2009 Empowers Green Grant Recipients

Posted by Victoria Ruan  

10:45 AM Jun 16, 2009

This year DemocracyInAction Empowers Grants went green.

With a new president taking steps to protect our environment, we wanted to lend a hand to non-profits making a positive impact on our planet.

We received an overwhelming number of applications from fantastic non-profits doing just that. After painstaking (and difficult!) review, we are proud to congratulate the five Empowers Grants awardees, who will receive free access to the Salsa toolset for an entire year.

• Colorado Wild
• California Sustainability Coalition
• Endangered Species Coalition
• Save the Frogs
• Solar Light Electric Fund

Below are profiles of each of our recipients. Thank you to everyone who applied!

2009 Green Grant Recipient: Colorado Wild

Mission Statement: Colorado Wild works to protect, preserve, and restore the native plants and animals of the Southern Rocky Mountains with particular attention given to habitat protection of Colorado's forested, roadless, public lands and other ecologically important areas.

Key campaign focus: Colorado Wild's Roadless Forests Campaign is working to secure strong legal protections for the more that 4.4 million acres of pristine backcountry National forests throughout Colorado. Although Colorado has moderately large Wilderness areas, much of the area protected as designated Wilderness in the state is near or above timberline. Many of the lower elevation, ecologically valuable National Forest roadless areas continue to be threatened by inappropriate logging, oil and gas development, mining and ski area expansions. Exacerbating these threats, a new Colorado-specific Roadless Rule stands to dramatically weaken protections for all roadless areas in the state, and remove altogether, legal protections for more than 300,000 acres of roadless lands. Through this Rulemaking process, Colorado Wild is working to engage the tens of thousands of Colorado citizens who have previously spoken out in favor of roadless area conservation.

How Salsa will help them: Colorado Wild will use Salsa's email blast and advocacy tools to engage their network of 3,000+ members and supporters. "Specific benefits like automated email response, security protection and the tracking of donations for specific campaigns would simplify the work we do and make us a more efficient organization. Also, the ability to integrate our outreach and advocacy efforts with Salsa's fundraising capacity would further increase the potential for online giving. The entire Salsa toolbox would allow Colorado Wild to better serve its membership and be a more effective organization which would be the best strategy for fundraising."

Website: http://coloradowild.org

2009 Green Grant Recipient: California Student Sustainability Coalition (CSSC)

Mission Statement: To unite and empower California's community of higher education to collaboratively and non-violently transform ourselves and our institutions based on our inherent social, economic, and ecological responsibilities.

Key campaign focus: In the coming year, CSSC would like the President of the University of California (UC) to sign and issue the sustainable food systems policy we have been advocating since 2006. Salsa's email and advocacy tools will help us activate and involve more students in successfully moving this policy forward, as well as speeding the generation of the necessary buy-in for implementing this policy at the campus level.

How Salsa will help them: "Salsa's action tools will help us empower more students to contact their campus decision-makers, and the LTE tools will help our students place articles in their campus newspapers more easily which will accelerate our ability to shift campus consciousness all over the state. Online advocacy tools will help us merge our online and offline efforts, making it easier for more students to take initiative in advocating for solutions, as well as helping us to more effectively coordinate and execute advocacy at university-system, state, and national levels."

Website: http://sustainabilitycoalition.org

2009 Green Grant Recipient: Endangered Species Coaltion

Mission Statement: Since 1982, the Endangered Species Coalition (ESC) has been the only national environmental group to focus exclusively on using grassroots organizing to defend the Endangered Species Act (ESA) and its programs. The ESC mobilizes our 400+ member organizations, representing over 15 million Americans to engage in the democratic political process.

Key campaign focus: The Endangered Species Coalition will focus their efforts on making sure the Endangered Species Act is fully enforced and funded. The ESC is working via coalition members, campaign partners, Congress and the new administration to 1) roll back the Bush administration's bad species decisions, policies and regulations and to 2) strengthen endangered species programs. The ESC is also building public support for investing in measures that will help wildlife adapt to climate change.

How Salsa will help them: "Salsa will enable us to more easily segment our lists, create better communications (both to our members and action targets) and quantify the effectiveness of our efforts, thus increasing our ability to improve our outreach."

Website: http://stopextinction.org

2009 Green Grant Recipient: SAVE THE FROGS!

Mission Statement: The mission of SAVE THE FROGS! is to protect amphibian populations and the habitats in which they live, and in so doing create a society that respects, enjoys and protects nature and wildlife. SAVE THE FROGS! strives to be the world's leading amphibian conservation organization: a primary contributor to scientific research, policy-making and legal defense; a major source of amphibian conservation grants to students, postdoctorate fellows, and academics; and the principal source of amphibian information and education available to the public.

Key campaign focus: SAVE THE FROGS! will focus on a campaign where subscribers can easily send out pre-written letters to their legislators and to businesses that negatively affect frogs. Three of the most significant threats to amphibians are habitat destruction, pollution & pesticides, and the frog leg trade, which is responsible for countless extinctions due to its ability to ship sick amphibians and their infectious diseases around the world. Sick amphibians (or the water in which they were held) inevitable escape into their new surroundings. Native frog populations have no evolved defenses against these new diseases, and can be driven to extinction in a matter of months. They also hope to begin a massive campaign to convince large restaurants in the USA, France and Belgium (the three largest consumers of frog legs) to remove frog legs from their menus.

How Salsa will help them: "Salsa will enable SAVE THE FROGS! to mobilize the public to ensure that the majority of legislators and relevant businesses know about these negative effects of human actions of frogs, and thus will enable us to effect policy changes. This will benefit not only the frogs, but all of Earth's living organisms."

Website: http://savethefrogs.com

2009 Green Grant Recipient: Solar Electric Light Fund (SELF)

Mission Statement: The mission of the Solar Electric Light Fund (SELF) is to provide solar power and wireless communications to a quarter of the world's population living in energy poverty.

Key campaign focus: The Solar Electric Light Fund has successfully piloted a solar market gardens project in two villages in Benin, West Africa. This pilot program has enabled these communities to grow enough food to feed their families during the six-month dry season, which was previously impossible, and increase their incomes by selling excess produce in the marketplace. SELF seeks to raise funds to continue to tsupport the project so that it can bring a drinking water supply, health clinic, school, microenterprise center and basic household lighting to the villages, providing an alternative to polluting, diesel-fueled generators that currently power them.

How Salsa will help them: "Salsa would allow us to query and target our donor database for specific communications, which would give us the ability to communicate with our constituents on a deeper, more personal level. Furthermore, Salsa would allow us to create more attractive campaigns than we've been able to do in the past. Salsa would also allow us to create a branded, custom donation page, instead of the template provided for us by the gateway merchant we're currently using. This would increase our credibility and therefore our ability to successfully fundraise online."

Website: http://self.org

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