RKMF Innovative Wood Products and Value Chains Grant

RKMF Innovative Wood Products and Value Chains Grant

Status: ACTIVE
Funder: Richard King Mellon Foundation
Last Updated: August 20, 2025

Summary

The Richard King Mellon Foundation invites proposals for the RKMF Innovative Wood Products and Value Chains Grant, aimed at fostering innovation in wood products and strengthening value chains. With a focus on rural economic development and environmental conservation, the Foundation supports projects that enhance the use of novel wood materials in the built environment. Eligible initiatives may include product development, market strengthening, and demonstration of new technologies to maximize the benefits of these innovations.

Overview

Richard King Mellon Foundation Since 1947, the Richard King Mellon Foundation (Foundation) has funded visionaries with bold ideas to advance prosperity in Southwestern Pennsylvania, and environmental conservation across the United States. The Foundation’s 2023 year-end endowment was $2.9 billion, and its Trustees in 2024 disbursed nearly $155 million in grants and program-related investments. The Foundation focuses its funding on six program areas: Conservation; Economic Development; Economic Mobility; Health & Well-Being; Organizational Effectiveness; and Social-Impact Investments. All six programs invest in transformative, evidence-informed solutions that align with the Foundation’s strategy and contribute to positive change. Innovative Wood Products and Value Chains The Richard King Mellon Foundation seeks proposals that support innovation in wood products; strengthen associated value chains; and/or encourage deployment of these materials. The cumulative intent is to accelerate the use of novel wood products across the built environment and among consumers, with attendant benefits to conservation and economic development. RFP responses may address product development; certification and commercialization; market and value chain strengthening; deployment of new technologies in demonstration projects; and other scalable projects with the potential to secure and enhance the benefits of innovation in innovative wood products. The Foundation has a particular interest in projects that demonstrate a clear nexus with rural economic development in areas with conserved natural resources and landscapes.

Eligibility

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Application Details

Request for Proposals:
Innovative Wood Products
and Value Chains
Applications due:
Wednesday October 1, 2025, 12:00 PM EST
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Table of Contents
Table of Contents ........................................................................................................... 2
Introduction to the Richard King Mellon Foundation ..................................................... 3
Conservation Funding Program..................................................................................... 3
Background: Working Forests Rely on Wood Products Value Chains ........................... 3
Request for Proposals: Seeking Projects that Enhance and Encourage Innovative
Wood Products and Value Chains ................................................................................. 5
Proposal Requirements .............................................................................................. 5
Types of Support ........................................................................................................ 6
Funding Amounts ....................................................................................................... 8
Use of Funds ............................................................................................................... 8
What the Foundation Will Not Fund ............................................................................ 8
Application Timeline ..................................................................................................... 9
Inquiries and Question Submission ............................................................................... 9
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Introduction to the Richard King Mellon Foundation
Since 1947, the Richard King Mellon Foundation (Foundation) has funded visionaries
with bold ideas to advance prosperity in Southwestern Pennsylvania, and
environmental conservation across the United States. The Foundation’s 2023 year-end
endowment was $2.9 billion, and its Trustees in 2024 disbursed nearly $155 million in
grants and program-related investments.
The Foundation focuses its funding on six program areas: Conservation; Economic
Development; Economic Mobility; Health & Well-Being; Organizational Effectiveness;
and Social-Impact Investments. All six programs invest in transformative, evidence-
informed solutions that align with the Foundation’s strategy and contribute to positive
change.
Conservation Funding Program
Since its founding, the Richard King Mellon Foundation has invested over $1 billion to
conserve and restore critical habitats in Pennsylvania and nationally, and to create
livable communities in and around those critical habitats. In the process, the
Foundation has helped to protect more than 4.5 million acres of land in all 50 states,
with a particular focus on increasing public access and conserving working lands.
The Foundation’s Conservation funding program’s vision is to see wildlife flourish and
people thrive in once-imperiled habitats across Western Pennsylvania and the nation.
To this end, the Foundation invests in strategic land protection, stewardship, activation,
and sustainable communities, including efforts to develop and deploy new
technologies that foster livable communities and healthy natural systems.
Background: Working Forests Rely on Wood Products Value Chains
The conservation of working forests across the United States benefits when markets for
wood products are robust. Demand for wood products is the basis for the complex
forest-based economy that includes logging, milling, shipping, value-added
production, and more. In this way, forestry practices—and the economic viability of
keeping forests as forests—depend heavily on markets for the various types and
grades of timber that America’s working forests produce.
A thriving forest-products industry plays an essential role in the stewardship of
American forests and is critical to ensuring the future of intact forested landscapes. In
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turn, these working forests sustain some 950,000 jobs nationwide, generating over
$280 billion in annual GDP.1
In recent years, however, many lumber markets have faltered, with negative
consequences for forestry. Notable declines in demand for hardwoods have
precipitated drops in lumber prices and the closure of numerous hardwood mills. For
decades, the decline of the paper and pulp industry has driven down demand for
small-diameter and low-grade wood, with negative consequences for the management
of complex forest types. These and other market trends have driven forest
conservation and management in the US toward an increasingly uncertain future.
The emergence of innovative wood products may be critical to halting and reversing
the decline in lumber markets, and to reestablishing conditions that incentivize
ecologically and economically viable forestry. Particularly where innovations create
new uses for low-grade, low-value, and/or small-diameter timber, their adoption may
help to resolve major challenges in the forest-products market. New markets for those
lower-value logs would support a future in which sustainable timber harvesting
continues to make economic sense for loggers, mills, and other businesses in the
supply chain.
Innovation2 in wood-based construction materials is producing an increasingly varied
class of engineered wood products. Examples of innovative wood-based construction
materials include mass timber; nanocellulose insulation, drywall, and particle board;
biochar additives; and timber concrete composites. Two of the most well-known and
widely-used wood-based construction products are types of mass timber: cross-
laminated timber (CLT) and glue-laminated timber (glulam).
While promising in these respects, many wood-based construction materials face
challenges related to development, adoption, and scaling. Many materials that might
create new markets for low-value timber require further development, certification,
and commercialization. Market-ready materials may benefit from technical support for
the scaling of manufacturing, value-chain strengthening, and upskilling of workers in
the forestry, manufacturing, and construction sectors. The most mature innovations
1 Jagdish Poudel & Ram Dahal, “A comprehensive look at the forest products industry’s economic
contribution to the United States: Pre- and post-COVID analysis,” Forest Policy and Economics, Vol. 172
(2025).
U.S. Department of Agriculture. U.S. Forest Service. “Forest Products”. Updated 2024. Accessed at
https://www.research.fs.usda.gov/.
2 The nature of innovation may vary, but innovations considered herein share certain characteristics: they
are “new ideas, methods, products, services, or solutions that have a significant positive impact and value”
and involve “transforming creative concepts into tangible outcomes that improve efficiency, and
effectiveness, or address unmet needs.” See Nick Jain, "What is Innovation? Definition, Types, Examples
and Process". IdeaScale. 15 July, 2023. Accessed at https://www.ideascale.com.
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may be best advanced through demonstration projects, and/or through direct
collaborations with the construction and real estate development industries.
Beyond construction, an array of other innovative wood products show promise to
similarly stimulate the market for lumber and thereby strengthen the future of working
forest management. The range of products include novel wood-based packaging
solutions; carbon fibers; thermally modified wood; energy applications for woody
biomass; biochar; wood-based bioplastics; and more. These innovations—like those in
construction—are expected to require investments at various stages of value chains, as
well as pilot projects and new partnerships aimed at stimulating adoption.
Request for Proposals: Seeking Projects that Enhance and Encourage
Innovative Wood Products and Value Chains
The Richard King Mellon Foundation seeks proposals that support innovation in wood
products; strengthen associated value chains; and/or encourage deployment of these
materials. The cumulative intent is to accelerate the use of novel wood products across
the built environment and among consumers, with attendant benefits to conservation
and economic development.
RFP responses may address product development; certification and
commercialization; market and value chain strengthening; deployment of new
technologies in demonstration projects; and other scalable projects with the potential
to secure and enhance the benefits of innovation in innovative wood products.
The Foundation has a particular interest in projects that demonstrate a clear nexus with
rural economic development in areas with conserved natural resources and
landscapes.
Proposal Requirements
(1) Applications must outline an approach to launch, enhance, or expand the
application of one or more innovative wood-based construction material(s).
(2) The Foundation welcomes proposals from non-profit organizations; public sector
entities; and scalable for-profit companies. The Foundation provides both grants
and Program-Related Investments (PRIs) to nonprofit organizations, and provides
grants to public sector entities. The Foundation primarily uses PRIs structured as
convertible notes to provide funding to scalable for-profit companies.
(3) Priority will be given to proposals that address both the conservation and
economic-development outcomes of the project.
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(4) Applicants shall be based in the United States, and project implementation shall
occur in the United States.
(5) Submitted proposals must clearly describe:
• The problem statement: the challenge related to innovation in wood products
the proposal seeks to address.
• Specific activities that would be undertaken.
• Feasible, measurable outputs, which describe what each activity aims to
accomplish. For example, if one activity is to construct modular housing units
using mass timber components, example outputs would include the number of
units constructed, the volume of timber used in construction, and the total cost of
development per unit.
• Feasible, measurable outcomes, including target metrics that describe the
degree of change in behaviors, knowledge, or skills that are expected to result
from the proposed activities. Example outcomes for an upskilling project aimed
at introducing builders to a wood-based material could be, for example, the size
of the construction market newly made viable for that material.
• How the proposed outcomes align with the Foundation’s Conservation funding
program and any economic development outcomes associated with the project.
• A monitoring, evaluation, and learning plan to track and document outputs
and outcomes.
• A sustainability plan, describing how Foundation funds would seed initiatives
with the potential to be sustained through earned revenue or other long-term
funding mechanisms. Applications should describe how the outcome of the
proposed project will result in a financially viable market, enterprise, or
program.
Types of Support
Applications should fit under one of the following types of support:
Planning and Innovation. A planning and innovation grant may provide an
opportunity for partners to formally come together to assess an opportunity, develop a
plan for addressing those needs, strategize on a way forward, and newly deploy a
product or solution. Planning and Innovation support may include:
Product Development. For projects involving promising innovations in wood
products that require further research and development. Products should have a
demonstrable commercialization pathway, and the potential to generate
conservation and economic-development benefits.
Certification and Commercialization. For projects involving fully developed
innovative wood products that require testing, certification, inclusion in industry
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standards, or similar prerequisites prior to use in demonstration projects or
scalable implementation.
Program or Partnership Development. For projects that contemplate launching
a new partnership or program, and which seek funds for the purpose of planning,
coordinating, or scoping.
Implementation. Implementation grants are for efforts to deploy innovative forest
products that may have already started or are already planned and therefore need
further infusion of funds to support more creative or expansive efforts. Implementation
support may include:
Demonstration Projects. For projects involving appropriately certified wood-
based materials with low adoption rates, intended to improve the visibility of the
material; to increase the comfort of designers, builders, and producers with use of
the material; to improve consumer comfort with new materials; to demonstrate
cost-effectiveness; or similar goals.
Value Chain Strengthening. For projects involving critical supply chain
activities associated with one or more innovative wood-based construction
material(s), including enhancing source-material production and the
sustainability of sourced lumber; capital investments in value-added enterprises;
upskilling of the forest products and construction workforces; and other
precursors to scalable deployment of the material.
Scalability. Scalability grants are for projects that expand on the demonstrated
success of a wood-based construction material, allowing for the penetration of new
markets or accelerated adoption of the product.
Scalable Product Deployment. For projects aimed at broad and scalable
incorporation of one or more innovative wood products in major construction
projects or commercially available product lines.
Marketing and Promotion. For projects and programs that increase the visibility
of innovative wood products; accelerate the acceptance or adoption thereof; and
coordinate among multiple businesses to advance the interests of the wood-
products industry.
Social Impact Investment. Social Impact Investments in the form of Program-Related
Investments are for early-stage for-profit companies that are seeking to grow their
business focused on the development and deployment of innovative forest products in
construction.
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Funding Amounts
The Foundation does not have a limit or range for funding amounts per application for
this RFP.
Successful grants may be invited to apply for follow-on funding or additional capacity-
building funding opportunities at the conclusion of the grant.
Use of Funds
Funded activities must be conducted within 6-18 months.
Grant funds awarded through this RFP may be used for a variety of expenses such as
program and service delivery; capital expenditures; administrative expenses;
consultant fees; or evaluation.
What the Foundation Will Not Fund
The Foundation will not fund the following items through this RFP:
• Endowments or capital campaigns
• Public-policy advocacy, political causes, or political events
• Existing deficits or retroactive funding
• Event sponsorships
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Application Timeline
Funding is expected to be awarded based on the following schedule.
RFP Timeline
Wednesday, October 1, 2025 Applications Due
Noon (12:00 PM) EST. Apply - Richard King Mellon Foundation
(rkmf.org)
Wednesday, December 5, 2025 Funding Status Notification
Friday, December 23, 2025 Funds Issued for Awarded Grants
Inquiries and Question Submission
The Foundation’s general eligibility criteria apply to the RFP. Please review our
application FAQ.
The Foundation will not respond to substantive questions related to this RFP prior to
application submittal. For questions following submittal, please email related to this
RFP to rkmf@rkmf.org. Use the subject heading: Innovative Wood Products RFP.
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