The Christensen Fund

Mission

Since 2004, our mission has integrated our concerns with the arts, biodiversity and education as follows:

The Christensen Fund believes in the power of biological and cultural diversity to sustain and enrich a world faced with great change and uncertainty. We focus on the biocultural – the rich but neglected adaptive interweave of people and place, culture and ecology. Our mission is to buttress the efforts of people and institutions who believe in a biodiverse world infused with artistic expression and work to secure ways of life and landscapes that are beautiful, bountiful and resilient.

We pursue this mission through place-based work in regions chosen for their potential to withstand and recover from the global erosion of diversity. We focus on backing the efforts of locally-recognized community custodians of this heritage, and their alliances with scholars, artists, advocates and others. We also fund international efforts to build global understanding of these issues. These are challenging goals, so we seek out imaginative, thoughtful and occasionally odd partners to learn with. The Fund works primarily through grant making, as well as through capacity and network building, knowledge generation, collaboration and mission-related investments.

Vision

The Christensen Fund crafts its grant making and other activities on the conviction that worldwide diversity – both cultural and biological – is hugely valuable and should be cared for. These diversities have evolved over vast time through both evolutionary and historical processes and human acts of creativity, adaptation and learning. The presence of these diversities is inherently resilient and enhances ability to adjust to the unexpected twists and turns of time and to the threats posed by globalization, nationalism and unsustainable development. Diversity is not only beautiful and meaningful, but also provides a storehouse of ideas, practice and knowledge and supports life forms and ecological processes. This key arena for our actions sustains and sharpens The Christensen Fund’s longstanding tradition of attention to conservation science, visual arts and education.