Over $1.3 Million in Community Grants So Far This Year!
In the first half of 2020, environmental mitigation payments and cy pres enabled the Rose Foundation to award more than $1.3 Million in grants to community-oriented organizations and groups advocating for consumer and environmental health and environmental stewardship. The Rose Foundation is never a party to the underlying litigation. Our role is to help fulfill the terms of the settlements and to ensure that the settlement payments achieve maximum community benefit in nexus with the underlying environmental or consumer protection issues raised in the case. Through our database of community-based organizations and our experiences with hundreds of past grantees, we are able to broadly publicize the availability of mitigation or cy pres funds to non-profit organizations whose work centers directly on the nexus of individual settlements, but who are not directly known to the settling parties. We track grantees’ achievements and report back to the parties and the courts, demonstrating how the money is used to fulfill settlement requirements. Grants awarded from January through June address water issues as they relate to industrial water pollution, stormwater runoff, and environmental justice. Projects include environmental youth leadership development, habitat restoration, community science, and legal advocacy. We also completed another grantmaking round of the Consumer Products Fund to groups working at the intersection of environmental health and truth-in-advertising, including reducing exposure to toxics in consumer products and promoting clean labels for food.