Foundation News

By Steven Berkenfeld, Chair, Board of Directors, Sierra Club Foundation

In May, Sierra Club Foundation board members met in San Francisco for the second Quarterly Board of Directors Meeting of 2016. Over two days, we conducted Foundation business and received grantee program updates. I am pleased to share with you some of the reports from Sierra Club program leads who joined us for discussions on projects fiscally sponsored by the Sierra Club Foundation.

The Sierra Club’s Our Wild America Campaign updated us on progress toward the Sierra Club’s national monument designation goal set at the start of President Obama’s second term. The Sierra Club’s goal is for President Obama to protect six million acres as national monuments under the Antiquities Act of 1906 by the time he leaves office. To date, the President has designated 4.8 million acres of national monuments with the most recent designation being three areas of the Southern California deserts important for their cultural and ecological value. The next special place the Sierra Club is working to protect is the proposed Greater Grand Canyon Heritage National Monument, comprising 1.7 million acres of land around the Grand Canyon. With a recent program restructuring that brought Sierra Club Outdoors (another project sponsored by the Sierra Club Foundation) under the umbrella of Our Wild America, the Sierra Club has an opportunity to better leverage the power of introducing people to natural places to also engage them in helping protect those places. Post-board meeting, we were excited to hear President Obama’s announcement designating the Stonewall Inn in New York City as the newest national monument in honor of its historical significance in the LGBTQ civil rights movement.

A team of Sierra Club staff and volunteer leaders joined us to share feedback collected from stakeholders, including Sierra Club Foundation directors, on developing a national comprehensive clean energy campaign. The Sierra Club Foundation’s Forward Fund made a grant in early 2016 to support the capacity of all stakeholders to participate equally in the planning process. We are committed to ensuring the clean energy campaign is equitable and inclusive from the start.

The Sierra Club’s Beyond Coal Campaign provided us with background on where U.S. carbon emissions were in the 1990s through where we need to be in 2025 to stay on track with the U.S. pledge made as part of the Paris climate agreement. The Beyond Coal Campaign has been extremely successful in mobilizing people to fight coal. With the rush to build new coal plants that started in the early 2000s defeated, the Beyond Coal Campaign is pivoting its strategy toward ensuring that wherever coal plants are shut down, power generation is replaced with clean energy sources, like wind and solar. For example, after the Sierra Club’s decade long effort organizing and litigating against coal power in Iowa, the state recently announced a $3.6 billion investment in wind power.

Our next Board of Directors meeting will be in Yellowstone National Park in September. We will be joined by the Sierra Club's Summit Circle, a nationwide network of Sierra Club and Sierra Club Foundation's most committed major donors, to celebrate the National Park Service's centennial year. I look forward to getting back together with our board in one our most awesome natural settings.