Water Foundation

The Water Foundation's grantmaking, strategy, and field building efforts aim to secure safe, clean water for people, restore and sustain freshwater ecosystems, and build climate resilience, both urban and rural.

The Water Foundation’s system interventions take values and insights that emerged from conversations with field and funder partners and translate them into principles that drive the work.

The interventions include:
1. Changing the ways we move and share water—Historically, we’ve moved water through legacy infrastructure that often hurts fish and wildlife and generates conflict. We can reimagine how this works by recasting natural watershed functions as valued parts of water infrastructure. By shifting how we move and share water, we can contribute to the recovery of degraded ecosystems and enhance resilience to climate change.

2. Broadening who makes water decisions and how—Expanding the voice and political influence of those most impacted by water challenges can help generate more democratic, responsive, and effective water institutions. Achieving water systems that support healthy human and natural communities requires diversifying water leadership and supporting water institutions to collaborate and innovate.

3. Strengthening the stories we tell about water—Voters support clean water for people and nature, but we often fail to generate the political will to tackle our most critical water problems. By driving narratives through communications and community outreach that connect to people’s values and priorities, we can spur political action and galvanize powerful movements for water solutions.

We strive to be an engaged, highly strategic, intermediary funder, operating in service to grantees and to donors. We focus on moving resources quickly as opportunities arise and investing to sustain and grow the capacity of the water field over time. Our grantmaking empowers the field to demonstrate and scale on-the-ground solutions and supports collaboration across difference.

We come to the table with deep water expertise, political experience, relationships, and lobbying capacity. Where field partners seek our assistance, and we are uniquely positioned to help, we will complement our primary funder role by bolstering the capacity of our partners, convening diverse leaders, and partnering on compelling policy campaigns.

In just the past few years, our strategy and grantmaking have helped advance California’s water policy on a range of critical issues, from sustainable groundwater management to the nation’s largest public financing program for green stormwater infrastructure. In Spring 2019, we shared a new strategy that will help set the direction for the Water Foundation’s continued achievement, available at www.waterfdn.org/strategy.