Our staff at Evergreen works with a range of clients: large and small governments, many of the major environmental organizations in the Pacific Northwest, environmental and engineering consultants, and private charitable foundations.
While focused on ensuring that financial resources go towards worthy environmental projects, our work spans a wide range of activities. It includes long-term financing strategies restoration efforts, focused approaches to identifying and procuring funding for specific projects, traditional foundation and government grant seeking, as well as more innovative implementation approaches such as government incentives and environmental mitigation and compliance. Our services include:
Establishing and supporting fundraising coalitions
Many environmental and resource challenges – like nonpoint pollution control, stormwater management, salmon recovery – are beyond the capacity of an individual agency or jurisdiction to handle. Evergreen staff is adept at working with multi-agency coalitions on funding programs, having served most recently as funding consultant to the Tri-County coalition, a seven-agency group focused on salmon recovery in central Puget Sound.
Assisting with proposals and applications
Our on-staff expertise on public funding sources and grantwriting, combined with on-call specialists in foundation funding, lobbying, and specialized funding sources (such as EPA grants and Farm Bill incentive programs), are a potent combination that we can put to work on your funding applications and proposals. Our success rate on applications – over 70% – is the best in the business, and our rates for grantwriting are very competitive with in-house staff. For an excerpt of an application that we helped prepare, see the “Products” area.
Developing innovative approaches to
environmental mitigation and compliance
Finding ways to implement restoration projects increasingly requires thinking “outside the box.” We are currently investigating opportunities to support environmental restoration by redirecting mitigation and compliance work to high-priority watershed projects. We are familiar with state-of-the-art strategies for banking and trading in use elsewhere in the U.S. and are working with several clients to adapt these models to the Northwest. See the “Products” section for more.
Improving incentives for landowner conservation
Evergreen has recently been working with state agencies and farm organizations on programs to encourage landowner involvement in habitat restoration and other conservation actions. Recent work includes efforts to develop financial markets for conservation products provided on private farms and forest parcels.
Developing strategies for raising outside funding
Even the most generously funded government agencies run short of funding for projects and programs and many have turned to grants, public loan programs, and new financing strategies to raise money. Based on our long-term in-depth involvement in funding, we can advise you on which programs are a good fit for your needs, your likely success rate for various sources, as well as which programs are just not worth the trouble. One of our most popular services is our “Funding Needs Assessment”: for a simple flat rate, we provide a thorough, targeted assessment of funding needs and opportunities for your agency. For an example of a step-by-step blueprint for outside funding that Evergreen prepared for one local agency, see Funding Needs and Strategies for Seattle Public Utilities in the “Products” area.