The Great Lakes Protection Fund has supported an intriguing diversity of projects with a continuity of effort and purpose. The Fund’s fundamental principles are evident throughout a portfolio of more than 240 projects involving more than 800 regional institutions.

Since its creation over twenty years ago (read more about the Fund’s history), the Fund has sought projects that create positive ecological impacts for the Great Lakes. Teams can achieve these outcomes through a focus on solutions, opportunity, and a collaboration among all interests driving change in the worlds of science, policy, and community norms (read more about our principles).

The Fund invests in doing new things in new ways and remains steadfastly open and encouraging to innovative ideas, including things that may at first appear to lie outside our funding history and comfort zone. The Fund accepts sizable risks in the quest for outsized ecological reward. We welcome your ideas, questions, suggestions, solutions, and not-yet-fully-formed enquiries. We are in the business of getting to “yes.”

Russell Van Herik
Executive Director