ECOLOGIA's Annual Fundraising Appeal

Dear Friends of ECOLOGIA,

ECOLOGIA has just concluded our twentieth year. Quite appropriately, it was a year during which grassroots participation and financial support played a huge role in our success. When we began our work reaching out, way out, from Northeastern Pennsylvania in 1989, individuals, churches, and local businesses provided the financial support, moral encouragement, and human resources we needed. Two decades later ECOLOGIA benefits from foundation grants, but we are still nurtured and sustained by the grassroots. During 2009, there were days, weeks and months when we and our partners in remote and desperate situations were waiting and waiting for the arrival of long overdue funds from promised grants. These dry spells are more than cash flow challenges for the non-profit world. They are droughts that can wither budding initiatives and weaken even well-established projects.

Miraculously, throughout 2009 small and medium sized private, local, and corporate donations arrived in just the critical amounts needed to keep our momentum going. We wish you could have been here to hear the audible sigh of relief and feel the break in tension. Even more, we wish you could see the gratitude in the eyes and faces of distant partners who know that these are difficult times for the United States and that your donations often come at the cost of some considerable sacrifice.

Those of you who have known us for some or all of the last two decades know that ECOLOGIA is not predicated on a high intensity fund raising business model. We don’t believe in giving third party fundraisers a large chunk of our donations so that we can have a bigger budget. We have avoided going after funding streams and government projects that might have provided us with financial stability, at too high a cost. In our line of work, the strings attached to those sources of funding have felt more like entrapping ropes with weights attached. Such an approach probably works well for some non-profits, but not for one so dedicated to fundamental change and real independence as ECOLOGIA. In addition, we have long believed that scale is important and that real change comes from below, and at the margins. So it is in that precarious position we have placed ourselves. We are small and standing with the ignored, neglected, and challengingly innovative by design.

But we remain consequential. When delegates from the world’s most populous country, China, ran into difficulties participating in the creation of a global standard on corporate social responsibility, they sought our advice and guidance. We helped their voice to be heard in a global gathering of the International Standardization Organization (ISO) in Québec City this August. We helped China’s issues to be understood and respected. We also helped China to understand the outside world. We continue working with the Chinese at quite high levels of policy making.

Here are a few other examples of how we made news outside the headlines this year:

• Our second year of work in the remote deserts of Inner Mongolia has brought ECOLOGIA to the challenging nexus of anti-desertification initiatives, poverty alleviation, and the “fair trade” marketing of natural fibers such as camel wool and cashmere. One new part of this work is partnering with a goat herders’ cooperative to plant special desert “wild cherry” trees that could stabilize the advancing desert, and could help to reduce dust storms that plague Beijing and whose effects can be detected on our west coast. Some additional encouraging developments on this project can be found on our website homepage.

• We are actively engaged with students and future leaders at Middlebury College in Vermont and the Monterey Institute of International Studies in California. We meet with or converse electronically with them on a daily basis, providing guidance on the creation of new models of social change ranging from businesses to non-profit initiatives.

• ECOLOGIA continues to be the convener of an international consortium of academic institutions, research centers, and NGOs developing models of socially and environmentally responsible businesses pushing the envelope of sustainability way beyond “business as usual” and into the realm of where we need to be if we and the planet are to endure and thrive in the 21st century.

• We have continued our commitment to supporting grassroots “people to people” projects through our Virtual Foundation. In 2009, these have ranged from community-building and sustainable organic farming after the major earthquake in China, to support for a school in a low-income area in Kenya, to veterinary and health services for reindeer herding nomadic populations in Mongolia. One of the common denominators of these projects is that they involve an undramatic, long-term commitment by people on the ground, to work at improvements over time in regions facing serious historical and physical challenges.

It has been a difficult year for many of us; a lot of people right here at home in the United States are suffering. We hope that you read this message from us as primarily a message of hope and progress, and only secondarily as a fundraising request. Clearly many people's support has been critical to ECOLOGIA, particularly in the past year. But also clearly, we have demonstrated our perseverance over the decades, and we have grown stronger together with our colleagues and partners around the world. We would profoundly appreciate your financial support this year, in whatever amount you are comfortable donating. Rest assured that, regardless of your decision this year, we remain very grateful for your interest in our work, and look forward to keeping in touch with you during the years ahead.

Sincerely,

Randy Kritkausky, President
Carolyn Schmidt,Program Director