Today, more than ever, we must respond to a changing world in the face of climate change, food security, social and economic justice/injustice. The global pandemic, COVID-19, brings us closer to this challenging reality with transformative possibilities, that calls on philanthropy to show more courage and immediate action. At Swift Foundation we recognize this imperative and seek to deepen our work in meaningful and relevant ways in response and beyond. Currently we are engaging a review of our own work, and entering a process of re-envisioning our grant making principles, criteria, and overall vision towards a reimagined future. We will continue to make grants and respond to needs in this pandemic crisis. We look forward to announcing and sharing our new vision and grant making guidelines in the fall.
Swift Foundation supports peoples who protect the places they live, love, know, and share with all our relations.
We envision this work called philanthropy as a practice of solidarity and reciprocity with humans and all our relations. It is the alchemy of working with accumulated money to facilitate healing. To weave relationships based on trust, return tomorrows taken back to the lands and peoples it was taken from and is dedicated to All Our Relations and especially to our children and the generations yet born.
The Swift Foundation derives and embraces the following Values and Principles based on our respect and honoring of Indigenous Peoples worldviews, traditions and knowledge grounded in deep and long-lasting relationships with home territories. These values guide our board and staff in beliefs, actions, and grant making.
Swift also funds one-time program grants for particularly promising and important initiatives that fall outside of our specific guidelines yet meet our overall mission and demonstrate a high degree of effectiveness and impact.
We see the respect, care, and honoring of Mother Earth as a core value that is essential to maintaining the well-being of humanity and the future survival of all living beings. We consider this our responsibility as humans.
Thus, we prioritize lived experience of particular communities and home places, and value this knowledge and perspective. We stand with communities in responding to chaos and crisis deftly and courageously.
We understand relationality as key to a holistic, interconnected, and interdependent view that effectively forms the basis for reciprocity and complementarity in our actions; and honors life as a dynamic complex web.
Thus, we engage reciprocity as an act of the whole in which funding relationships mutually exchange benefits to support just solutions for all relations, including the human and the natural world. We embrace the inherent complexity in finding integrated approaches and solutions responding to systems thinking and complex problem solving, and specificity.
We value the collective well-being of the whole that promotes community and solidarity forms of production, accumulation, and redistribution in harmony with nature, and supports the construction of a society where differences are respected within a framework of equality, justice and dignity.
Thus, we participate in the making of restorative economies that take into account the necessary restoration required to heal the profound, interlocked ecological, economic, and social crises we are facing. We promote mutual accountability, transparency, and clarity through building trusting relationships.
