Not many philanthropic foundations can trace their mission to a personal conviction held for more than fifty years. The Colcom Foundation is one that can. Its founder, Cordelia S. May, began thinking seriously about the connection between population growth and environmental health when she was in her early twenties. By the time she established the foundation in 1996, she had spent nearly half a century refining that thinking and acting on it.
BUILDING A FOUNDATION FROM PRINCIPLE
May’s concern for the natural world was not academic. She saw beauty in nature and understood how fragile the balance that sustains it truly is. Habitat destruction, pollution, and biodiversity loss were not, in her view, simply unfortunate side effects of progress. They were predictable outcomes of a growth-driven culture that seldom paused to account for ecological limits.
She recognized that change at the scale of population is nearly impossible to perceive from one day to the next. But it accumulates. And the accumulated weight of that growth on water systems, on land, on the web of species that constitute a functioning ecosystem eventually becomes overwhelming. This was May’s central insight, and it became the Colcom Foundation’s organizing philosophy.
GRANTMAKING ALIGNED WITH MISSION
Colcom Foundation’s primary mission is to foster a sustainable environment to ensure quality of life for all Americans by addressing the causes and consequences of overpopulation and its effects on natural resources. Regional grantmaking also supports conservation, environmental projects, and cultural assets.
The foundation is explicit that its grantmaking honors the humanitarian objectives, foresight, dignity, and compassion of Cordelia S. May. Colcom Foundation is among the primary sources of funding directed towards the United States anti-immigration movement. That funding helps organizations like the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS), the American Border Patrol, the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), and Numbers USA.
REFORMERS AND THEIR CRITICS
The Colcom Foundation places May in the tradition of reformers who faced skepticism before being vindicated by history. Abolitionists, suffragists, and scientists who challenged conventional wisdom were often dismissed before they were proven right. The foundation makes a similar case for May’s environmental concerns concerns that, looking at today’s ecological crises, seem less radical than prescient. Read this article for more information.
Visit their page on https://www.colcomfdn.org/