Sall Family Foundation supports transformative change at the nexus of the environment, public health, and community resiliency.

They believe that the people in communities are best placed to make the decisions that affect their everyday lives, enabling them to generate locally governed and sustainable solutions for the long-term – benefiting both people and nature.

SFF’s vision is turned into reality by a simple approach – backing leaders and organizations closest to the big challenges to the environment, public health, and poverty, empowering them to experiment, learn, and evolve as the planet around them changes. This is achieved through funding of both locally-led civil society organizations and larger non-profit agencies, with whom they encourage knowledge sharing and collaboration. This ensures community-driven approaches can leverage collective wisdom, scientific evidence, and scale efficiencies.

Their work is driven by curiosity, learning and experimentation. They embrace the complexity and long-term nature of problems, knowing that simplification of situations rarely leads to sustainable solutions that break the mold.

They explore areas where success isn’t guaranteed, and they’re not afraid to make mistakes, because the true successes of the past three decades have often been born out of the times when things haven’t always gone to plan. Their philanthropy provides a safety net which gives organizations and communities the confidence and means to make progress on complicated problems, and find the solutions which would otherwise be out of reach.

They recognize that the health of the environment is directly linked to the health and economic wellbeing of them all, that good health and healthcare is essential to improving all outcomes in a person’s life and that in order to help communities control their own fate they need support to sustainably improve their incomes, security, nutrition and surrounding environments.

Their investments span the geographies of Latin America, the Caribbean, sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, Southeast Asia, Asia Pacific and the Arctic. While some of what they have learned has been applied in different contexts, some of the complexity of the problems addressed is unique to the setting.

Every place is different and so they have collaborated closely for decades with trusted partners with deep expertise in regions across the world. They value honest dialogue with these partners, which they believe breeds deep trust, a culture of continuous improvement and an empowering flexibility that allows their ecosystem, and the communities they touch, to constantly experiment, evolve and reassess the road to the greatest impact.

And the common thread running throughout? Their founders, John and Ginger Sall, whose long-held plans to pledge the majority of their wealth to philanthropy, are driven by their compassion for this planet and the people and animals which live on it. These values led them to establish the Sall Family Foundation nearly 30 years ago. Their philanthropy is guided by humility, curiosity, science and they are on a continuous journey of learning and improvement. They have learned through deep listening to the lived experiences of local experts as well as world-renowned scientists that given the right information, communities with the agency to self-govern will create sustainable long-term benefits for people and nature. It is their belief that philanthropy should be measured by attention to any mistakes made and lessons learned along the way, and the impact felt by the world’s most vulnerable.