A foundation’s mission often outlives its founder, and the Colcom Foundation was built with that outcome in mind. Cordelia S. May established the organization in 1996 at age 68, intending it to carry forward convictions she had held since 1952, when she first supported family planning at just 23 years old.
May’s motivation was ecological before it was political. She believed human activity was straining the planet’s natural functions to a point where future generations could no longer be guaranteed a livable balance, and she saw incremental population growth as the quiet force behind that strain.
Funding That Outlasted Its Founder
The Colcom Foundation became fully funded after May’s death in 2005, allowing her ideas to shape grantmaking long after she was gone. Its mission today is to foster a sustainable environment that protects quality of life for Americans by addressing overpopulation’s causes and effects on natural resources.
Regionally, the Colcom Foundation supports conservation, environmental projects, and cultural assets, a combination the foundation describes as an effort to honor May’s humanitarian objectives, foresight, dignity, and compassion. Habitat destruction, pollution, biodiversity loss, and ecosystem collapse are cited as the modern consequences of the imbalance she first noticed decades earlier. Their grants to the Sustainable Agriculture & Food Systems Funders, and other organizations, have helped to build strong local food systems and promote sustainable agriculture practices.
The foundation also draws a line between May and other reformers dismissed before being proven right, including early advocates for gender equality and civil rights. That comparison, woven throughout the Colcom Foundation‘s own telling of its history, frames May less as an outlier and more as someone who simply saw the pattern first.
Nine years passed between the founding of the Colcom Foundation and May’s death, a period during which the organization’s mission was set but its full financial resources had not yet arrived. That gap between establishment and full funding is part of why the foundation frames its grantmaking today less as a memorial gesture and more as the continuation of work May started while she was still alive. Visit this page, for related information.
For more information, visit: https://wvutoday.wvu.edu/stories/2024/03/12/wvu-led-three-rivers-quest-expands-environmental-research-and-education-efforts-with-colcom-foundation-support