Now in its eighth year of publication, Berkeley-based Bay Nature magazine recently announced the launch of a new content-rich Web site (baynature.org). While many nonprofits have good stories to tell, Bay Nature now has over 700.

The concept of Bay Nature magazine began as a conversation in 1997 between publisher David Loeb and Malcolm Margolin, author of the much-admired Ohlone Way and founder of Heyday Books in Berkeley. With seed funding from the David and Lucille Packard Foundation and other local funders, the inaugural issue covered by a majestic great blue heron photograph hit local magazine racks in January 2001. Now, just over ten years after that initial conversation, the magazine is one of four programs that make up the nonprofit Bay Nature Institute.

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“Exercise is key to health, and studies have shown that people are much more likely to exercise if parks and opportunities for recreation are nearby,” writes the Trust for Public Land (TPL) in their latest issue of Land & People. For TPL and many other community-focused organizations, the interconnected issues of physical health, getting outdoors and connecting kids to the outdoors, are becoming paramount to their work. These issues are relevant for the land conservation-focused TPL, health organizations like Kaiser Permanente and funders like the Stewardship Council in California. TPL in fact received funding from Kaiser Permanente to build what they call “Fitness Zones” in Los Angeles, particularly in densely populated low income East Los Angeles neighborhoods where obesity is high.

Another organization focused on getting youth outside believes “[c]hildren are smarter, cooperative, happier and healthier when they have frequent and varied opportunities for free and unstructured play in the out-of-doors.” As such, the Children & Nature Network, chaired by Last Child in the Woods author Richard Louv, compiled two annotated bibliographies to research that will tell you just how much kids are not getting outdoors, the consequences and the most promising solutions.

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The San Francisco Bay Area environmental movement was born before the first Earth Day on April 22, 1970. This KQED special tells the story of the history and people who saved the Bay from disaster beginning in the 1960s until today.

Other stories and resources:
KQED Earth Day Radio Special: The History of Environmental Justice

NPR: How Does ‘Going Green’ Impact Black America?

Green Collar Jobs Report Released by Raquel Rivera Pinderhughes, Professor of Urban Studies, San Francisco State University

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A recent “Meet the Grantmakers” panel at the Foundation Center in San Francisco brought together Jacob Harold of the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, Anne Valley of The James Irvine Foundation, and Linda Wood of The Evelyn and Walter Haas, Jr. Fund to focus on the theme of “organizational effectiveness.” Threaded throughout the discussions were topics raised at the March 10-12, 2008 conference convened by Grantmakers for Effective Organizations - also known as GEO. GEO promotes organizational effectiveness by identifying and promoting grantmaking practices that improve grantee performance. If your organization passed the letter of inquiry and proposal stages with a funder and needs to get ready for a site visit, the Foundation Center panelists would encourage you to download a free copy of “The Due Diligence Tool.” Many grantmakers are now using this GEO publication to assess nonprofits when making funding decisions. The guide pulls together best practices from a variety of U.S. foundations from small family foundations to large private foundations.

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