What We Fund

Youth education, youth advocacy and reducing childhood poverty – these are the broad funding focus areas for our grants supporting youth. While we do make exceptions, in general we prioritize the following in each category:

• Education: school-based programs for youth focused on educational attainment. We also reserve a small portion of our education grants budget for development of youth leaders.
• Advocacy: organizations working to support foster youth and prevent and treat child abuse.
• Reducing poverty: in the short term, organizations focused on childhood hunger; in the long-term, educational attainment and family support such as housing and education support.

Our environmental grants support climate change mitigation and organizations working to protect ecosystems. We recognize both represent huge issues with multiple strategies to address. In general we prioritize grants in the following way: 

• Protecting Ecosystems: organizations working on habitat restoration and clean water protection. We also reserve a small portion of our environmental grants to support the next generation of environmental stewards.
• Climate Change Mitigation: In Hawaiʻi we focus on organizations working towards mitigation strategies. In Oregon we include mitigation strategies as well with a particular emphasis on policy implementation and defense.

The great majority of our grant budget goes towards grants in support of youth and/or the environment. However, we do award a small amount of community grants, typically in response to an acute need. An example is that, at the onset of the pandemic, we made grants to community organizations addressing the dramatic spike in hunger.

Banner Photo Credit: ʻIolani School’s KAʻI Program