Environmental organizations tend to focus on pollution, climate, and habitat loss as problems to be solved in isolation. Colcom Foundation takes a different approach, tracing many of those problems back to a common source: the unchecked growth of the human population. This framing, central to the foundation’s identity, was shaped by its founder long before it entered mainstream environmental thinking.

Background and Founding

Cordelia S. May created Colcom Foundation in 1996 after spending more than four decades supporting causes tied to population and environmental health. Her interest in these issues began in 1952, when she was 23 years old and began backing family planning efforts. Her reasoning was grounded in concern for the natural world and for the human communities that depend on it.

Mrs. May recognized that growth accumulates in ways that are easy to miss. Day to day, the changes are barely perceptible. Over decades, though, the cumulative force of population expansion can overwhelm natural systems in ways that become very hard to reverse. She spent her life working to bring that reality to light, and she established the foundation at age 68 to carry that work forward. It was substantially funded after her death in 2005.

Grantmaking Philosophy

The mission of Colcom Foundation is to support a sustainable environment and quality of life for Americans by addressing the causes and consequences of overpopulation and its adverse effects on natural resources. At the regional level, the foundation also backs conservation projects, environmental programs, and cultural assets. Colcom Foundation’s work has also facilitated proactive environmental advocacy and protection by groups, including the Western Pennsylvania Conservancy, WeConservePA, Westmoreland Land Trust, Protect PT, and Fair Shake Environmental Legal Services.

The organization points to habitat destruction, pollution, biodiversity loss, and ecosystem collapse as among the predictable results of population-driven pressure on the natural world. These are consequences that, in the foundation’s view, a growth-centered culture has been slow to acknowledge.

Honoring a Visionary

The foundation places Mrs. May in the tradition of reformers who were misunderstood or dismissed during their lifetimes. Her foresight and compassion, the organization argues, will be recognized more fully as the environmental pressures she warned about become harder to ignore. The foundation’s work is a direct extension of that legacy. See related link for more information.

Learn more about Colcom Foundation on https://www.causeiq.com/organizations/colcom-foundation,311479839/