The Christensen Fund believes in the power of biological and cultural diversity to sustain and enrich a world faced with great change and uncertainty. They focus on the biocultural – the rich but neglected adaptive interweave of people and place, culture and ecology. Their mission is to buttress the efforts of people and institutions who believe in a biodiverse world infused with artistic expression and work to secure ways of life and landscapes that are beautiful, bountiful and resilient.
They pursue this mission through place-based work in regions chosen for their potential to withstand and recover from the global erosion of diversity. They focus on backing the efforts of locally-recognized community custodians of this heritage, and their alliances with scholars, artists, advocates and others. They also fund international efforts to build global understanding of these issues. These are challenging goals, so they seek out imaginative, thoughtful and occasionally odd partners to learn with. The Fund works primarily through grant making, as well as through capacity and network building, knowledge generation, collaboration and mission-related investments.
