CLIMATE:
Since 2005, Global Philanthropy Partnership has worked with partners including the City of Chicago, Chicagoland headquartered corporations, Chicago universities, and local, North American, and global non-profit organizations to coordinate adaptation and mitigation strategies regarding climate change.
Click here to learn more about Chicago’s climate focus: 2022 Climate Action Plan
Click on the partnership project links below for more on how GPP is supporting climate initiatives around the world.
SIMMONS CENTER FOR GLOBAL CHICAGO
GPP hosts the Simmons Center for Global Chicago to better link the locally-based and globally-engaged community. Initially a virtual center, linking global development practitioners and supporters through a networking website, the Simmons Center opened in June 2022 as a co-working space for practitioners of this work, connecting the international community in Chicago for greater global development impact.
Learn more here.
Current Partnership Projects
Agnitor is a pioneering initiative designed to ignite passion and foster awareness among youth about the diverse, rewarding, and sustainable career opportunities across Agriculture, Food and Natural Resources (AFNR). Created by a dynamic team of cross-sector partners in 2023, our program serves as a bridge, connecting teachers, after-school programs, and community-based organizations with Illinois’ vibrant agri-food ecosystem.
Agnitor facilitates presentations with carefully vetted industry professionals, bringing real-world relevance and career exposure directly into classrooms. These presentations showcase the breadth and depth of careers within AFNR and highlight the diverse paths to success. We enhance career-connected learning through engagement in career fairs, professional development workshops, and community outreach activities. These events provide students with hands-on experiences and valuable insights into potential career pathways.
The Artisan Grain Collaborative
The Artisan Grain Collaborative (AGC) is a network of individuals and organizations working to build and sustain a regenerative grainshed in the Upper Midwest.
AGC is a gathering place for individuals and organizations working across the Upper Midwest from farmer to consumer to support diverse regenerative food systems. We accomplish this through multi-stakeholder collaboration to build relationships with individuals, organizations, and communities, provide education, share scientific data, and promote initiatives that result in greater public awareness and support of agricultural systems that provide multiple societal benefits. AGC’s focus is on food grade small grains as a first best opportunity to begin an economically viable regenerative transition in a region currently dominated by monocultures of only a few crops. It’s mission is to create a diverse regional grainshed built upon regenerative agriculture practices that steward the health of communities, local economies, and natural resources.
City Hub and Network for Gender Equity – CHANGE
Founded in 2020, the City Hub and Network for Gender Equity is the world’s first international network led by cities and dedicated exclusively to the pursuit of gender equity. CHANGE is a learning hub for local governments to exchange and iterate on strategies that advance gender equity in their communities. In doing so, our network fosters trust and collaboration between policy makers to create feminist societies. CHANGE brings together cities that are seeking to remove barriers and expand opportunities for women, girls and people with non-binary gender identities.
The Emergent Learning Community Project
Emergent Learning (EL) helps people across a system think, learn and adapt together in order to achieve important social change goals. People often think of “learning” as a product to deliver or as a one-off event. Emergent Learning is a habit — a way of expanding our collective thinking in order to grow our ability to achieve the results we want. Emergent Learning is about more than a pack of tools — it is about rethinking what it means to achieve complex goals in a complex world. EL focuses on discovering a shared line of sight that allows everyone to find their place in the endeavor; posing questions that invite a wider, more diverse, circle into the thinking process; making thinking visible to encourage a learning dialogue; deliberately testing hypotheses in the work itself; and sharing patterns and insights across a team, network, or community.
Launched in 2021, the Emergent Learning Community Project supports a vital, diverse and growing community of practitioners who, together and individually, are deepening their practice and achieving powerful results in expanding spheres of influence. Through a variety of activities, the EL Community Project helps practitioners both expand their vision for what’s possible and apply EL to specific and concrete goals.
The Equitable Transportation Fund
The Equitable Transportation Fund is a new matching grant program hosted at Global Philanthropy Partnership that pairs national foundation funds with local foundation funds to support community-based advocacy around sustainable and equitable mobility. The long-term goal of this fund is to increase access to and use of active transportation modes and public transit.
The immediate goal of this fund is to meet the urgent need for safe alternatives to public transportation as Americans commute in a pandemic. it seeks to support advocacy efforts for: (1) optimizing transit capacity and safety; (2) recovery funding for transit; and (3) walking and cycling for trips that have shifted off of transit during the recovery period.
Michigan Agriculture Advancement (MiAA)
Michigan Agriculture Advancement uses education to empower alternatives to the commodity agriculture system that has prioritized production efficiencies at the expense of farm resiliency, production flexibility, food value, and environmental impacts. MiAA supports the work of innovative farmers building soil health and diversifying crop rotations. Recognizing the value of these changes extends beyond the farm through limited environmental impacts and enhanced local food economies, MiAA works to achieve a stronger agriculture system in Michigan.
Midwest Climate Leaders Trip
This tour is designed for Midwest leaders and key funder partners to explore how cities in the Netherlands integrate affordability and maximize proximity in city and regional planning. During this trip, the tour participants will meet with Netherlands city officials and leaders in Utrecht, Rotterdam, and Amsterdam. In each city, we will study actionable policies, land-use, and strategies that Midwest states could potentially adopt in their city planning.
Sustainable Consumption Research and Action Initiative
SCORAI is a multi-regional assemblage of networks with independent groups in North America, Europe, China, and Israel. SCORAI networks are made up of academics and practitioners to forge connections and work together to address challenges at the interface of material consumption, human fulfillment, lifestyle satisfaction, and macroeconomic and technological change. Each affiliation provides critical support and facilitates meaningful impact in their region. Members are either actively involved in research or avid practitioners who are driven to translate research on sustainable consumption into practical action.