, an initiative that encourages New York to enforce the cleanup of polluted and abandoned land in urban centers. As a result, the New York State Brownfields Law was enacted in 2003. "The Rockefeller Brothers Fund's crucial role in the development of this initiative highlights how philanthropy has the capacity to influence public policy for the common good," said Ridings.

The Council on Foundations, an association of 2,000 grantmaking foundations and corporations worldwide, serves the public good by promoting and enhancing responsible and effective philanthropy. For more information on the Council, visit its website at www.cof.org.

Remarks of Chet Tchozewski

executive director of the Global Greengrants Fund, to the Council on Foundations 55th Annual Conference in Toronto, April 27, 2004, on accepting the Robert W. Scrivner Award for Creative Grantmaking

Thank you for the tremendous honor that the Scrivner award represents.

I have been learning more about Bob Scrivner in the past few weeks, and I’ve discovered that he was a great model for the kind of thoughtful risk-taking that helps keep philanthropy responsive and relevant.

I’ve received several phone calls from people who knew and admired Bob. Wayne Jaquith of the Peace & Security Funders Group mentioned Bob's early grant to Physicians for Social Responsibility in 1980. At the time, PSR wasn’t widely known, but within a few years PSR had won a Nobel Peace Prize.

I believe that much of the best work in philanthropy is based on intuition, and everyone seems to agree that Bob had great intuition.

Since 1993 the Global Greengrants Fund has made small grants to thousands of community-based environmental groups in the developing countries by relying on the ‘collective intuition’ of a global network of volunteer advisors to identify grantees.

While I'm very proud to have Greengrants' work recognized by the Council, I cannot take all the credit for what we are achieving. Credit must go to our teams of advisors around the world who work as volunteers to make this model a success. It also goes to our grantees—grassroots groups around the world—whose incredibly hard work is helping to improve the environment we all share.

I don't say this as an attempt at modesty. We absolutely couldn't do this without their dedication, generosity of spirit, and their willingness to take tremendous risks.

What appealed to me about the original Greengrants idea was that we could overcome two barriers to international grantmaking at the same time. First, we could reduce the costs of making small grants, and second, we could tap the wisdom of local people closest to the action.

By reducing costs, we hope to encourage more donors to explore international environmental giving. Despite increasing awareness of how our own future is linked to conditions in the rest of the world, too little money is available to support environmental work in places where the situation is most desperate.

I think we often forget how far we've come in North America. Love Canal, across the border in New York state, reminds me of the days when environmental clean up was happening one community at a time.

But unlike Love Canal, the people of Bhopal, India didn’t have the luxury of support from the Sierra Club or the EPA Superfund in 1984 when twenty thousand people died because of a toxic gas leak at a Union Carbide chemical plant.

In most of the world today, neighbors are coming together to try to solve local problems. But communities in the developing world usually find that they will have to work in isolation with very few resources. This means that progress will come slowly, if at all.

But it doesn’t need to be that way. We can get grants to grassroots groups in developing countries. We can do it inexpensively, and we can do it without taking a heavy-handed approach that assumes that we know best.

That brings me to the second feature that informs the Greengrants model: the use of a network of volunteer advisors who can identify promising grant candidates in dozens of countries.

Our advisors fulfill many of the same duties as program officers. They identify grantees and can help mentor and monitor them. Yet they work as volunteers. They do this because their own commitment to the cause keeps them highly tuned to the needs of grassroots groups and to the opportunities they represent.

There are many benefits that our advisors bring, but perhaps their greatest advantage is in the range of viewpoints they offer.

In a way, Greengrants celebrates the risk of disagreement. We believe in the power of the grassroots as a catalyst for positive change, and we know that progress is a complicated path. Many voices need to be heard if nations are to be responsive to the needs of their citizens.

As a believer in risk, Bob Scrivner might have appreciated the vast opportunities for risk—and for failure—that Greengrants represents. We make nearly 500 grants a year now, and each one is a calculated risk.

We reach an incredible range of groups working on almost every environmental front, and I’m as proud of our failures as our successes. Though often as small as $500, our grants offer hope, and they offer the kind of diversity that reduces grantmaking risks overall.

Thank you for this wonderful award, and thanks too, for everything the Council has done to support our work over the years.

Although I don't have time to thank everyone who has helped Greengrants over the years, I want to be sure to thank the Mott Foundation, Goldman, Packard, Ford, Open Society Institute, Rausing Trust, TOSA, Jurzykowski, and Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors all of whom provide major funding for our work.

Thanks also to our advisors and grantees and to all the donors that have been willing to join with us and share the risks and rewards of international small grants philanthropy.

Anne Rolfes
Founding Director of the Louisiana Bucket Brigade, named as one of New Orleans City Business Magazine’s Power Generation

Even though many Louisiana petrochemical companies cringe when Anne Rolfes stops by their offices, she insists her four-year-old advocacy group is not trying to put their plants out of business.

Rolfes, founding director of the Louisiana Bucket Brigade, said her group’s true intent is to encourage chemical plants to do everything within their power to avoid accidents and to stay attentive to their neighbors’ needs.

“Our point of view is every accident costs those companies to lose products,” she said. “If you stop these accidents, the community benefits because they aren’t subject to that pollution and the company benefits because they have more product to sell and less long-term liability.”

A Lafayette native, Rolfes said she was not raised to be an activist or to question petrochemical companies.

Much of her thinking changed after her tour of duty in Togo, Africa where she served in the Peace Corps. After she returned to the United States she began paying attention to what some multinational corporations were doing in African communities, such as Nigeria.

Seeing the suffering hit home for Rolfes because she realized the families being affected could just as easily have been the families she lived with.

“I had never been an activist before, but seeing that and having such a personal connection made me start paying attention to oil productions issues,” she said.

When she returned to Louisiana, she began drawing parallels to what she saw as inequities by petrochemical companies in some Louisiana communities.

In 2000, Rolfes incorporated the Bucket Brigade as a vehicle to advocate for communities near petrochemical plants and to distribute specially made buckets designed with a bag made of non-reactive plastic that collects air they can later test.

The Bucket Brigade distributes these to neighbors of chemical plants so they can hold the plant accountable after toxic emissions are released through flare-offs.

Rolfes was instrumental in coordinating a community buyout in Norco in which Shell Chemical paid to relocate dozens of families living next door to a plant.

“We are not looking to put the companies out of business or to get in the way of their progress. We want them to be good neighbors and to run their plant safely. This benefits both the plant and the community,” she said.