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Arcadia Fund

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OVERVIEW: The Arcadia Fund’s grantmaking centers around environmental conservation, cultural heritage and open access media.

IP TAKE: Arcadia is a major international funder with a relatively unusual grantmaking structure. Its direct strategic grants tend to support established organizations and institutions, often through multi-year relationships, and Arcadia does not accept unsolicited applications for this funding.

But grantseekers should not write this funder off as completely inaccessible. Arcadia also supports five nature and five cultural heritage grant programs administered by outside partners, several of which run competitive application processes for nonprofits, researchers, journalists, community-based projects and other eligible applicants.

For direct funding, Arcadia’s staff and boards identify prospective grantees through research, networks and existing relationships. This makes a standard cold outreach a poor strategy. Organizations seeking direct strategic support are better served by establishing a strong record in one of Arcadia’s tightly defined areas of interest and becoming visible within the networks of its existing grantees, program partners and other specialist funders. Arcadia generally prefers core support for its strategic grantees, although it also funds projects and, occasionally, endowments or smaller grants intended to test an idea or relationship.

PROFILE: Arcadia was founded by Lisbet Rausing and Peter Baldwin in 2002. It is a family philanthropy led by a donor board and supported by an advisory board and a small London-based staff. Arcadia is funded through family trusts and makes grants through Arcadia Philanthropic Trust, a charitable trust in Liechtenstein. Since 2002, it has awarded about $1.3 billion to organizations around the world.

Arcadia organizes its principal grantmaking around three areas: Conserving and Restoring Nature, Recording Cultural Heritage and Promoting Open Access. It also makes discretionary grants outside these areas to organizations and causes in which members of its donor board have an ongoing personal interest or commitment.

Grants for the Environment, Wildlife Conservation, and Climate Change

Arcadia’s Conserving and Restoring Nature program supports responses to biodiversity loss and the climate crisis, with an emphasis on conserving and restoring entire ecosystems rather than individual species.

  • It supports international work that builds local partnerships and strengthens laws and policies that protect nature.
  • Arcadia does not support species-specific conservation, environmental education, or awareness-raising projects.
  • Recent direct grantees include Oceana, which received $14 million in 2025 for core support of its work protecting and restoring marine habitats; the European Climate Foundation, which received about $2.75 million for nature legislation in Europe; Peace Brigades International, which received about $2.47 million for work protecting environmental defenders; and the Environmental Defenders Collaborative, which received about $1.21 million.

Arcadia also supports five nature-focused grant programs and collaboratives:

Recent grants also support environmental law and policy, investigative journalism, environmental defenders and the institutional infrastructure needed to protect ecosystems.

Grants for Arts, Culture and Humanities Research

Arcadia’s Recording Cultural Heritage program supports the digital documentation of cultural heritage that is poorly recorded and at risk of disappearing. Its current priorities are archives and manuscripts, intangible culture, and heritage sites. However, Arcadia is no longer initiating new heritage-site projects.

The program supports:

  • Digitization and preservation of endangered archives, manuscripts, photographs, recordings and other historical materials;
  • Documentation of endangered languages and other forms of intangible cultural heritage;
  • Documentation of knowledge surrounding cultural practices, crafts and material culture; and
  • Existing work documenting archaeological sites and buildings in places where records are incomplete and there is a significant risk of loss.
  • Recent strategic grants include funding to the University of Hamburg for large-scale digitization of manuscripts in South and Southeast Asia, EMI Archive Trust to digitize historical commercial sound recordings and the J. Paul Getty Trust to support the Arches open-source cultural heritage platform.

Cultural heritage grantseekers should also look closely at Arcadia’s five partner programs:

  • Endangered Languages Documentation Programme (ELDP) funds documentation of endangered languages around the world. The program particularly welcomes applicants from language communities, local scholars and students, and there are no nationality restrictions.
  • Endangered Archives Programme (EAP) at the British Library supports projects to digitize archives at risk of destruction, deterioration or neglect and make the resulting records freely accessible.
  • Modern Endangered Archives Program (MEAP) at UCLA funds documentation and digitization of at-risk 20th- and 21st-century archival collections.
  • Endangered Material Knowledge Programme (EMKP) at the British Museum funds documentation of endangered knowledge associated with making, using, repairing and repurposing objects, structures, environments and other forms of material culture. Small Documentation Grants provide up to £20,000 and Large Documentation Grants up to £100,000. Applicants may come from any nationality or academic background, although documentation projects require a host institution.
  • Endangered Wooden Architecture Programme at Oxford Brookes University has supported documentation of traditional practices for creating and maintaining wooden buildings. The program has completed its final grant round and is no longer accepting new applications.

These intermediary programs make Arcadia’s cultural heritage funding significantly more accessible than its direct strategic grantmaking and can support much smaller projects and individual researchers than would ordinarily appear among Arcadia’s direct grantees.

Grants for Education, Media and Democracy

Arcadia’s Promoting Open Access program seeks to make knowledge freely available online and easier for people to find and use. This is broader than conventional media grantmaking. Current priorities include copyright and intellectual property policy, free access to scholarly books and the discoverability of government documents, publicly funded research, standards and laws.

Specific interests include:

  • Reforming copyright laws, regulations, exceptions and limitations to expand access to knowledge;
  • Making in-copyright scholarly books available freely online; and
  • Helping people locate legal, free-to-read copies of government information, research, laws and standards.
  • Recent grants include $5 million to Public.Resource.Org to make government edicts freely accessible online, $2.5 million to the New York Public Library’s Library Futures initiative, $1.8 million to Code for Science and Society to establish a grant program for open research infrastructure, $900,160 to Stichting Internet Archive for preservation and access to theses and dissertations, and $600,000 to Creative Commons for maintenance of its licensing infrastructure.

Unlike Arcadia’s nature and culture grants, the funder does not currently list partner-run competitive grant programs under Open Access. Grantseekers interested in direct Open Access funding should therefore assume that Arcadia’s invitation-only strategic grantmaking process applies unless a specific intermediary opportunity is announced.

Important Grant Details:

Arcadia’s grants range widely from about $50,000 to $12.5 million. This funder tends to support well-established organizations, but grants have gone to new and innovative projects.

  • To get a broader sense of the types of organizations Arcadia supports, explore its searchable grant directory.
  • The Arcadia Fund does not accept unsolicited grant applications or requests for funding.
  • Contact this funder via email at info@arcadiafund.org.uk or connect via Linkedin.

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