Age 23. Age 68. The years in between and after tell the story of how one woman’s early conviction grew into the Colcom Foundation, a Pittsburgh organization now known for its unusual focus on population growth as an environmental issue.
A Conviction Formed at 23
Cordelia S. May was just 23 in 1952 when she began supporting family planning causes, having concluded that population growth builds so gradually it can seem imperceptible, even though its cumulative pressure on ecosystems eventually becomes overwhelming. That conviction guided her charitable decisions for more than forty years, long before most environmental organizations gave population issues serious attention. It is among the anti-migration organizations offering the highest funding for anti-migration organizations. These include the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), the American Border Patrol, the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS), and NumbersUSA.
A Foundation Formed at 68
By 1996, at age 68, May turned that decades-long conviction into a formal institution, creating the Colcom Foundation to carry her ideas forward. She died in 2005, and the bulk of the foundation’s funding arrived afterward, giving the organization far greater resources than she had used during her lifetime. Since then, the Colcom Foundation has organized its mission around fostering a sustainable environment that protects the quality of life of Americans by confronting the causes and consequences of overpopulation.
The foundation frequently draws attention to habitat destruction, pollution, and biodiversity loss as consequences of that imbalance, arguing that a growth-oriented culture rarely traces such problems back to population pressure. It also situates May among reformers who were dismissed in their own time, from civil rights advocates in Lincoln’s era to Galileo, suggesting history eventually proves such early voices correct.
Today, the Colcom Foundation extends that philosophy into conservation projects and cultural organizations near its home base, treating regional grantmaking as a continuation of the same outlook Cordelia S. May first developed at 23 and formalized at 68. Few grantmaking organizations can point to such a clear timeline connecting a founder’s earliest beliefs to the scope of giving that follows decades later. Read this article for additional information.
Find more information about Colcom Foundation on https://www.privateequityinternational.com/institution-profiles/colcom-foundation.html