The Plant Initiative

These grants totaling $5,000 were provided in October 2026 to organizations working to increase respect for plants, encourage ethical behavior toward plants, and/or to support development of an effective movement toward these goals.

Grants of $500 each were provided to:

Aldo Leopold Foundation (Baraboo, WI) to help cover expenses for the Land Ethic Live program, a free, virtual monthly speaker series featuring conservation-related authors, scientists, philosophers, and practitioners.

Center for Biological Diversity (Tucson, AZ) to support the Center's efforts to protect the endangered Acuña cactus, which lives in Southern Arizona and Mexico, and which is under threat from livestock grazing, illegal collection, mining, urban development, border-enforcement activities, off-road vehicle use, and climate change.

Center for Democratic and Environmental Rights (Spokane, WA) to support CDER's Tribal Attorney's work in collaboration with the Rappahannock Tribe of Virginia to enforce the rights of the Rappahannock River, including the right of the river to provide habitat for plant species that are culturally and historically significant for the sustenance of tribal members, such as the habitat of marsh oats (wild rice).

Center for Plant Conservation (Wildomar, CA)  to support the Center's work in building a Living Collections Data Ecosystem, which can transform thousands of isolated pieces of conservation knowledge into something much more powerful: a shared understanding of what we have, what are missing, and what we must do next to prevent plant extinction. 

Earth Law Center (Durango, CO) to help extend legal rights to orchids in Colombia, including helping to support a multi-day Rights of Nature workshop at the La Planada Ecological Reserve, which will bring together Indigenous leadership, scientists, and a film team to explore the Rights of Nature framework and to integrate Indigenous ecological knowledge into a Declaration of Rights for Orchids.

Global Alliance for the Rights of Nature (San Francisco, CA) to advance the Rights of the Amazon by coordinating with Indigenous leaders and legal partners working to connect strategic Rights of River and territorial cases in Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru, for a possible joint case at the Inter-American System.

Mandaamin Institute (Elkhorn, WI)  to support the Institute's work to re-find a more collaborative and productive kinship with maize based on working together in partnership, with the grant helping to pay for educational work with farmers and meetings, including travel to meetings, with the goal of showing farmers and others how the Institute works with, lives with, and thinks about corn.

Native Seeds/SEARCH (Tucson, AZ) to purchase supplies used in the regeneration and conservation of rare, arid-adapted crop seeds from the Greater Southwest, including purchasing two critical items for expansion of seed production: harvest bags to protect maturing seedheads and fruit from pest predation, and cover crop seed to improve soil organic matter and water infiltration in new expansion fields.

Old-Growth Forest Network (Easton, MD) to help offset the cost of the Network's ArcGIS Pro subscription and ArcGIS Online Credits which allow for layering internal forest data with public forest maturity data to create maps that guide fieldwork and highlight where old growth is most likely to be found.

Organization of Nature Evolutionaries (Danby, VT) to support production and public outreach work, including a short film, for ONE's Plant Kin Gratitude Ceremony running from September 26 though November 16, 2026, which is a global, self-guided ceremony that encourages gratitude, kinship, reciprocity, and appreciation for plants.

With your support, The Plant Initiative plans to continue to provide grants in 2027 to organizations working on behalf of plants! 

Each month, The Plant Initiative sends out an e-mail newsletter to provide timely information and resources about improving the plant-human connection as well as to keep you up to date on our work.

Here's the link to the October 2026 e-newsletter which was sent on October 15, 2026.

To subscribe to the e-newsletter, just visit our home page and enter your e-mail address on the form on that page. If you have a suggestion for a resource, event, or other item that may be of interest to subscribers, please consider sharing it with us at info@plantinitiative.org. 

Thank you for your interest!

The Plant Initiative is posting podcast episodes on our YouTube channel.

Our eighth episode, recorded on August 7, 2026 features an inspiring conversation between artist and poet Evgenia Emets and Plant Initiative board member Sue Fager. Topics included the development and future of the Eternal Forest project of which Evgenia is the Founder; the connection between ecology, language, and memory; connecting with nature; and what gives hope for the future. 

Watch it here!

2025 was a year of continued progress for The Plant Initiative! As described in this report, we

hosted 7 free online events and a podcast, awarded 16 grants totaling $8,000, sent out our

monthly e-newsletter to over 5,500 subscribers, and further built our presence on social media.

A big thanks to Plant Initiative board member Mya Hummel for donating the design for the report!  And we greatly appreciate Steven F. White and Jill Pflugheber for generously allowing us to use in this report their wonderful images of plants from their web site  Microcosms: A Homage to Sacred Plants of the Americas, Microcosms: Sacred Plants of the Americas book from Papadakis Publisher (2025), and Sacred Plants of the Americas book from Princeton University Press (2026). Thank you also to Plant Initiative board member Walter Furness for sharing his photograph of Desert Gold (Geraea canescens) which was taken in Death Valley National Park in California.

And we are very grateful to Vegan Printer for their generous discount once again on the printed version of the report.

As an all-volunteer organization with no paid staff, we have done a lot with a modest budget. Thank you for all of the support and interest you have shown over the past year!

Learn more about our work by reading or downloading the report here or by clicking on the report cover or the button below.

Join the new Plant Networking site on Hylo!

This new free Hylo networking tool is a special interactive web site set up for those interested in the human-plant connection supported by The Plant Initiative and Networking with Plants in the Anthropocene. It's a space for sharing active research, collaborations, art, and any forms of humans and plant relations. Use this page to collaborate, share, and to connect with others interested in thoughtful ways of relating to plants.

Visitors to The Plant Initiative's web site are especially invited to join this online community!