The primary purpose of the Cloudsplitter Foundation is to improve the environment, both physical and cultural, in the Adirondacks and to make life easier, healthier, and more rewarding for the people who live there.
While over 70% of the Foundation’s grants go to institutions in the Adirondacks, our secondary mission, to the extent that funds are available, is to aid other organizations dedicated to humanitarian causes, wilderness preservation, protecting civil liberties, and cultural development.
Past support has been to organizations listed on the Information Links tab. Grants fall into two categories: repetitive annual grants to support Adirondack institutions that further the Foundation’s goals. These are smaller grants, representing less than 10% of our gifting, that do not need repetitive grant applications.
The balance of our grant-making is for strategic programs where funds donated provide leverage towards our goals of improved ecology, more livable communities, or improving and expanding local organizations that share our goals. This frequently involves challenge grants and/or matching fund grants. We do not make outright gifts without some strategic objective tied to the grant. Leveraged grants have top priority. Click here to read about our philanthropic philosophy.
Unleveraged grant applications are less valued than grant applications that attract other donors or achieve a specific, measurable, outcome. We generally will not give to endowments or their equivalent.
Types of projects we have approved in the past are:
- Matching grant to endow a chair for the Watershed Institute at Paul Smith’s
- Challenge grant to finish the SkatePark campaign in Saranac Lake
- Matching grant to help fund the construction of a new lodge at Dewey Mountain
- Kick-start funds for an early childhood development program at the Adirondack Foundation
- “Small-grants-for-small-people” gifts to help day care centers acquire needed supplies and equipment
- Multi-year support to expand the Adirondack Loon Program
- A major capital gift to the Heart of the Adirondacks campaign at the Adirondack Nature Conservancy
- A challenge grant to fund a fisheries study on Follensby Pond
- A multi-year grant to help the Ausable River Association with its environmental work
- A major capital gift to help the Adirondack Museum with its refurbishment and new exhibits
- A gift to help the Saranac Lake Library complete its Kollecher collection digitalization
- A grant to Pendragon Theatre to help it fund a study of its future facilities
- A potential multi-year grant to help the Marie L. Haberl School with its environmental outreach to 4th grade students
- A multi-year grant to support Jerry Jenkin’s multi-volume project to great the first comprehensive ecological atlas of the Northern Forest
- A grant to the Strand Theater to help disadvantaged area youth attend art classes and camps
- A major grant to Adirondack Health to support the construction of a new surgical suite