Restitution Funds Report
In the first half of 2020, environmental mitigation payments and cy pres enabled the Rose Foundation to award more than $1.3 Million in grants to community-oriented organizations and groups advocating for consumer and environmental health and environmental stewardship. The Rose Foundation is never a party to the underlying litigation. Our role is to help fulfill the terms of the settlements and to ensure that the settlement payments achieve maximum community benefit in nexus with the underlying environmental or consumer protection issues raised in the case. Through our database of community-based organizations and our experiences with hundreds of past grantees, we are able to broadly publicize the availability of mitigation or cy pres funds to non-profit organizations whose work centers directly on the nexus of individual settlements, but who are not directly known to the settling parties. We track grantees’ achievements and report back to the parties and the courts, demonstrating how the money is used to fulfill settlement requirements. Grants awarded from January through June address water issues as they relate to industrial water pollution, stormwater runoff, and environmental justice. Projects include environmental youth leadership development, habitat restoration, community science, and legal advocacy. We also completed another grantmaking round of the Consumer Products Fund to groups working at the intersection of environmental health and truth-in-advertising, including reducing exposure to toxics in consumer products and promoting clean labels for food.
We are very thankful to the many citizen enforcement and consumer protection organizations whose programs protect the natural environment, public health, and the civil liberties of our communities. Their enforcement programs help companies comply with state and federal laws which protect community health, people’s rights, and environmental quality, and these mitigation payments enable the majority of our grantmaking.
Learn more about our grantmaking funds and some of the impactful projects we have recently funded:
- California Watershed Protection Fund
- Central Valley Disadvantaged Community Water Quality Grants Program
- Consumer Products Fund
- Grays Harbor/ Chehalis River Watershed Fund
- Puget Sound Stewardship & Mitigation Fund
California Watershed Protection Fund
This spring, 22 grants were awarded through our California Watershed Protection Fund, totaling $355,750. Project locations span California and include coastal watersheds in Southern and Central California, as well as Humboldt County, the Russian River, Sacramento River, and San Francisco Bay. Many of the projects address environmental justice issues related to water quality, green infrastructure and riparian restoration, youth leadership development, as well as projects challenging governmental regulators to do a better job controlling industrial pollution. As COVID hit this spring, we worked with grantees to help them adjust workplans to accommodate social distancing and remote engagement.
Grantee Spotlights
Orange County Environmental Justice (OCEJ)
Funded to teach residents of disadvantaged communities in the Santa Ana River Watershed to employ participatory research and document, understand, educate, communicate, advocate, and ultimately build community capacity to ensure water quality for all via Photovoice methodology.
OCEJ’s mission is to bring the fight for environmental justice through advocacy, public accountability, healing, and systematic transformation to Orange County. And they are committed to advancing social and environmental justice in the most impacted and under-resourced communities.
Youth conduct community science, gathering samples to test pollution levels in their community.
Photo Credit: Orange County Environmental Justice
This grant will enable OCEJ to expand their Building Community Capacity with Photovoice initiative in Anaheim, Fullerton, Garden Grove, Orange, and Santa Ana. The ultimate goal of this project is to empower community members to hold public and private systems accountable to high water quality, as well as to be engaged and a part of creating systems and policies that support these goal.
The Sierra Fund (TSF)
Funded to lead a feasibility analysis for carbon credits for meadow restoration in the Upper Feather River Watershed.
TSF is a community organization dedicated to working in the spirit of service to the Sierra Nevada. Over the last decade TSF has built a body of cutting-edge research and a cohort of scientists and state leaders working to restore and protect the resiliency of the Sierra region.
Community members explore the Sierra Nevada’s meadows.
Photo Credit: The Sierra Fund
Meadows are among the most unique and valuable green infrastructure in the Sierra Nevada region, providing ecosystem services including increasing biodiversity, flood attenuation, sediment filtration, water storage, water quality improvement, carbon sequestration, and livestock forage. This grant will enable TSF to quantify and monetize the carbon sequestration capacity of healthy meadows, using the Upper Feather River Watershed as a feasibility study, in order to incentivize investments in multi-benefit meadow restoration activities in the region.
Central Valley Disadvantaged Community
Water Quality Grants Program
This is the seventh year of program partnership between the Rose Foundation and the Central Valley Regional Water Quality Control Board to manage the Central Valley Disadvantaged Community Water Quality Grants Program. Since its inception, this grantmaking program has funded 27 Supplemental Environmental Projects (SEPs) and enabled by 14 Administrative Civil Liability Settlements, totaling over $2.3M in grants! Funding from those SEPs has been fully placed with community-based organizations, and tremendous progress has been made on clean water issue solutions — through water accessibility, availability, assessment, and monitoring — having important environmental and public health benefits.
Grantees Advancing Environmental Justice
Consumer Products Fund
This spring, our Consumer Products Fund awarded over $355,000 to 11 projects across the country that promote truth-telling and consumer understanding regarding product ingredients and performance — with the overarching goal of protecting people’s health and safety and the environment. The 2020 cycle was enabled by cy pres from the Richman Law Group’s class action settlement with Johnson & Johnson around making “natural” claims on several of its Aveeno Active Naturals skin moisturizers. The complaint alleged that the Active Naturals products contain dozens of harmful and synthetic chemicals, including glycerin, benzaldehyde, and phenoxyethanol, and that J&J failed to disclose the presence of these synthetic, unnatural ingredients on packaging or its website.
Grantee Spotlight
Beyond Pesticides
Funded for its work with communities to prevent, rather than simply reduce, toxic chemical use; recognize the power and importance of biological systems and ecosystem services; and challenge misinformation that diverts people from the problem and solution.
Beyond Pesticides takes a holistic approach to advancing sustainable, regenerative, organic practices, products, and policies to solve the pesticide poisoning and contamination problem. This framework provides the foundation for ending pesticide dependency in all aspects of use, agricultural and nonagricultural, while protecting a cross-section of people, including those facing disproportionate risk, and the environment on which all life depends.
Photo Credit: Beyond Pesticides
In the face of the ongoing global pandemic, Beyond Pesticides is finding ways to protect those with elevated risk factors, including respiratory illnesses and reduced immune system function, that disproportionately impact communities of color and low-income areas. The project is producing a webpage that will be kept up-to-date with information on how to protect yourself from COVID-19 without toxic sanitizers and disinfectants using safe alternatives and provide resources for long-term change.
Grays Harbor/ Chehalis River Watershed Fund
This spring, our Grays Harbor/Chehalis River Watershed Fund — which supports community-based organizations dedicated to protecting and restoring the watershed, and honors the historical uses of the watershed, while preserving fish and wildlife, so that the Chehalis River Basin will be healthy and productive in perpetuity — awarded a two-year, $60,000 grant to the newly formed Twin Harbors Waterkeeper (THW) to help them patrol the second largest watershed in Washington State, the Chehalis River Basin Watershed.
Grantee Spotlight
Twin Harbors Waterkeeper (THW)
Funded to support THW, a new waterkeeper program, in its work toward three interlocking goals: 1) stop illegal water pollution; 2) prevent new sources of water pollution; and, 3) stop toxic discharges to water from historically contaminated sites.
“The pivotal role that the Rose Foundation had in the formation of the Twin Harbors Waterkeepers is special to me both personally and professionally. It all started in 2013, when we established the Grays Harbor/ Chehalis River Watershed Fund, which was the first grants program that I managed in Washington state.”
—Kevin Hendrick, Rose Foundation’s Pacific Northwest Grants Manager
Twin Harbors Waterkeeper Lee First collects samples from a boat patrol.
Photo Credit: Twin Harbors Waterkeeper
While the new Waterkeeper was formed quite recently, its story begins in 2013, when the Rose Foundation launched our Grays Harbor/ Chehalis River Watershed Fund. The Fund supported a coalition of local activists in learning national Waterkeeper Alliance monitoring protocol from Bellingham Washington’s North Sound Baykeeper to bolster the local groups’ ongoing campaign around the risks of fossil fuel transport. This opportunity also introduced Grays Harbor activists to the world of waterkeepers!
In 2019, this collaboration grew into Washington’s newest waterkeeper, dedicated to protecting and improving water quality in Chehalis River Watershed, Grays Harbor Estuary, and Willapa Bay Watershed. And this spring, thanks to the recent two-year grant from the Rose Foundation, THW has the resources to support its programs involving permit compliance review, field inspections, on-the-water patrols, a pollution hotline, and legal actions.
Puget Sound Stewardship & Mitigation Fund
The Puget Sound Stewardship & Mitigation Fund’s goal is to mitigate water pollution impacts by supporting community-led efforts to protect or improve the water quality of Puget Sound, prioritizing projects from communities and neighborhoods with disproportionate impacts from pollution. Since its inception in 2012, the Puget Sound Stewardship & Mitigation Fund has awarded about $6 million in projects related to habitat restoration, water quality monitoring, green infrastructure, environmental justice and environmental youth leadership development. In our spring cycle, with the help of a local funding advisory board, we awarded 20 grants for a record total $560,169 to groups working at the intersection of watershed stewardship and community impact.
Grantee Spotlights
Puget Soundkeeper Alliance
Funded to support Deschutes Estuary Restoration Team (DERT) in becoming a waterkeeper in the South Sound through a partnership with Puget Soundkeeper to provide training, resources, and logistical support to expand DERT's capacity and assist them in becoming a Waterkeeper affiliate.
“The presence of a new actor monitoring and enforcing the Clean Water Act and stormwater policies creates a clean, healthy watershed and community locally. It also signals to polluters that groups are watching and ensuring that everyone has access to clean water. And the Rose Foundation’s ability to not only partner with various waterkeepers, but also fund their projects with a wide variety of strategies is a win for clean water everywhere.”
— Laura Fernandez, Program Officer
Rainbow crests over the Deschutes Estuary.
Photo Credit: Deschutes Estuary Restoration Team, Joel Kluger
We are excited to support this partnership to help DERT, a long-time Rose Foundation grantee, grow into being a waterkeeper in the South Puget Sound. The grant will help Puget Soundkeeper provide the programmatic support DERT needs to make this transition, including training, resources, and logistical support as it joins the waterkeeper network.
The Common Acre
Funded to support the Green Line, a 2-acre pollinator conservation project along the Creston-Duwamish transmission corridor of Seattle City Light, which repurposes inactive public space to enhance pollinator habitat, food resilience, human health, and water quality; engage diverse local youth with their site; and prevent ongoing watershed pollution.
The Common Acre seeds acres of wildflower meadow to create habitat for bees.
Photo Credit: The Common Acre
With support from this grant, The Common Acre will engage up to 20 young people (age 13 - 22) in a 6-week curriculum-based program focused on stormwater and wastewater; ecological restoration work; site assessment skills; volunteer management and leadership skills. The group will also work with an Indigenous landscape designer and DIRT Corps member to design and implement a site-expansion to improve native habitat and increase stormwater infiltration on the project site. And the grantee will conduct work parties as free public events, where community members will play a hands-on role in site restoration and learn about issues impacting water quality.
Acknowledgements
Many thanks! Through their programs to enforce state and federal laws and regulations, the following organizations, agencies, and law firms have directed funds to the Rose Foundation, which have supported recent grantmaking.
We want to express sincere thanks to Anacapa Law Group, Aqua Terra Aeris Law Group LLP, Californians for Alternatives to Toxics, California Communities Against Toxics, California Sportfishing Protection Alliance, Central Valley Regional Water Quality Control Board, Center for Biological Diversity, Center for Community Action and Environmental Justice, CLAWS, Columbia Riverkeeper, Communities for a Better Environment, Consumer Law Group of California, Ecological Rights Foundation, Ecology Law Center, Environmental Advocates, Humboldt Baykeeper, Inland Empire Waterkeeper, Kampmeier & Knutsen PLLC, Law Office of Gideon Kracov, Lozeau Drury LLP, Law Offices of Andrew L. Packard, Los Angeles Waterkeeper, Madera Oversight Coalition, Northwest Environmental Advocates, Puget Soundkeeper Alliance, RE Sources for Sustainable Communities, Richman Law Group, San Francisco Baykeeper, Sierra Club, Smith & Lowney PLLC, and Spokane Riverkeeper.
About Rose Foundation |
Rose Foundation for Communities and the Environment is a grantmaking public charity that specializes in handling restitution payments and class-action settlement awards, and using these funds to support grassroots-based conservation, social justice and consumer protection projects in close conformance with the nexus of the specific settlement. For more than 25 years, Rose has received over 600 settlements and cy pres, helping to enable more than $50 million in community grants in California, Washington, Oregon, and nationally.
The Foundation’s role in these settlements is to act as a neutral third party, accepting the funds and then disbursing them to community-based stewardship projects in nexus with the original harm. Rose Foundation assumes all administrative and legal responsibility for meeting settlement terms related to the restitution fund. Please visit our website for more details, or contact Executive Director Tim Little for information about how to direct a mitigation payment or cy pres to the rose Foundation.
