Stimulating systemic-level solutions to progress towards a more equitable, economically prosperous and environmentally sustainable global society.

The Garfield Foundation is a private grantmaking foundation, whose mission is to stimulate systemic-level solutions to progress towards a more equitable, economically prosperous and environmentally sustainable global society. Grantmaking priorities focus on community revitalization and the environment. The Community Revitalization program explores opportunities to strengthen commercial development in economically distressed urban neighborhoods. In addition, the Foundation has a small subsidiary fund supporting innovative youth development initiatives. Environmental grantmaking priorities include sustainable consumption and production, biodiversity conservation, animal welfare and toxic metal pollutant source reduction.

Smart growth is at the nexus of the Garfield Foundation's two programmatic interests: environmental sustainability and community revitalization. To date, Garfield has made three grants in the City of Boston that bring us into the Smart Growth arena, one to a regional planning process emphasizing smart growth principles, one to the CDC trade association to help them join the Smart Growth Alliance, and one to a local CDC to produce a green development manual. These projects are experiments and we look forward to seeing the results.

The Garfield Foundation is currently leading and facilitating a collaborative initiative in the Midwest called RE-AMP (Renewable Energy Alignment Mapping Project)- which specifically employs the tools of systems thinking.