Nature-Centrism as a Lens for Organizational Behavior and Decision-Making

About the V. Kann Rasmussen Foundation

Founded in 1991, the V. Kann Rasmussen Foundation’s work is based on the premise that human activities lie at the core of most environmental problems, and human creativity and collaboration are at the heart of solving the problems these activities create. The environmental mission of the V. Kann Rasmussen Foundation is to support the transition to a more environmentally resilient, stable, and sustainable planet. We believe best practices for promoting sustainability will be most effectively developed through an integrated systems approach and one that furthers the involvement of an informed public in environmental decision making.

Nature-Centrism as a Lens for Organizational Behavior and Decision-Making

Over the course of 30 years the V. Kann Rasmussen Foundation has funded critical but low- attention areas, knowledge gaps, and cross-cutting environmental strategies that attract little or no investment from other funders. Looking back, almost all the environmental issues that VKRF has engaged in have led back to humanity’s disregard for nature’s inherent value and for the limits of our planet’s natural resources. VKRF supported conservation issues in its early years, and has addressed water pollution, toxicity, soil depletion, and climate change in its later years. Most recently, the foundation has worked on a toolbox for exploring and working with the complex and dynamic processes involved in many societal and natural systems simultaneously reaching irreversible tipping points. Through the lens of a systems perspective, it becomes even clearer how humans have damaged their own life support systems at all planetary levels. A recalibration of our relationship to nature is needed. A relationship where all life forms co-exist in balanced, rather than hierarchical, systems. Only a shift away from the separation from, and domination of, nature to an understanding of our deep connection to, and embeddedness in, nature can provide us with the solutions and blueprints for tackling the challenges we face today.

In its next rounds of grantmaking, the foundation will continue its recent work at the systems level, further exploring the consequences of, and solutions to, humanity’s anthropocentric departure from value structures based on our kinship with nature. We recognize that we stand on the shoulders of nature-centric thinking of previous generations, cultures, and knowledge systems. We also recognize the significant work of different schools of regenerative and nature-centric practices that is already being applied in many sectors and geographies.

The foundation believes that many of these already-existing frameworks for nature-centric worldviews have the potential to lead to new ethical paradigms, models for cooperation, co- existence, and resilience that will overcome humans’ alienation from nature and foster well- being of all life on our shared planet.

As an entry point for its upcoming grantmaking round, the foundation will explore whether a more mainstream adoption of a nature-centric worldview is possible, either within our current structures or in the future, when the escalating polycrisis prepares the ground for a broader re-examination of our current paradigm.

This call for proposals focuses on nature-centric decision-making, in which nature’s inherent value becomes a central principle and informs institutions’ practices across their activities. VKRF is looking to identify grantees who are ready to make the recognition of interbeing, interdependence, and interconnectedness central to their strategy development, decision making, and day-to-day operations.

With this effort, VKRF hopes to prepare the ground for a significant scaling-up of nature-centric policies and practices that can lead to long-term resilience and integrity of the entire biosphere.

Types of Projects

Projects could include, but are not limited to:

• participatory research on governance frameworks for nature-centric decision making
• participatory social research on nature-centric cultural shifts, design principles, and management practices
• planning and learning processes that will facilitate an organization’s application of a nature- centric lens to its strategy and planning processes, day-to-day operations, and relationships with external partners and stakeholders
• building organizational capacity for buy-in of nature-centric strategies at the highest levels of organizational decision-making and governance
• peer learning in the form of workshops, convenings and conferences that will allow multiple organizations to co-create and share methodologies, approaches, tool-building, and practices that make a nature-centric lens prominent in behaviors and decision-making
• related visionary work exploring scenarios moving us toward a mainstream nature-centric future.

Objectives and Criteria

All proposals will need to be science-based and should meet the following criteria:

• Scope:
  • be visionary, experimental, and action-oriented when it comes to research and the changing of minds; and
  • consider life as relational.
    • The foundation is only interested in projects in which both human and non-human life are taken into consideration.
• Approach:
  • build on cross-cutting and/or transdisciplinary knowledge domains;
  • ambitious in the effort to scale and mainstream a nature-centric worldview; and
  • come to this topic with a nonjudgemental, curious, and collaborative mindset.
• Field-building:
  • advance the field beyond the results of the individual project
• Output and information resulting from funding:
  • must be open-source, accessible and available to be used free of charge by anyone in civil society and within the government sector, though the grantee will retain ownership of the copyright for any material produced.

Funding

The foundation will entertain projects with a one- to two-year timeline. Results and outcomes should be achievable within the grant period and the budget requested.

The foundation’s total grantmaking budget for this funding round is six million USD. We anticipate funding 12-15 projects.