Our Purpose

Maliasili exists to support high-potential local organizations to accelerate the benefits they bring to people, ecosystems, and climate change.

Our mission is to accelerate community-based conservation through local organizations.

Our work is ultimately designed to address the damage and degradation of natural ecosystems—and their value for biodiversity, wildlife, and climate—that is accelerating around the world. Our purpose is to expand, strengthen, and sustain community-based approaches to conservation and natural resource management.

We believe that talented, motivated, and committed local organizations are key agents of change in the design, facilitation, and support of community-based conservation approaches that drive community stewardship and benefits from land and resources. We believe that through strengthening these organizations, they will be able to increase their individual and collective voice and influence, achieving more sustainable conservation outcomes.

We believe that improved conservation practices through community action and stewardship will scale and spread through more capable, influential, and resilient local organizations.

Our partners’ work will result in safeguarding critical ecosystems that provide value for peoples’ livelihoods, generate nature-based economic opportunities, protect numerous endangered species, and store vast amounts of carbon in forests and other natural systems.

1. Our goal is our partners’ success. We focus on strengthening local organizations to optimize their conservation impact. Our role is to catalyze their talent, commitment, and innovation to help them do more, do it better and by doing so, change the conservation field. When that happens, we succeed.
2. Make the complex simple. In everything we do, we strive to create practical, tangible, action-oriented solutions. A key to that is keeping things simple and clear.
3. Put people first. Our work is relationship-driven and trust-based. When people are supported, when they feel valued and heard, they are able to reach their full potential. Maliasili’s success depends on outstanding individuals, dedicated to each other’s success, working as an effective team.
4. Strength in diversity. Inclusion of different backgrounds and perspectives is essential to our success and the broader changes necessary for effective, sustainable conservation. Strengthening local voices and capacity is core to everything we do, internally and externally.
5. Walk the Talk. One of Maliasili’s great strengths is that most of our advice to our partners is based on our own experience working in local organizations as well as in growing our own organization with an ambitious vision. We understand the realities of building and managing an entrepreneurial organization and we strive for our own organization to be a model of effective management and teamwork for our partners.
6. Laugh. Learn. Adapt. The challenges we face are great, so we must be resilient. To maintain perspective, we must also have fun and not take ourselves too seriously. We embrace learning from failure and success, and work to constantly iterate, improve our practices, and adapt to the changing world around us. We are driven by a commitment to learning as a key to continuous improvement personally and professionally.

WATCH: how we work - our support to local organizations

Our goals are ambitious and bold

By 2025 we aim to:

Triple the size of our portfolio supporting a total of 90 organizations across Africa and Madagascar
Train, support, and connect 200 high performing local conservation leaders
Mobilize at least $40 million in new funding for our portfolio partners
Stimulate at least $100 million in new funding commitments for community-based conservation organizations across the conservation field

Read our Strategic Plan

Our Theory of Change

Our Theory of Change has three core desired outcomes—stronger local organizations, outstanding leadership, and greater resources and influence at the local level—which are interconnected and mutually reinforcing. We believe that empowered and effective local organizations will drive greater change and that an organization’s empowerment stems from a combination of clear purpose, skilled team members, confidence in their impact, compassionate and capable leadership, sufficient resources, and connections to decision-makers.

The outcomes we seek:

Stronger Local Organizations. We believe that if we invest in the organizational development of local organizations through holistic, multi-year partnerships that enhance their strategy, people, implementation, and funding, then these organizations will become more capable and resilient. We believe that investments in organizational development create a positive feedback loop between organizations seeing results towards their mission and feeling empowered to do more.

Organizational Development

Outstanding Leadership. We believe that all organizations need outstanding leadership to meet their full potential. Our programs seek to cultivate and support such leadership, which requires not just the skills to guide an organization’s work, but also the self-awareness and empathy to support themselves and their team members, as well as their ability to foster partnerships necessary to grow their work.

Leadership Program

Greater Local Influence and Resources. We believe that local organizations are key to driving conservation success, and are deserving of more recognition, trust, and funding on a systemic level. We work to amplify our partners’ voices, influence, and access to resources and ultimately to catalyze shifts in power, influence, and funding towards our partners and other local organizations.

Funding

Our formula for what makes an effective organization is fairly simple:

Strategy + People + Action = Impact

Strategy

Strategy is about understanding what needs to get done and designing the right path to do it. It involves big thinking yet practical solutions. We ask tough questions and help our partners find the right answers so they can gain focus and clarity on what they need to do to achieve their goals and create lasting change.

People

An organization’s most important resource is its people. They bring the ideas, skills, and human-power to drive change. Whether visionaries, technicians, or work-horses, we help organizations get the most out of their teams, relationships, and networks to achieve optimal performance.

Action

Action is how a team brings a strategy to life. It’s how it raises money to make things happen, plans its activities to stay focused, measures its progress, or lets others know what its doing and why it matters. We help organizations design their systems and strategies so they can get things done.

Funding

Money enables an organization to do its work, execute its strategy, and recruit the team it needs to deliver. Good funding is secure, flexible, and supports an organization do what it wants to get done to achieve its goals.

Our strategic Planning process