Earth Today | EFJ stays the course on fundraising mission

It has been more than a year since the Environmental Foundation of Jamaica (EFJ) announced its intention to go after funds to sustain its operations, having appointed a new leadership and awarded a new set of grants under the Forest Conservation Fund (FCF).

They have since employed the services of a consultant to help energise their efforts, while taking a relook at their approach. The initial intention was to focus much of their efforts on overseas prospects. Now, chairman of the board, Professor Dale Webber, says the entity now sees merit in a dual approach.

"We hadn't done a lot of the travelling we started planning to do. We thought we would be better served from two angles (including) taking advantage of as many of the local possibilities as we can ... getting money from entities that have like minds and using NGO communities - all the entities we have trained - to enact what they want to do," he noted in recent interview with The Gleaner.

At the same time, Webber said, "We are still doing a lot of the prep work to go to a big international donor to say what we want. We need to get everything in place before we do that."

This includes concretising a 'pitch' they can take to prospective partners.

Our needs

"We are creating that pitch we think is the right platform ... to seek funds to come back to the EFJ. We have told him (the consultant) what our needs are and he is working with our CEO (Barrington Lewis) to pull together all the strengths of the EFJ and determine how we can accentuate the positives we have," Webber said.

There is, too, ongoing work on enhancing the image of the EFJ, including work on its website and social media presence, with which they have had some support from former board member Emma Lewis, also an independent blogger and environmental advocate.

At the end of the day, Webber said the EFJ is keen on legacy building.

"Our perspective is we have set a strategic plan which allows us to strengthen communities through their NGOs. The EFJ has a very small, but very effective team. Strengthening our partners and NGOs is a major part of what we do. We have decided that we want to do that, and if we were to close tomorrow, the EFJ should be able to say we have helped many entities, moving from project to project, to strengthen communities," he said.

Meanwhile, the entity is not ruling out options such a debt swap, as part of their fundingraising efforts. It is, in fact, a debt swap that led to the establishment of the EFJ as an independent special purpose foundation and medium through which sustainable development programmes would be developed and the funds managed more than two decades ago.

This was under the United States (US) government's Enterprise of the Americas Initiative through which the proceeds of debt forgiveness and debt reduction were channelled into the promotion and implementation of sustainable environmental and child-survival and development programmes.

"We are looking for another debt-for-nature swap, whether with the US or any other entity who wants to engage in a debt-for-nature swap. That has worked very well on two occasions. That is what gave us the EFJ and the JPAT (Jamaica Protected Areas Trust), through the FCF (Forest Conservation Fund)," Webber said last year.

It is under the Special Climate Change Adaptation Fund that the EFJ, which has been in operation for more than two decades, has, over the past months, awarded more than $80 million in grants to civil society groups and select public-sector entities to undertake projects to build Jamaica's climate resilience.

They awarded another $80 million in grants through the FCF and for projects aimed at regenerating and/or preserving Jamaica's forest cover, while promoting sustainable livelihoods.

In 20 years, the EFJ has awarded in excess of 1,200 projects and given out more than JMB 300 billion.