Entering a new century: Sam Passmore reflects on our Environment program’s next chapter
The Mott Foundation is celebrating our centennial and entering our second century of work with a new strategic plan to guide our grantmaking.
In the video and transcript below, hear from Sam Passmore, director of our Environment program, about what’s ahead for the program and why it’s important.
Transcript of video
We only have one planet.
And so we need to figure out a way to live sustainably on this planet and in a way that supports people and community.
The thing that gives me hope about the future is we’re mostly focused on land and water issues. And those are issues that span ideological differences. And so there’s a lot of opportunity to build common ground.
One thing that does span across the program is how we do our work. We always center community and the impact on community. We believe in the power of networks and supporting people working together in networks to make change.
There’s a lot of continuity from the work in the past. So, the work in the past and going into the future will both have a domestic U.S. component and an international component.
The domestic U.S. component is grounded very much in our long-term work in the Great Lakes.
But, under the new plan, we’re also going to stretch into a national water policy role. All of that work is grounded in what we call the One Water approach, which is this idea of delivering safe and affordable water to all, from the source to the tap.
The international work also will continue some themes that we’ve been active in a long time.
The first is focused on our long-term interest in development finance and how the flow of finance — particularly from multilateral development banks that are publicly funded — how that finance impacts people and the environment in the developing world. And that initiative is called Finance for Sustainability.
The third initiative is deeply grounded in our long-term work in the Amazon Basin and actually expands that and deepens that to focus on forest and land resources in the Amazon, largely based on the insight that Indigenous peoples and other traditional communities who live in the forest are some of the most important protectors of the forest.
There have been important victories along the way, which are super inspiring.
I think the real inspiration and what keeps you motivated and gets you up in the morning to do the work is the people that we’re helping and the people we get to know — just unbelievable leaders, most of them unsung heroes working at the community level. You don’t read about them in the New York Times, but they’re just amazing people. Very inspiring.
And just knowing that we, in our small way, are helping them gets us up in the morning.