Introducing Biome Trust
Mount Taranaki in Aotearoa New Zealand
A Philanthropic Organism in Service to Ecological Health
Kia ora, hello world. Biome Trust and the first version of our website are alive, here at www.biometrust.earth. You can also find us on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Twitter.
At Biome Trust we refer to ourselves as a philanthropic organism, something beyond an organisation, as a way of expressing our ecological lens and focus.
We exist as an operating nonprofit, Biome Trust Aotearoa, based in New Zealand. We also have a global presence, through relationships with our Donor Advised Fund partners. We provide financial gifts and support to projects doing transformative work for planetary health and regeneration.
The word biome doesn’t have a universal definition, though it is commonly used to refer to a major life zone, or a large biological community, characterised by its plants and animals. Biome is also used to describe life at other scales, like the microbiome in the soil or one’s gut biome. At its essence, biome means ‘community of life’.
All of these connotations - bioregional, multi-scalar, the soil-gut connection, and multi-species communities - are fitting descriptors for the nature and direction of our work.
What We Do
Biome Trust aims to rewild resources. Our current economic system tends to reduce nature into commodities, viewing the living world as resources. It values them for their benefit to humans, usually in financial terms.
Biome Trust seeks to interrupt this pattern by transforming financial wealth into ecological wealth. We want to grow forest corridors and community gardens, more than portfolios and endowments, while recognising that humans are nature and the world is alive. Instead of further economic accumulation, we choose to invest in nature regeneration, in hope for a healthier Earth where life can flourish.
One way we enact this work is through gifts. There are many organisations and individuals taking positive actions for the healing of our planet. We wish to accelerate their efforts, by sharing our resources, so that these economic abstractions can be alchemised into ecological health and regeneration.
We prefer the term gifts over grants, because giving reflects our trust and respect for the groups and projects we support. If our gifts can extend beyond financial capital - into helpful advice or connections, for example - that is great, but we’re not here to exercise governance or burdensome stipulations for the funds we provide. We are a small team with our own limitations, and we believe in pushing power to the edges wherever possible.
Our Roots
The people involved with Biome Trust represent a diverse array of backgrounds and experiences. Within the founding circle, our journey into philanthropy began in 2012. My brother Brian and I co-founded a tech company called Inflection, which sold its genealogy website to Ancestry.com. We put some of the proceeds into the Namaste fund, administered by the Silicon Valley Community Foundation and The Gift Trust in New Zealand.
We decided to ‘spend down’ that initial endowment over the next 10 years, providing modest-sized gifts to over 400 nonprofit organisations. You can read about the Namaste fund’s work here. During that time, we also helped create the Edmund Hillary Fellowship (EHF), a global network of changemakers dedicated to impact from Aotearoa New Zealand.
Those experiences taught us just how little nonprofit funding goes to ‘environmental’ causes. By most estimates it’s less than 4% of all grants. Grant-making comprises approximately 5% of total endowments (the other 95% being mostly invested in stocks and bonds), which means the philanthropic industry is committing roughly 0.2% (4% of 5%) of its assets annually to the environment. This includes climate change, animal welfare, conservation, biodiversity, pollution cleanup, and much more - combined. Interest in climate action is growing, but projects on the ground still struggle to get the economic support they need, while environmental challenges are increasing.
Nonprofit Funding
In 2022, that company Brian and I started 15 years ago was acquired, which generated a bumper crop of financial resources. We decided to give 100% of our proceeds to create Biome Trust. We are deeply grateful for the teams involved. Their hard work and commitment makes this new chapter possible.
Alongside Catlin Powers and the Monahan family, long-time trusted collaborators, talented colleagues, and our philanthropic partners, we have spent the last 9 months cohering the Biome Trust community and establishing our roots structure. Brian and Catlin also gave birth to a wonderful daughter during that time.
While we are moved by many social and humanitarian needs, we believe the convergence of ecological crises demands urgent action, and is inexplicably connected to all aspects of human wellbeing, now and into the future. That’s why we are continuing to focus most of our efforts on planetary health and regeneration.
Mangaroa Farms
A unique aspect of Biome Trust is that it also wholly owns Mangaroa Farms, a resilient food hub and education centre located in Te Awa Kairangi, the Hutt Valley water catchment, near Wellington, New Zealand. Mangaroa Farms is a 2000-acre ‘living laboratory’, transitioning what was a traditional dairy farm and monoculture pine plantation into regenerative agricultural practices. We are growing a diverse food basket - kete kai - while restoring permanent, mostly-native forests. At Mangaroa Farms we direct our work and attention on healthy soils, nutrient-dense food, water quality, flourishing biodiversity, and community skills and resilience.
Mangaroa Farms is a nonprofit company with its own board of directors and management, with some overlap with the Biome Trust team. This legal architecture makes Mangaroa Farms’ role as a community asset clear and legally permanent, while keeping operations nimble and connected to the broader philanthropic initiatives of the trust. Community land ownership and governance will be a persistent theme in our work. You can follow along the Mangaroa Farms journey at: www.mangaroa.org and on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
What We Value
We approach values as a living conversation, to be continually cultivated and renewed, shaped by our community and environment. In our explorations so far, we emphasise connection, including to Papatuanuku (Mother Earth) and all living creatures; humility, to stay open, and learn alongside our giftees and partners; kaitiaki, guardianship of Earth and stewardship for the benefit of future generations; courage, to take bold action, make inevitable mistakes, but not sit idly by; and tending to the local, starting within our own bioregion and ecocultural landscape.
We aim to take keystone actions, taking responsibility for our role and place as humans, in reciprocity with Earth.
We honour our ancestors, recognising their efforts and sacrifices, and the interconnected histories of peoples and places, including where we call home in Aotearoa New Zealand. We are committed to upholding Te Tiriti o Waitangi as the foundation for partnership between tangata whenua (the first peoples of Aotearoa) and tangata Tiriti (all others who have come here). We view this commitment as an ongoing journey, based on authentic engagement, acknowledging historical injustices, and mutual respect.
Our Approach
One of the challenges of philanthropy is ‘the everything problem’ - the tendency to tackle too many areas at once, or the persistent difficulty in deciding from so many worthy causes and projects. Within the starting frame of ecological health in Aotearoa New Zealand - and even just our bioregion - the demand and possibilities for funding far outstrip our capacities. So we need additional frameworks to define our core focus, while maintaining openness and flexibility.
One of the most important principles guiding our approach is to layer our time, energy, expertise, networks, and resources together, as best we can. What this means is that we are more likely to support a project when we are already engaged in the problem area, and feel we have something to bring to the table. This is why many of our gifts so far have involved themes we’ve also been exploring at Mangaroa Farms.
Drawing from our experience in technology entrepreneurship, we bring a future-forward lens to philanthropy, anticipating waves of disruption and exponential change, especially this decade. We believe innovations like crypto, AI, robotics, and synthetic biology should all be examined and understood, as well as scrutinised for their ethics and unintended consequences. Given its small size, we think New Zealand can move quickly and be responsive to coming technological shifts, but this will require considerable fortitude.
We believe philanthropy is uniquely positioned to take risks - even though it often does the opposite. Unlike investment or debt, which come with a responsibility to grow and pay back money over a given timeframe, philanthropy can deploy funds over a longer timeframe and respond to areas that are often externalised. Whereas government funding is susceptible to politics, foundations don’t run for elections; they can place riskier bets, and accept that some won’t pan out. We aren’t afraid to be the first - or the only - backer on a project.
We love to get behind great leaders. This is one of the most scalable ways for us to have an impact, as it creates a clear model for how we can engage and support an organisation. We especially like founder-led projects where we can see sustained commitment and effective resource allocation.
Our highest preference is to provide multi-year gift commitments, with trust in the organisation to deploy the funds at its discretion. We hope to serve as an ally alongside the team and leadership, on a shared mission and journey together.
Where We Are Today
It’s still early days for Biome Trust. We’ve made about a dozen gifts so far, mostly to organisations we’ve also supported in the past through the Namaste fund. Beyond our work at Mangaroa Farms, our most significant investment to date has been with Learning Environment, an inspiring farm and community wellbeing initiative in Whanganui.
Here are the thematic areas that are emerging in our work so far:
Regenerative biomes - community land projects, often with an integrated or holistic approach to ecological health, human wellbeing, and educational experiences
Local food resilience - starting with the Wellington region, food system initiatives that ‘close the loops’ from seed to plate to soil
Nature-based economies - aligning financial incentives and legal frameworks with protection and regeneration, including the evolution of carbon credits and rights of nature
Open learning and innovation - ecological education, filmmaking and publishing, and research into new technologies to aid Earth renewal
Advancing philanthropy - collaborating with other funders to increase the effectiveness of our strategies and funds
As in nature, we find a lot of the magic happens at the edges, and in the overlap and intersections of these thematic ecosystems.
You can see a list of our giftees here.
In Closing
Thanks for your interest in Biome Trust and the journey we’re beginning. To start a conversation, or to simply make sure we are aware of your organisation, you can send us a message here. We are also interested in meeting future collaborators, as we continue to grow our team.
I am only one voice in the Biome Trust choir. Subscribe to our newsletter for monthly recaps from around the ecosystem, and stay tuned on this blog for more perspectives.
Earth is our endowment; life is a gift. May we be present, and in service.
Matthew Monahan
Biome Trust
March 2023