Philanthropy Europe Association features Foundation Scotland's commitments to climate action

The Philanthropy Europe Association (Philea) is spreading the word that, in the face of the climate crisis, a growing number of foundations across the globe are committed to climate action, irrespective of their mission. Philea have spotlighted three such organisations: The European Cultural Foundation, Fondation de France and Foundation Scotland. 

Giles told Philea: "At Foundation Scotland we do feel a responsibility to take action as best we can on climate, given that we are Scotland’s community foundation, and we need to stand up and show our credentials on what we are doing both internally and on funding. Whilst we’re not a huge foundation, we wanted to play our part in making that difference. And as an organisation, we decided that we needed to look inside ourselves as well as outside to the communities that we support. We wanted to make sure that all our staff and all our trustees, in fact all the volunteers gathered around the foundation, really understood the issues well.

"We started to focus on funding, focus on our own operations, so that we would understand the basic science behind climate change. We wanted to be deliberate that all of our funding would ask the people seeking funding for community projects ‒ whatever the theme of the project, whether it’s working with young people or older people or apprenticeship schemes or refurbishing a village hall ‒ that they could have a climate smart feature. Also we are trying to decarbonise our own operations. Some of the quick wins for us were reducing travel and doing more meetings digitally as an example. But we are also looking at things like our investments and where we invest our endowment."

Read more here: https://bit.ly/3V9cHZa and watch Giles in action, below.