Island Resources Foundation Legacy Fund

The Island Resources Foundation (IRF) Legacy Fund was established to provide resources and support for individuals, institutions, programs, research, publications, and related activities that continue the legacy of Island Resources Foundation. The Fund will contribute to a strengthening of those objectives advocated by the Foundation throughout its decades of activity in the Caribbean.

Briefly, the purposes of the Fund include but are not limited to:

  1. Support for environmental planning and impact assessment projects for small islands, with an emphasis on coastal and marine resource development.
  2. Support for natural resource protection and research initiatives, including, especially, insular biodiversity research and conservation.
  3. Promoting environmental policy, natural resource management, legal frameworks, and institutional development that build capacity for island communities and island institutions.
  4. Improving the availability of environmental information and increasing the dimensions of the environmental information base for small Caribbean islands, including expansion of the inventory of more than 300 publications prepared and disseminated by the Foundation from 1972-2016.
  5. Strengthening initiatives that advance civil society in the Caribbean, including the promotion of appropriate technology, openness and transparency, good governance, open access to information, and inter-disciplinary/multi-institutional collaboration, all values promoted by Island Resources Foundation during its 44-year history.
  6. Support for the sustainable conservation and educational activities associated with the future management of the Nancy Spire Nature Preserve in Fish Bay, St. John, USVI, a property long under the management and stewardship of Island Resources Foundation.

The Community Foundation of the Virgin Islands (CFVI), based in St. Thomas, U.S. Virgin Islands, administers the Legacy Fund with support from an Advisory Committee. (For details about the operation of the Advisory Committee, contact the spokesperson for the Committee, Judith Ann Towle at jtowle@irf.org.) The CFVI is a well-established philanthropic presence in the region where IRF had been active, and CFVI policies will permit it to make IRF Legacy grants and support IRF Legacy programs throughout the insular Caribbean.

 A full copy of the Agreement establishing the IRF Legacy Fund can be downloaded here.

To Donate to the IRF Legacy Fund

To support the activities of the Fund, donors should send a check payable to “Community Foundation of the Virgin Islands,” with a Memo notation “For IRF Legacy Fund,” to:  PO Box 11790, St. Thomas, VI 00801. The CFVI is a 501(c)3 charitable organization, and donations are fully tax deductible for US  tax payers. For further information about donating to the Legacy Fund, contact Dee Baecher-Brown, president, at the address above, at 1-340-774-6031, or via e-mail at DBrown@cfvi.net.