Nature-Centrism as a Lens for Organizational Behavior and Decision-Making

Overview

Over the course of 30 years the V. Kann Rasmussen Foundation has funded critical but low attention areas, knowledge gaps, and cross-cutting environmental strategies that attract little or no investment from other funders. Looking back, almost all the environmental issues that VKRF has engaged in have led back to humanity’s disregard for nature’s inherent value and for the limits of our planet’s natural resources. VKRF supported conservation issues in its early years, and has addressed water pollution, toxicity, soil depletion, and climate change in its later years.
As an entry point for its upcoming spring 2025 grantmaking round, the foundation will explore whether a more mainstream adoption of a nature-centric worldview is possible, either within our current structures or in the future, when the escalating polycrisis prepares the ground for a broader re-examination of our current paradigm.  

This call for proposals focuses on nature-centric decision-making, in which nature’s inherent value becomes a central principle and informs institutions’ practices across their activities. VKRF is looking to identify grantees who are ready to make the recognition of interbeing, interdependence, and interconnectedness central to their strategy development, decision making, and day-to-day operations.  With this effort, VKRF hopes to prepare the ground for a significant scaling-up of nature-centric policies and practices that can lead to long-term resilience and integrity of the entire biosphere.

Program Description: 
The Spring 2025 grantmaking round, the foundation will explore whether a more mainstream adoption of a nature-centric worldview is possible, either within our current structures or in the future, when the escalating polycrisis prepares the ground for a broader re-examination of our current paradigm.

This call for proposals focuses on nature-centric decision making, in which nature’s inherent value becomes a central principle and informs institutions’ practices across their activities. VKRF seeks to identify grantees who are ready to make the recognition of interbeing, interdependence, and interconnectedness central to their strategy development, decision making, and day-to-day operations. Foundation has been engaged in the following program areas: 
•    Cultural Resilience and Global Leadership under the Conditions of Environmental Breakdown 
•    Nature’s Inherent Value 

Objectives and Criteria: All proposals will need to be science-based and should meet the following criteria: 
1. Scope:  - be visionary, experimental, and action-oriented when it comes to research and the changing of minds; and - consider life as relational. The foundation is only interested in projects in which both human and non-human life are taken into consideration. 
2. Approach:  - build on cross-cutting and/or transdisciplinary knowledge domains; - ambitious in the effort to scale and mainstream a nature-centric worldview; and - come to this topic with a non-judgemental, curious, and collaborative mindset. 
3. Field-building:  - advance the field beyond the results of the individual project.
4. Output and information resulting from funding: - must be open-source, accessible and available to be used free of charge by anyone in civil society and within the government sector, though the grantee will retain ownership of the copyright for any material produced
 

The foundation always tries to be as transparent and inclusive as possible when creating its pipeline of projects to consider for funding. This open call is being announced on the foundation’s website and distributed through the foundation’s long-term networks. 

1. Two-tier process: The application process is two-tiered. We begin the process by inviting all applicants to send us a two-page Letter of Inquiry. Based on the Board’s evaluation of the received Letters of Inquiry, a maximum of 30 applicants will be invited to send in full proposals. Detailed guidelines for submitting Letters of Inquiry can be found at https://vkrf.squarespace.com/s/vkrf-guidelines-submitting-letters-inquiry-x5ka.pdf. All Letters of Inquiry should follow the format that is described in this document. 

2. Deadlines: The deadline for submitting Letters of Inquiry is 5:00 pm Eastern Standard Time on February 3rd, 2025. 

On March 10, 2025, selected applicants will receive invitations to send full proposals. Those who are not invited to submit full proposals will be informed on the same day. The deadline for the submission of full proposals will be April 9, 2025, and grant recipients will be informed no later than June 1, 2025.

Anticipated Number of Awards: 12-15 projects
Total Funding Amount: $6,000,000 

Anticipated Period of Performance: 1-2 years