“America is not a pile of goods… America is a dream of greater justice and opportunity for the average man and, if we can not obtain it, all our other achievements amount to nothing.” ― Eleanor Roosevelt

“Ecological agriculture allows us to make peace with the earth, soil and the society.” ― Vandana Shiva

The river moves from land to water to land, in and out of organisms, … you cannot separate the land from the water, or the people from the land. ― Lynn Noel

The 21st Century will be the era of nurture capital, built around principles of carrying capacity, care of the commons, sense of place and non-violence. ― Slow Money Principle III.

“When people, land, and community are as one, all three members prosper; when they relate not as members but as competing interests, all three are exploited. …” ― The Land Institute

“The soil is the great connector of lives, the source and destination of all. It is the healer and restorer and resurrector, by which disease passes into health, age into youth, death into life.” ― Wendell Berry

Divest-Invest

We are signatories of the Divest Invest Philanthropy pledge. We support the ethical and financial reasons for divesting from fossil fuels and investing in ways that protect the health of our Living Earth and foster transition to a Sufficiency Economy based on living within our planetary means using ecological economics, regenerative agriculture, energy conservation, renewable energy, and protecting our common wealth with justice for all.

Climate instability resulting from global warming threatens all life, and is already on a sobering trajectory. Transitioning away from a fossil fuel based global economy and growth based financial system is the greatest ethical and survival challenge of our time.

We are committed to taking a leadership role in the shift from the Age of Oil to the Age of Soil during this great transition from an extractive to a regenerative economy. We commit our investments, originally generated by extraction of the Earth’s wealth, to provide soil in which to grow a New Sufficiency Economy. As members of the sixth generation since Charles Pratt played his integral role in the rise of the Age of Oil, we now resolve to use our investments and grants as nurture capital for an Age of Soil we hope will flourish for the next seven generations.

Since we developed our first mission statement in the 1990’s, We have been committed to ecological health and integrity, by investing in companies that are producing products and services that consider triple bottom line, and to promoting social and economic justice.

Our investment policy has been revised periodically since that time to reflect changing global conditions and our knowledge and understanding of how to best be in service to Earth and her future.

Over the past decade, the investment policy has tightened up. Although we did not have any investments in oil or coal, we used to consider conventional natural gas as a bridge fuel to a renewable economy, and had some utilities and transport investments that used natural gas. Those forms of fossil fuels and companies are now eliminated from our investment portfolio.

We have focused most intently on investing in soil, food, and community and secondarily in renewable energy companies and the clean energy economy which we consider to include investments in renewable energy, clean technology, energy efficiency upgrades, community-development financial institutions, industries such as sustainable forestry, and other funds or businesses that have positive environmental and social impacts

We recognize the importance of energy conservation and efficiency as the “first fuel” that is fastest, most affordable way to implement the shift away from fossil fuels, and is how we will reduce our energy use to levels where renewable energy can be a viable alternative to fossil fuel use.