For its 40 years of existence, The Weeden Foundation’s primary mission has been to protect biodiversity. It has helped preserve more than 6,000,000 acres of biologically important habitat worldwide and has financed hundreds of small environmental organizations in its efforts to protect habitat and stop environmentally unsound practices.  The Foundation financed the first debt-for-nature swap in Bolivia in 1992, a strategy that is now widely used by international conservation organizations.  Currently, the Foundation is particularly interested in protecting the temperate rainforest habitat along the coast of northern California to Alaska and Chilean Patagonia. In addition, it has supported or currently supports projects in environmentally sensitive regions of the western United States, central Russia, Bolivia, Namibia, Mexico and various Caribbean nations.

Along with efforts to protect biodiversity directly, the Foundation has made many grants on the basis of the strong belief that our high levels of consumption and our burgeoning population threaten the global and U.S. environment. Over the past 10 years, the Foundation has devoted an approximately equal amount of funding to reducing domestic consumption and stabilizing population. Collectively, the Population-Consumption Program represents one third of total grant-making.

The Foundation’s consumption program currently focuses on sustainable paper consumption and production. Grantmaking in this area aims to expand the market for environmental papers through consumer-targeted education and efforts directed at the publishing industries and corporate and government procurement practices.  The Foundation also recognizes the importance of integrating the concept of sustainability into K-12 education. Current grants incorporate the ecological footprint and similar tools to achieve a fuller, more integrated curriculum that connects population growth, over-consumption, environmental degradation, and biological limits.
 
Since its inception, the Weeden Foundation has supported international and domestic population stabilization projects based on the rationale that an increasing population causes greater impact on the environment and loss of biodiversity. In the early years, the Foundation’s international program promoted increased global funding for family planning and reproductive health assistance, with particular emphasis on family planning communication strategies such as radio soap operas. Starting 10 years ago, the Foundation narrowed its international focus to efforts designed to liberalize abortion laws within Latin America.

The Foundation’s primary domestic population objective is for the U.S. to respond directly to the directives of President Clinton’s Council on Sustainable Development by adopting a national policy that leads towards population stabilization in the near future.  It considers all factors influencing population growth, and the Foundation has funded projects that advocate for increased federal funding of family planning clinics (Title X), that promote immigration reduction (immigration currently accounts for the majority of U.S. population growth), and that investigate the impacts of sprawl on adjacent wild areas.  

Weeden Foundation board and staff members are committed to preserving a diversity of life on this planet and have been, or are currently, board members of numerous environmental organizations including the Audubon Society, Sierra Club Foundation, California Wilderness Coalition, Conservation International, The Nature Conservancy, the American Bird Conservancy, the Environmental Grantmakers Association, and the Consultative Group on Biological Diversity.  The Foundation concurs with, and is motivated by, the 1993 World Scientists’ Warning to Humanity, endorsed by 1500 scientists: “Human beings and the natural world are on a collision course…If not checked, many of our current practices put at serious risk the future that we wish for human society and the plant and animal kingdoms, and may so alter the living world that it will be unable to sustain life in the manner that we know. Fundamental changes are urgent if we are to avoid the collision our present course will bring about.”