Update from the Executive Director
Happy New Year Hidden Leaf Community,
As we enter 2024, Hidden Leaf is beginning the new year with clarity, intention, and continued commitment to supporting our grant partners and amplifying their work.
Announcing our new website: With that in mind, we are thrilled and excited to launch our new website! Hidden Leaf is grateful to our partners at Change Consulting and YolkWorks for bringing this beautiful website to fruition. We hope the site will make clear what we care about and shine a light on the amazing organizations we are privileged to support. The website will also have resources on transformative change and regular updates from the field. We welcome your collaboration—if we can join forces to help share the good word about your work to impact social and environmental change, please reach out.
Sharpened Theory of Change: Since I joined more than five years ago, we've been wanting to refresh and update our Theory of Change. With support from A. E. Lynch Consulting, we’ve done just that. On our new website, you can find our new, clear and powerful Theory of Change. We want to thank Design Action Collective for the beautiful graphic representation of this work.
As part of this work, we have also refreshed and updated our mission statement, which now more clearly expresses the current evolution of Hidden Leaf and where we are going:
Hidden Leaf promotes inner awareness within liberatory movements in order to advance a more just, ecologically healthy, and compassionate society.
Shifting capital and power: Last year, as part of our five-year strategy, Hidden Leaf contributed more than $2.4 million in grants to critical frontline groups and intermediaries centering and grounding liberatory, spirit-led practices as part of their work and vision for the world we seek. Simultaneously, we made a second-year commitment of more than $1.4 million in community investments, supporting the procurement of vital land and infrastructure; shifting assets from us to important indigenous efforts as a continued effort of repair; contributing to community-led loan funds that will build and circulate capital to build a new economy that works for all and which contributes to planetary flourishing. A full list of our amazing partners can be found on the new website here.
With the leadership of board member Tara Brown, we have also rejuvenated our Investment Policy Statement, which you can find here, to reflect our dynamic approach to all of our investments: grants, community investments, deep impact investments, and more traditional investments. We hope this progressive IPS will be useful to other institutions like us and we welcome your feedback and reflections.
We look forward to updating our website regularly to highlight the important work that movement partners are doing, to be a space where conversations about deep change can be sparked, and to stay better in touch with all of you.
Wishing you all the best in 2024. May it be a year where our communities win big and we throw down hard for them!
With love,
Supriya
Murmurations: at the equinox
Illustration by Michael Luong/Yes! Media
A note from adrienne maree brown: Alta Starr has had many lifetimes and walks with easy wisdom. These days, she is a playful poet, thorough writer, deep collaborative thinker, and tarot oracle.
For Real Climate Justice, Philanthropy Must Support the Frontlines, Fund Early and Fund Big