Mission: If you want to help restore the beauty and balance of the natural world, we’d like to help you. The Earth Volunteer Fund is very easy to work with, our application process is simple, and our funding turnaround time is extremely quick, typically only a day or two.
We focus on projects in Southwestern Pennsylvania, primarily in Allegheny County and the Pittsburgh region.
We assist groups of volunteers that are working to restore land and water areas to their natural state. Our favorite projects are stream restoration (removing trash, tires and man-made blockages) and land restoration (removing trash from natural areas). Here are some recent projects that we have funded:
Removing tires and trash from streams (stream restoration projects),
Improving parks and public areas (Eagle Scout projects),
Tree planting in urban areas (urban forestry projects),
Trash cleanup,
Restoring damaged natural areas,
We prefer projects that will benefit as many people as possible, so we can’t help you with a project that are is private land that’s inaccessible to visitors. However, we are happy to help you if the property is private but is open to visitors (for example, publicly accessible streams and woodlands).
We are happy to work with all sorts of groups and organizations. You do NOT need to have 501(c)(3) nonprofit status. Your organization can just be an informal group of friends and neighbors.
Jeff and Earth Volunteer Fund were so helpful and easy to work with! The project review was fast, money sent, and we were able to undertake a riparian planting project with native species that otherwise would not have been completed. We are the Pine Creek Land Conservation Trust
What a GREAT organization! We are a small, all-volunteer watershed association and Boy, did EVF make funding our clean-ups super easy! It has been great twice--and we plan to ask for help again for our next clean up! We are an all-volunteer group, so writing a grant to a big foundation is not something we could do--and the funding we need--to help with supplies for community clean-ups--is "small"--so we thought we would have to self-fund everything and that is just not always doable! But EVFs help makes doing community clean-ups possible. Thank you EVF!
Incredibly easy to work with, quickly granted funds for our neighborhood streetscape rejuvenation and perennial pollinator garden installation. Thanks to this fund we were able to add more wildlife-sustaining, native trees and shrubs and make critical soil investments for a solid foundation and long-term health of our plantings with minimal effort.
The Annual Pittsburgh Garbage Olympics has run for 5 years now. Starting with 5 neighborhoods competing to see who can pick up the most amount of trash, we've grown into over half the neighborhoods in Pittsburgh last year. We're so appreciative of all the hard work done by volunteers we want to provide them more each year, from a greater variety of supplies to more food at a Closing Ceremony to better prizes for the winners of the Games.
Since the Garbage Olympics is run by volunteers as well, we have to consider the amount of time it takes to raise funds for it, and Earth Volunteer Fund has been incredibly simple to navigate and use.
