“A healthy planet begins with a strong foundation,” says the San Francisco-based Sierra Club Foundation. Founded in 1960, the foundation is most known for its connection to the Sierra Club, the organization founded in 1892 by esteemed conservationist John Muir. The previously mentioned “strong foundation” is made up of three components: educating, inspiring, and empowering. Specifically, these are executed in three ways. The first is supporting the Sierra Club and other environmental organizations through financial and material means; the second is fundraising; and the third is using those funds for the foundation’s own conservation activities. These funds go to its Climate Recovery Partnership, its environmental law program, its partnerships in environmental justice and community, and its Mission Outdoors program to cultivate the next generation of environmentalists. Grants are also made to other environmental organizations, including the Blue Green Alliance and Veterans Green Jobs.
Mark Sappenfield
Dear Reader,
About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:
“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”
If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.
But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.
The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.
We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”
If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.
