2024 is a year of anniversaries: Puget Soundkeeper is celebrating 40 years on the water, while our friends at the Rose Foundation for Communities and the Environment celebrate 30 years funding grassroots environmental projects! Puget Soundkeeper spoke to The Rose Foundation’s outgoing Executive Director and founder Tim Little, Interim Executive Director Aiko Pandorf, and Pacific Northwest Program Officer Timothy Bell to learn more about the organization’s past, present, and future.
[Puget Soundkeeper] How did the relationship between Puget Soundkeeper and the Rose Foundation begin?
[Tim Little] I got a call from one of Soundkeeper’s attorneys. I think it was Knoll Lowney. Essentially, he said that Puget Soundkeeper had landed a world-record Clean Water Act lawsuit—more than previous totals—and he wanted to talk about starting a grant-making fund in Seattle. I said, ‘Let me get on a plane.’ Everything unfolded from there.
[PSK] You’re referring to Soundkeeper’s win against Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railway Company in 2011?
[TL] Puget Soundkeeper was able to show BNSF’s railyard drained into Elliott Bay, and that the company had been regularly discharging polluted stormwater in violation of its permit. Soundkeeper used food dye to show that runoff from the facility went directly into the Bay. BNSF settled for over $1 million. Soundkeeper called a few local foundations, and one of them suggested that the Rose Foundation might be a good fit.
[PSK] Right, because the settlement money goes toward a “supplemental environmental project,” which needs to be administered by another organization.
[TL] The Rose Foundation model is to have a community funding board, so I started flying up to Seattle from Oakland and meeting people. One of the people on the funding board was Lee Moyer, a legendary voice from the past and someone who was involved in founding Puget Soundkeeper. He insisted on showing me every single place you could launch a kayak up and down the Duwamish River. And he made a point to launch a kayak from those public access spots because the city was trying to shut down access. He took photos to prove that it was a public launch site and demanded that the city keep them open.
[PSK] What kinds of major shifts have you seen since that exciting beginning?
[Timothy Bell] Environmentalists have had to wrestle with the question of environmental justice, and I feel that Rose and Soundkeeper have moved in lockstep on that point. It’s a major priority for both organizations, and we have both experienced growing pains and a learning curve. Most, if not all, of the organizations we support have a strong environmental justice component or it’s the primary work they do.
[TL] At the end of the day, we must fund projects with a water quality improvement component. That’s part of the nexus of a Clean Water Act settlement and what we report to the Department of Justice. But as community-oriented funders, we have a strong preference for projects that build justice and equity within an environmental constituency. We fund projects that tie into harm done by water pollution, and we’re also building community power by working locally.
[PSK] What are your organizational priorities today, and how are they reflected in your grantmaking and other programs?
[Aiko Pandorff]: As the Rose Foundation enters this next period and chooses a new leader, we’re recommitting to the grassroots element in our organizational perspective as well as our funding. Often, our most exciting impact has been achieved by pushing funding toward groups that wouldn’t necessarily have access to traditional support. Looking into the future, that’s what we’re most proud of and most want to preserve.
[TB] A lot of funders look at successful programs and think about how to scale up. Rose Foundation is actually looking at how to scale down. By that I mean smaller-scale funding going to organizations that are often overlooked by traditional funders. People who are focused on a single creek or something similar. We are really looking at how effective these smaller groups are, in the context of historical injustice in their communities.
[TL] We’re talking about money, which is what foundations do, they move money around. But we also have in-house advocacy programs. We’re working on building a regional model, integrated up and down the West Coast, to support activists with training and networking. We want to give people money, but the money will run out. Our goal is for community groups to be stronger by the end of their grant funding period than they were at the beginning.
[PSK] I hear you describing a more holistic contextualization for your funding decisions, and a vision of sustainability within the environmental justice movement itself.
[AP] Rose Foundation has had 30 years to build itself into what it is today. The scale and scope of visioning can be very small—we might ask ourselves how we can adjust to realistically fit what we can do today. Other times, we reach for the sky and wonder what might happen if anything is possible. We’re asking ourselves how to move in the future based on the impact we want to make, and that requires focusing on why we do this work. The intersection of stewardship, conservation, resilience, and environmental justice gives us a new opportunity to define ourselves.
Background
What is the Rose Foundation for Communities and the Environment?
Puget Soundkeeper’s legal settlement payments help fund the Rose Foundation, an organization that empowers communities through grassroots grantmaking, environmental justice, and youth leadership. Soundkeeper has directed over $7 million to the Rose Foundation since 2012, supporting over 300 local water quality and environmental justice projects initiated by more than 100 organizations.
The Puget Sound Stewardship and Mitigation Fund has provided funding for dozens of restoration, education, and monitoring efforts around the Puget Sound. These projects bring us from rural to urban communities, from farms, to sidewalks, to kelp forests. They highlight the interconnectedness of clean water protection and remind us that our efforts to protect Puget Sound extend across the entire watershed in all its complexity.
How Does Funding Work?
When Clean Water Act lawsuits are resolved via cooperative court order (instead of a Judge’s ruling at trial), the parties may choose to apply the defendant’s payment in lieu of penalty locally to what the Environmental Protection Agency calls “supplemental environmental projects.” Keeping the funds local enables mitigation of harm in the particular waterways that were harmed by the pollution. It enables and supports projects in communities that suffer the disproportionate brunt of the pollution. Nearly every Soundkeeper lawsuit, if successful, results in payments like these.
Environmental racism is real. Race is the single most significant predictor of living in close proximity to pollution. Throughout history, Black and brown communities have been systematically denied economic opportunities that many white people take for granted. The imbalance is stark, damaging and continuing. A commitment to pursuing equity today and into the future requires one to pay close attention to how resources are allocated, directed and shared.