Biophilia Foundation Grants

The Biophilia Foundation Grants support biodiversity conservation on private lands, focusing on systemic change through community engagement. The foundation encourages organizations to submit letters of inquiry detailing their mission, tax status, funding requests, and intended outcomes. They prioritize private land conservation, ecosystem restoration, and innovative policy initiatives, especially in the arid Southwest and Chesapeake Bay regions. Grants typically range from $5,000 to $25,000, with larger amounts available for established partnerships.

NOTE: The Biophilia Foundation seeks out potential grant recipients and therefore does not have an open application process. However, organizations can send a one- to two-page letter of inquiry to the foundation. In the letter, please include an introduction to the organization, its mission, geographic area of focus, the organization’s tax status, amount of funding requested, the need or problem to be addressed, program to be funded, and intended outcomes.
Our Mission & Approach
The Biophilia Foundation is dedicated to advancing biodiversity conservation on private lands by fostering systemic change through people, their communities, and direct action. We approach our mission by offering grants to nonprofit organizations, administering in-house programs, and serving as a strategic partner and fiscal sponsor for organizations with which we collaborate.
Private Land Conservation
While national parks and other lands protected by governments are critical to conservation, many regions are dependent upon the conservation value of privately-owned lands.
Our private land conservation initiative includes protection of the Pritzlaff Ranch in New Mexico, support of the Linkages project to engage private landowners in northern Sonora, and serving as the fiscal sponsor of Wildlife Corridors LLC’s project to extinguish development rights in a critical wildlife corridor.
Ecosystem Restoration
The Biophilia Foundation supports a range of restoration projects. We are particularly interested in low-tech, process-based stream restoration projects in degraded watersheds in the west. Low-tech restoration using rock detention structures or wood structures, such as beaver dam analogues, provides a nature-based solution to a host of challenges, including providing habitat for biodiversity, increasing resilience to drought and flooding, and storing carbon.
Partners and grantees engaged in this work include the Borderlands Restoration Network, Sageland Collaborative, Cascade Forest Conservancy, and Cuenca Los Ojos.
Restorative Economies
The Biophilia Foundation is interested in developing a restoration economic sector. Restorative economies encompass a variety of market-based activities, including but not limited to ecotourism, native plant sales, ecosystem restoration crews, sustainable harvest, and regenerative ranching. They can also incorporate payments for ecosystem services, such as carbon markets.
Our partner and grantee Borderlands Restoration Network is very active in this field, and our work on carbon credits for dryland riparian restoration aims to provide an additional market-based mechanism for restoration.
Conservation Policy
The need for policies that support wilderness, rewilding, restoration, and nature-based solutions is great, and opportunities for policy advancement are on the horizon. The Biophilia Foundation funds several initiatives that advance innovative environmental policy.
We were active in the development of recommendations to the Biden-Harris administration to prioritize restoration in the US-Mexico borderlands, and we support efforts to secure a green amendment in New Mexico and Yellowstone to Uintas Connection’s advocacy toward federal agencies with land management responsibilities. The Biophilia Foundation was also active in the ballot initiative to reintroduce wolves to Colorado and serves as fiscal sponsor of the Rocky Mountain Wolf Project.
Funding
First-time grants to organizations generally range from $5,000 to $25,000, but on occasion we make larger or multi-year grants to organizations with which we have longer-term partnerships.

Eligibility

The Biophilia Foundation focuses its giving on the United States with particular interest in the arid Southwest and the Chesapeake Bay.The Biophilia Foundation’s allowable indirect cost rate is 20% for nonprofit organizations and 12.5% for universities and units of government.