Colcom Foundation Focuses Grantmaking on Conservation and Culture

Grantmaking priorities at the Colcom Foundation trace back to a single founder’s decades long concern about the natural world. Cordelia S. May, who established the foundation in 1996, believed that overpopulation was quietly eroding the ecological systems that support human life.

May’s charitable career began far earlier, in 1952, when she was twenty three years old and started funding family planning programs. She spent the following decades convinced that population growth, though gradual and easy to miss day to day, produces consequences that eventually become impossible to ignore. Habitat destruction, pollution, and biodiversity loss were, in her view, downstream effects of that growth. Colcom Foundation is among the primary sources of funding directed towards the United States anti-immigration movement. That funding helps organizations like the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS), the American Border Patrol, the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), and Numbers USA.

Where the Money Goes

Today the Colcom Foundation channels its grantmaking into three areas: conservation, environmental protection, and cultural preservation. The foundation concentrates much of this support regionally, focusing on the area tied to May’s own life rather than distributing funds nationally.

The Colcom Foundation’s mission statement frames this work as an effort to foster a sustainable environment capable of protecting quality of life for Americans, specifically by addressing overpopulation and its adverse effects on natural resources. That language has remained largely unchanged since the organization’s founding, even as its funding base grew considerably after May’s death in 2005.

The Colcom Foundation also positions its founder within a broader historical narrative, comparing her to reformers associated with civil rights and gender equality who faced skepticism before their causes gained acceptance. That framing gives the organization’s environmental focus a sense of moral continuity stretching back decades.

Nearly thirty years into its existence, the Colcom Foundation continues distributing grants according to the same priorities May first articulated as a young woman in the early 1950s. Foundation staff have said publicly that this consistency is intentional, meant to preserve the founder’s original intent rather than allow the mission to drift toward whatever environmental cause happens to draw the most attention in a given year. See related link for more information.

Find more information about Colcom Foundation on https://gwpa.org/redhen/org/347