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About

The Earth Funding Lab is a platform for learning, strategy and collaborative action, designed to help philanthropic funders work together to support greater impact.

It is a place in which to set greater goals together, compelling us to work across silos to help more systemic change come about.

We facilitate processes to help learn about new models, transform structures, and support new forms of collective action.

Our guiding star is to support economies in service to life, with three active workstreams underway in areas of investment, tax and the legal rights of nature.

Why it’s needed Why it’s different The story so far

Why it’s needed

A premise of the Lab is that we cannot rely on traditional methods of funding alone in order to meet the unprecedented challenges our world faces. If we continue using exactly the same methods, we are likely to continue seeing the same rate of change and same kind of results. 

In response, the Earth Funding Lab is a call to evolve the systems and structures behind funding in order to support greater and more systemic forms of impact.

At one level, the Lab is a place to connect ideas, knowledge, resources and strategies. At another, it is a place to work together to transform how funding works to help new forms of support grow in the world.

We acknowledge that are no simple solutions to the challenges of the world today. For this reason, the spirit of the Lab is one of community, shared inquiry, experimentation and mutual support.

“This is a very exciting and motivating prospect indeed … it’s been amazing.”

Sufina Ahmad, John Ellerman Foundation

Why it’s different

The Lab is both a learning community and innovation incubator. We work with questions about how to evolve philanthropy from within in order to support more sustainable and generative change. We do this by:

  • Making breakthrough changes in ‘how’ funding happens as well as ‘what’ to fund
  • Setting more courageous goals and objectives that compel us to work across silos
  • Giving ourselves a set of guiding principles that challenge us to work in more impactful, systemic ways
  • Offering supportive and challenging learning spaces that work around purpose, values, beliefs and habits
  • Bringing together a community of funders, actors, thought leaders and practitioners to share learning and develop actions
  • Helping to build deeper relationships between funders to enable greater collaboration
  • Working as a constantly evolving ecosystem through reflection, learning and experimentation
  • Bringing the wisdom of nature and the principles of living systems into how we work in order to protect all life on our planet

Participating Funders

The story so far

  1. The Environmental Funders Network and the Bio-Leadership Project came together to consider how to help philanthropy be more effective in supporting deeper, transformational changes in the world.
  2. We consulted 60 funders and others, from which we defined a guiding star: To help funders work together in supporting ‘economies in service to life’.
  3. Nine ‘catalyst funders’ joined us for an initial research stage, identifying opportunities to grow this work.
  4. In 2023, we facilitated a 6-month journey, learning more about potential areas of support including new models of systemic change and alternative funding structures.
  5. Later in 2023, we prioritised three workstreams to begin working on areas of 1) tax narratives; 2) investment models and 3) rights of nature work.
  6. We have a wider bank of ideas to develop into workstreams when more funders are ready to join us.
  7. Through 2024 we are working with live workstreams, hosting ‘Basecamp Trainings’ to help new funders join, and from September will begin a new cycle of continued and new workstream themes.

Live workstreams

Evolving the tax system to serve life

This workstream is focused on exploring the points of confluence between the tax system and the climate and nature emergencies.
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Going beyond ESG

This workstream explores and acts on the misalignment between how organisations make grants and how they invest.
Find out more

Supporting the rights of nature movement

This workstream sets out to support the rights of nature movement to grow, knowing that giving nature back its rights will transform the way our economy functions - and how society views nature.
Find out more

Join

The Earth Funding Lab is a virtual campus for funders to come together and work in new ways. It’s open to all types and sizes of funding entities, from individual philanthropists to foundations, although the participants must have decision-making power about grant making.

Learn more