Our history
Where Foundation for Gaia began.
Foundation for Gaia has been working for the natural world since the 1980s. The way we work has changed over the years, but the purpose has not.
In its early years, the Foundation worked as a funder, giving grants to environmental and social projects around the world. Over two decades of giving, we supported organisations that have gone on to shape the environmental movement — among them Greenpeace, Survival International, the Green Belt Movement in Kenya, the Cousteau Society and the New Economics Foundation.
Alongside these were many smaller projects working on conservation, education and the rights of communities, from the rainforests of Costa Rica and Cameroon to the mountains of Scotland.
The people behind it
Founded and guided by environmental pioneers.
Foundation for Gaia was founded by Else Marie Bruning de Waal and led by Vita de Waal. From the start it was guided by a board that brought together some of the leading figures of the environmental movement:
Edward Goldsmith, founder of The Ecologist; Jonathon Porritt, former Director of Friends of the Earth and co-Chair of the UK Green Party; Jakob von Uexküll, founder of the Right Livelihood Award, often called the “Alternative Nobel Prize”; José Lutzenberger, who went on to become Brazil’s environment minister; and the futurist Willis Harman.
Today
From funding the work to doing it.
Our role has changed. We no longer give grants. Instead, we carry out the work ourselves — bringing environmental and climate concerns to the United Nations and the global climate talks, supporting the communities closest to environmental harm, and building understanding of the laws that protect the natural world.
The mission has not changed. Only the way we pursue it has. What began as support for others is now work we take forward directly, for the natural world and the people who defend it.
The way we work has changed. The reason we work has not.
Foundation for Gaia, since the 1980s