Everglades Trust Ads Call Attention to Foundation/Industry Relations
Philanthropy News Digest
Mar. 8, 2016
On the same day as an Environmental Grantmakers Association conference in Miami last week, the Everglades Trust, which identifies itself as a “group of activists, businesses, and community leaders who are committed to protecting the Everglades,” ran advertisements in the New York Times and the Miami Herald criticizing the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation for listing the environment as one of its grantmaking priorities even as it maintains a controlling interest in U.S. Sugar, a major polluter of the Everglades, the Chronicle of Philanthropy reports.
The Michigan-based foundation’s chairman, William S. White, also chairs the board of U.S. Sugar, which Everglades advocates claim has contributed to the environmental degradation of the freshwater ecosystem. Although neither Mott nor EGA responded to questions from the Chronicle, U.S. Sugar officials said they had met with representatives of the environmental coalition a number of times and that sugar farmers had given up nearly a hundred and twenty thousand acres of land to assist with restoration efforts in the region.
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