Programs

Member Services

As a membership organization, EGA has always made excellent member service a key goal. This commitment has been embodied in the vibrant events, projects, and publications inspired by member needs and requests. EGA provides a number of opportunities for grantmakers to network and to stay informed on environmental issues. EGA also helps members connect through the website, which is regularly updated with news, publications, job postings and event announcements. EGA has an active community listserv and Linkedin account to keep members informed.

Events

From its inception, EGA has offered its members the ability to meet and discuss a range of environmental issues and funding approaches. Over the years, EGA has organized small and large events across the country to help its members learn, share, network, and collaborate.

• EGA Annual Fall Retreat

  The annual Fall Retreat is EGA’s hallmark event. It assists grantmakers in learning about issues, collaborating on projects, and sharing information. It allows environmental philanthropists to increase their effectiveness through heightened collaboration, thus providing a more strategic role for funders in the growing environmental movement. The Retreat invites funders from a variety of environmental sectors to discuss obstacles, opportunities, and potential partnerships between the philanthropic, public, and private sectors.
   

• EGA Policy Briefings

  EGA hosts federal, state, and regional policy briefings. The Federal Policy Briefing is held in Washington, DC every other year. In the alternating years, EGA’s State of the States policy briefing is held in various locations across the U.S. Regional Policy Briefings tend to focus on a particular issue or set of interrelated issues and are driven by members’ requests. The purpose of all policy briefings is to provide grantmakers with a better understanding of upcoming actions and politics affecting the environment and to create a shared space that will allow funders to communicate, strategize, collaborate, plan, and network.
   

• EGA Webinars

  EGA hosts a webinar at least once a month. Anywhere between a handful and hundreds of funders have participated in calls ranging from international climate negotiations, options to rebuild after natural and man-made disasters, creating the new economy, and specific issue areas.

Publications

In addition to convening funders, EGA produces materials to seed and enhance discussions and understanding among members as well as to provide resources to help facilitate their work. These publications are delivered through a limited print edition as well as electronically via the EGA website.

• Tracking the Field

  Tracking the Field is an ongoing research-based initiative that monitors trends in environmental philanthropy using foundations’ 990 filings, does just that. The first report was released in 2007, and listed the foundations and total grants by issue area as well as other useful information. The full Tracking the Field Report is published every other year, and provides a picture of grantmaking beyond that of our members to encompass the entire field of environmental philanthropy.

  With over a decade of data, this report is the product of EGA’s continued investment in monitoring activity within our field. While pursuing improvements in the report each year, the basic methodology and taxonomy has remained consistent, allowing EGA to evaluate trends and analyze more than 100,000 grants. There is also a secure interactive heatmap, which allows members to search grants by the region affected by the grant, issue area, and foundation, to better facilitate collaboration among EGA members.
   

• Briefing Materials

  EGA publishes targeted primers, white papers and reports on a range of existing and emerging topics and strategies. They often highlight best practices, identify gaps and feature innovation in the field. These are often introductory and cross-sector primers with a larger resource section for those that want to dig deeper. In the past, EGA has written papers on the funding landscape of environmental education, philanthropy and the solar market, funding strategies for mitigating and adapting to climate change, the intersection of climate change with non-environmental philanthropic issue areas.

Priority Themes

• Diversity, Equity and Inclusion

  Our Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) work is central to our mission and goals; we believe that we are stronger as a community when we incorporate these principles into everything we do. In recognizing a lack of diversity and equity in the environmental movement and elevating it to an institutional priority, we have advanced our DEI efforts to the next level by actively examining where we are ourselves, and how to move our membership and the broader movement towards racial equity. This work has culminated in the release of the EGA Racial Equity POV.
   

• Global Engagement

  Global Engagement was selected as strategic priority theme for EGA to pursue and highlight in programming. The broad goal is to better weave in global themes and information to highlight the international and interconnected nature of environmental challenges. The desired outcomes are to give members better access to information on how global issues impact their work through core EGA programming and new programming when possible.
   

• Constituency Building

  The broad goals of the Constituency Building thematic priority are to strengthen the environmental movement by identifying common interests and shared priorities with four priority “non-environmental” constituencies – civic engagement, faith, health, and national security. The desired outcomes include strategic use of money, collective strategies, policy agenda/s for strategic alliances, as well as research, analysis, programming and tools development that deepen knowledge and build trust and relationships to make our work more effective.