Noticias

Local climate and sustainability nonprofit Eco-Action Partners and environmental conservation nonprofit Sheep Mountain Alliance are among many organizations across the country left wondering about the status of their federal funding.

Eco-Action Partners and Sheep Mountain Alliance received a $150,000 grant from the Environmental Protection Agency last year. It was the first federal grant either organization had received. The three-year grant is through the EPA’s Environmental Justice Collaborative Problem-Solving Program.

Locally, the grant funds initiatives aimed at removing existing barriers to climate resiliency programming and increasing public health and environmental resiliency among underserved populations in the region.

Emma Gerona, executive director of Eco-Action Partners, described the current status of their grant.

“We first lost access to our grant back when the original memo was put out in late January, and there was no communication about the status of the grant,” Gerona said. “There’s been very little communication from our contacts at the EPA around what’s actually happening. The way we’ve been checking is every day seeing our grant portal and whether or not we can access our account.”

The grant, Gerona said, is reimbursement-based, with funds drawn from a federal account each month once the work is completed. After President Donald Trump ordered a federal funding freeze, confusion arose over what was happening.

“A couple weeks later, the grant came back—we were able to access it again for about a week,” Gerona said. “And then it went away again, and then it came back, and then it went away again. So it’s just been this really confusing back-and-forth of being able to access this grant and tracking down whether or not it is available because we don’t have any communication from the EPA themselves.”

Eco-Action Partners and Sheep Mountain Alliance work together on programming that includes workshops on drought resilience, wildfire preparedness, and equity in the outdoors. Typically, they are paired with an EPA project officer to assist them with technical questions, but right now, there is no one to contact.

“There’s been very little to no communication,” Gerona said. “Unfortunately, our project officer, who is the point person for our grant with the EPA, was part of the recent layoffs. So we’re kind of in between contact people right now, so that also hasn’t helped with reaching out and asking questions. They’ve been given the direction to not communicate when a lot of these things are in the air. So it’s been a lot of us reaching out and trying to set meetings, trying to get more information from email, and not really hearing anything back.”

While the status of the funding freeze remains unclear, both organizations say they remain committed to continuing their work in the community.

“We’ve had a lot of conversations about what it looks like to continue working on our projects and serving our community,” said Ruthie Boyd, program director for Sheep Mountain Alliance. “And that isn’t something we want to stop depending on whether our account is frozen or not, which leaves us in an interesting place. As Emma mentioned, we have to do the work first and get paid for it later. So right now, we’re feeling committed to continuing to do the work and figuring out what that looks like moving forward—even if this grant never comes back, which we can’t really count on.”

Gerona said they have been discussing ways to diversify funding sources and leaning on individual donors.

“We’ve been spending a lot of our time over the last two months just trying to address the uncertainty and figure out what’s going on,” Gerona said. “I think we’re all kind of at the point where we’re shifting our mentality to getting back to programming and getting our heads back into the work. Trying to figure out the funding still and hoping that’ll come into place a little bit, because I think a big piece of this tactic is trying to distract people from that work that’s trying to get done and just create chaos so that people are spending their time writing back and forth with their point people or lawyers and not actually getting the work done.

“We’re really trying to get back to the programming and get our heads back to the community, like Ruthie mentioned, because that’s what really matters in this work.”

Two weeks ago, the EPA released a statement saying it had canceled more than $1.7 billion in federal grant funding for more than 400 grants, a majority of which came through President Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act.