In collaboration with Coast Funds, First Nations are forming long-term visions and fundraising strategies to strengthen the stewardship of their territories for generations to come.
Coast Funds offers a straightforward process to collaboratively form your stewardship vision and design strategies to increase sustainable finance. Working closely with your staff and leadership we can create a tailored fundraising strategy for your First Nation to build its endowed funds and provide self-determined revenue for future generations.
Coast Funds is committed to working directly with your staff and leadership to form your stewardship vision, from establishing a new stewardship program, to envisioning the next decade of stewardship across the lands and waters of your territories. This 10-year vision guides your fundraising efforts and provides a stable foundation from which to build your endowed stewardship funds.
In a close working partnership, we can reflect on current and past stewardship activities, exploring how those efforts can be scaled up to meet your long-term vision for stewardship.
Evaluating and learning
Since 2008, Coast Funds has worked in close partnership with First Nations to leverage their endowed funds, securing annual funding for their stewardship operations (more than $53 million has been leveraged to date, and growing).
Forming a long-term vision
Working in partnership with your staff and leadership, we embrace a ‘dream big’ philosophy to explore the future of your stewardship authority. We ask a key question: “If you weren’t limited by today’s revenues, how would you invest in fulfilling your First Nation’s stewardship responsibilities?”
Together, we consider your human resources, organizational structure, infrastructure and equipment, training, and programming requirements as we build your vision together.
Creating an actionable plan
In partnership, we determine timelines for scaling your stewardship authority or Guardian program over a ten-year period, working within the broader context of your unique path to sovereignty.
Setting financial goals
Using your current operating expenses and revenues as a baseline, we’ll work with you to forecast the operating costs required to scale-up and sustain your long-term vision. We can also explore opportunities to build and diversify your revenue sources. You plan the revenues sources to focus on, and these priorities direct us in determining the fundraising goal(s) that will provide the financial sustainability to achieve your vision.
Endorsing the vision, establishing a mandate
Following formation of the stewardship vision, your First Nation’s hereditary and/or governing councils reviews the 10-year stewardship vision. This provides an opportunity for governance oversight in setting the vision. Typically Elders and Chiefs will have been engaged throughout the process, as determined by your leadership, but convening a council review enables the First Nation to formally endorse the vision, setting the goals for building and sustaining stewardship efforts for the next decade. With this consensus, your First Nation will have a mandate to initiate fundraising, knowing that your efforts are directly aligned with a consensus long-term vision from your leadership.
Working on stewardship finance alongside each First Nation uniquely positions Coast Funds to collaboratively assess the financial sustainability of stewardship revenues. This information can inform your plan to secure new revenues to fulfill your long-term goals for stewardship across your territories.
Your long-term stewardship vision serves as a foundation and target for your fundraising efforts. Using your vision as a guide, Coast Funds can support you to develop a fundraising strategy. We can work with you to identify opportunities, harness new and existing relationships, and strategize on funding from prospective donors.
Define your goals
Together, we can look to your 10-year stewardship vision as a foundational document to define your key near- and long-term fundraising goals, ensuring that the strategy and any campaigns are aligned with your mandate from council.
Identify opportunities
We can convene a series of workshops with you to uncover fundraising opportunities unique to your Nation. Together, we can identify key relationships, values, and needs to develop a framework for the partnerships best aligned with your goals.
Develop strategies
Through our work together, we can articulate your Nation’s priorities in alignment with funder interests. We can thoughtfully consider the campaign models that will best support your case for investment.
Confirm strategy, map a path forward
Once one or more strategies have been prioritized, we can support you to develop tactical plans. Coast Funds is available to provide support as you engage prospective donors. Together we can leverage our shared successes implementing globally recognized stewardship and conservation finance over the past decade.
Approve your fundraising strategy
Coast Funds can support your staff and leadership to secure approval from your Nation’s governing authority. With this approval, we support you as you LAUNCH YOUR ACTIVE FUNDRAISING CAMPAIGN, using your plan as your north star. As a close working partner, we can continue to provide ongoing services and resources throughout your fundraising journey.
Regional Fundraising Strategies and Partnerships
Where First Nations along the coast share common goals, there is a strategic opportunity for collaboration. Regional partners can work together, with support from Coast Funds, to scale strategies and complement ongoing work among regional organizations and the First Nations they work in service of.
Together, we encourage partnership with organizations looking to help scale these efforts in pursuit of each First Nation securing the resources needed to sustain their stewardship in perpetuity.
Your stewardship fundraising strategy will guide your efforts to leverage your First Nation’s unique relationships towards securing major contributions to your growing stewardship endowment. First Nations are building the value of their stewardship endowments through unique partnerships to provide sustainable, ongoing investment income that directly realizes their long-term vision for stewardship across their lands and waters.
Coast Funds can support your efforts to develop new revenue sources to finance your stewardship authority—in particular assembling contributions that will increase your sustainable, self determined revenue from your growing endowment.
Examples of how First Nations have leveraged their position to develop and diversify sustainable stewardship revenue sources include:
Coast Funds is ready to work with you as you turn your fundraising plan into sustainable finance in perpetuity. We are here to work closely with you to achieve you goals by:
Coast Funds is committed to working with you to grow your stewardship endowment. Together, we can partner with funders who align with your priorities and who are keen for your First Nation’s to fulfill your inherent stewardship responsibilities for generations to come.
After a forced relocation separated the Gwa’sala-‘Nakwaxda’xw Nations from their homelands, the creation of a Guardian Watchmen program is helping strengthen the Nations’ stewardship practices and cultural connections.
K’ómoks First Nation have stewarded the lands and waters of their vast territory since time immemorial. Today, that ancestral responsibility is carried out in large part by the K’ómoks Guardian department.
One of the smallest Nations in BC is working to restore and safeguard the unique marine areas in their territory.
The Heiltsuk Nation is ensuring that community voices are heard and important resources are protected through their stewardship work.
In 2009, the Haida Nation and Province of BC signed a historic protocol agreement that ensures protection for cultural features and sensitive ecosystems on Haida Gwaii.
Haida Rediscovery camps are revitalizing Haida culture and creating the next generation of leaders to care for and sustain the lands and waters of Haida Gwaii.
The Mamalilikulla Guardians are re-asserting the Nation’s presence in their territories, conducting research and restoration, monitoring industrial and recreational activity, and protecting cultural assets. With the Nation’s 10-year stewardship vision, they are mapping a path forward to do even more.
The Gitga’at Guardians protect the remote territory of the Nation while providing local employment opportunities.
The Gitga’at Nation is protecting ecosystems, wildlife, and cultural assets in their territory through monitoring and research.
After Ḵ’alii Aksim Lisims (Nass River) oolichan were designated a species-at-risk, the Nisg̱a’a Lisims Government undertook a multi-year research project that would protect their connection to the culturally important fish.