ABOUT

Our philosophy: Established in 2006, the NoVo Foundation was created from the core belief that humanity is at a crossroads and our current culture is deeply out of balance.

Historically, NoVo has had a reputation for being “at the margins”—speaking up when asked and amplifying wherever needed. Supporting the spirit and agency of girls and women (specifically Black, Brown and Indigenous) everywhere was a clear way to rebalance an intensely patriarchal global culture. We are grateful to an extraordinary team that helped bring so many of these voices to the center over the last two decades.

We know that this current moment has been created by a complex set of entangled systems that have subjugated, oppressed and ignored many for the benefit of the few. And continuing divisions—through political, social and economic means—only fuel the furthering of centralized power.

The edges now are where binary thinking dissolves. Complexity and ambiguity is embraced. Our senses and intuition are valued as highly as things quantified and measurable. Us vs. Them gives way to Us and We.

This time the margins are falling off the edge into a new (old) way of being. As the pandemic revealed the fragility of our supply chains, our education systems and our well-being, communities have come together in solidarity and a willingness to imagine together.

This cannot be scaled. “The next big thing will be a lot of small things.” And we are not looking for “wins.” Ultimately, our work is not about what we accomplish, but what we set in motion for future generations. NoVo believes that the next 500 years starts now.

How we work: While our work and the work of our grantee partners encompass a wide range of initiatives, NoVo’s guiding tenets are a compassionate view of the world and the highest definition of philanthropy—in the roots of the words anthro and philo – “for the love of human beings.” The only way to create real change is with love at the center. We recognize the inherent power and privilege of philanthropy, and strive to act as thoughtful stewards. 

Our work is iterative, emergent, and ever evolving as we listen and learn from the communities we work with. We organize our work as a cohesive whole, orienting towards collaboration, imagination, remembering earth-centered ways of being, and creating conditions for life to thrive through and beyond current collapsing structures.

NoVo does not accept or regularly respond to unsolicited proposals. 

Areas of work: NoVo supports a broad range of communities and initiatives that are bound together as a single body of work with sub-areas of focus. 

Those areas are regenerative bioregional-scale communities; Indigenous communities and Indigenous ways of knowing and being; growing food and growing children; and our specific place-based support in the Hudson Valley, which can be found here novoinkingston.org. 

The boundaries between each can be porous and difficult to define precisely because systemic-level work focuses on the relationships between all components of complex systems (those can include: people, organizations, communities, non-human populations, natural landscape features like rivers and mountains etc.), which necessarily overlap and inter-relate.