Prince Albert II of Monaco Foundation
OVERVIEW: The Prince Albert II of Monaco Foundation supports global development grantmaking through environmental conservation and climate change.
IP TAKE: Groups working on different aspects of the foundation’s stated areas of global development or climate change interested in working in research, technological innovation, and field work can apply for funding. In general, this foundation seeks organizations that embrace measurability, replicability, sustainable development, and the involvement of local populations.
This is not an accessible funder and does not accept unsolicited applications, likely due to the volume of requests it receives. Support for projects are also limited to grantees based in Monaco, Germany, Canada, Spain, USA, France, Italy, the United Kingdom, Singapore, China, and Switzerland.
PROFILE: Albert Alexandre Louis Pierre Grimaldi — Monaco’s reigning monarch, real estate billionaire, and son of iconic actress Grace Kelly — believes that climate change is the most pressing global issue of our time. In 2006, he founded the Prince Albert II of Monaco Foundation to “[c]arry out projects and implement concrete activities in [its] priority action areas,” which are the Mediterranean basin, Polar Regions and least-developed countries as defined by the United Nations official list. The foundation’s priority action areas include combatting deforestation, increasing our knowledge of biodiversity, conserving endangered species, developing marine protected areas, the continued development of energy efficiency and renewable energies and combatting ocean acidification.
Grants for Global Development, Climate Change and Marine
The foundation’s global development grants overlaps with it’s climate change work. It conducts all giving through a sustainability lens. The foundation offers three awards between these two giving spaces: a Climate Change Award, Biodiversity Award, and Water Award.
The foundation dedicates about 25 percent of its annual grantmaking budget to global development issues related to water shortage, deforestation and desertification, but does not otherwise state specific goals or strategies for global development. It appears grants for global development must emphasize a deep link with the foundation’s conservation and climate goals in order to qualify as this foundation sees the relationship between humanity and the environment as interconnected.
Grants for climate change focus on various aspects of conservation and biodiversity, from protecting water and marine-protected areas to deforestation’s impact on carbon absorption.
In general, the foundation prioritizes established organizations with long track records. For example, in the past it has supported Action Against Hunger’s project helping vulnerable smallholder farming communities adapt to the effects of persistent droughts and Where the Rain Falls’ program, which studies the connection between rainfall amounts, human mobility, and food security. The foundation has also awarded grants to water and sanitation organizations like One Drop and WaterAid.
Important Grant Details:
Grants average about $125,000. The foundation also supports projects that promote access to efficient and renewable energies in impoverished populations.
Past awardees tend to be principal investigators and scientists working across these spaces, investigating how to improve the response to man-made global warming and climate change.
For a better idea of the organizations the Prince Albert II Foundation supports, peruse over its annual report.
The foundation’s grantmaking is competitive since it funds less than 10 percent of the proposals that it receives. The foundation’s grant review process is relatively transparent, but it is also rigorous and comprises multiple steps.
The foundation is not currently accepting unsolicited grant applications and requests for funding.
PEOPLE:
Search for staff contact info and bios in PeopleFinder (paid subscribers only.)
LINKS: