Arcadia Fund
/OVERVIEW: The Arcadia Fund’s grantmaking centers around environmental conservation and cultural heritage. Its environmental giving supports on-site and off-site conservation efforts as well as policy advocacy and conservation leadership, while its culture funding seeks to preserve and protect endangered heritage sites and artifacts around the world.
IP TAKE: This funder awards many of its grants to large international institutions. It is not particularly accessible nor does it accept direct grant proposals like most other organizations that back progressive research. The Arcadia Fund prefers to find organizations to fund centered on its founder’s vision, which drives internal research about gaps and needs in its giving areas rather than accept unsolicited proposals. It rarely makes grants over multiple cycle. It funds operational costs or existing projects and likes to develop long-term partnerships with its grant recipients. It’s small team does not have the capacity to answer all emails, so don’t expect a definite response if you reach out to them. Grantseekers may reach out to its previous grantees to learn more about how they landed on this foundation’s radar.
PROFILE: Based in London, the Arcadia Fund was founded by Lisbet and Peter Baldwin in 2002 and supports “[c]harities and scholarly institutions to preserve cultural heritage, protect the environment and promote open access.”
Grants for the Environment, Wildlife & Marine Conservation, and Climate Change
The fund conducts grantmaking for both conservation and climate change through its more broadly named environment program, which ultimately works to “safeguard and restore unique and biodiverse areas of land and sea.” The Arcadia Fund supports and promotes “evidence-based practical solutions to the global biodiversity and climate crises.” This program prioritizes on-site interventions, effective laws and policies, and competent leadership.
Environmental and climate change grantmaking account for about 39% of the fund’s overall grantmaking and range from about $105,000 to about $2 million. Related grants tend to prefer larger, more established organizations rather than grassroots efforts. Past grantees include large and well-established environmental groups including Fauna & Flora International, the Wildlife Conservation Society, the Environmental Defense Fund and the Wildlife Justice Commission.
Grants for Arts and Culture
The Arcadia Fund directs grantmaking for arts and culture through its preserve cultural heritage program, which works to “ensure knowledge of the world’s cultural diversity is not lost.” Grants through this program invest in documenting “endangered cultural heritage, ensuring it is available to future generations.” In particular, the Arcadia Fund’s related funded here prioritizes archives and manuscripts, intangible culture (including at-risk languages and traditional practices), and heritage sites. Work related to archives and manuscripts center on non-European and non-American culture, while grants related to heritage sites have focused on Sub-Saharan Africa, Pakistan and Northern India, the Middle East and North Africa, Central Asia, Southeast Asia, China and Nepal.
Arts and culture grants account for about 36% percent of Arcadia’s overall grantmaking spend. Past arts and culture grantees include the Endangered Languages Documentation Program at Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften, the Desert of teh Mamluks Documentation Project at Heritage and Beyond and the Getty Conservation Institute.
Grants for Humanities Research
The Arcadia Fund conducts grants for humanities research through two programs: its preserve cultural heritage program and its promoting open access program. The first focuses on digital humanities research that works to preserve at-risk languages, traditions, and cultures. Supported work includes manuscripts and archives. The latter program invests in broadly improving “access to human knowledge.” The Arcadia Fund believes this may be accomplished through grantmaking that supports ‘open access,’ a movement within various research fields that makes research accessible to all rather than hiding it from the public behind expensive paywalls that often rarify research for an esoteric few, especially when much research is funded by tax payer funds.
Arcadia’s promoting open access grants work to “help make information free for anyone, anywhere to access and use, now and in the future.” As a ‘human right,’ access to knowledge, for the Arcadia Fund, “advances research and innovation, improves decision-making, exposes misinformation and is vital to achieving greater equality and justice.” Grants in this latter category funds “direct activism for open access, and by working to improve open access to scholarship and the discoverability of open access content.” In particular, Arcadia’s humanities research-related grants prioritize copyright and intellectual property issues, longform scholarship, and discoverability, or the need for access to legal, free versions of needed research. In this way, the Arcadia Fund hopes to address the imbalance of equity between the public and private, as well as between centers of power and public access, which can ultimately rebalance how decisions get made.
Past humanities research grantees, through both programs, include Birkbeck University of London’s Open Library of Humanities, Code for Science and Society, MIT Open Learning and Creative Commons, which used funding to advance open access to “galleries libraries archives, and museums.”
Important Grant Details:
Arcadia’s grants are often sizable, ranging from approximately $100,000 to over $30 million. As such, the fund does not award many grants across its categories each year. To get a broader sense of the types of organizations Arcadia supports, explore its searchable grant directory. For further grant insights, scroll down to each program area’s grants overview, which though not linkable, provides in-depth information.
The Arcadia Fund does not accept unsolicited grant applications or requests for funding.
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