Across the philanthropic landscape, many foundations funding environmental initiatives are moving toward more community-centered approaches. From forest protection to climate resilience and regenerative agriculture, there is growing recognition that lasting environmental outcomes depend on local participation and leadership.
However, this shift raises a critical set of questions:
👉 How can foundations ensure their grantees are truly applying a community-centered approach?
👉 How can they measure whether these interventions are improving community wellbeing?
The people who live closest to natural ecosystems often hold the deepest knowledge of these environments—and the greatest stake in their protection. When empowered, these communities can become the most effective stewards of nature and powerful drivers of sustainable change. Yet translating this potential into measurable impact remains a persistent challenge.
Despite growing momentum in impact measurement, traditional monitoring and evaluation (M&E) frameworks often overlook local communities’ lived experiences, values, perceptions, and well-being. These systems tend to emphasise quantifiable outputs, such as hectares restored or emissions reduced, over social indicators like cultural vitality, regional leadership, trust, and cohesion (Fonseca et al., 2019; Roszczyńska-Kurasińska et al., 2024).
This bias can obscure whether interventions are truly community-driven or imposed from above (Mandeville et al., 2025). Scholars have warned that such top-down approaches risk marginalising indigenous knowledge systems and fail to capture community-defined success metrics (White, 2002; Nyamari, 2024). Without robust, context-sensitive social metrics, it becomes difficult to assess whether funded projects promote long-term community wellbeing or sustain local engagement (Weeratunge et al., 2014).
This presents a gap between intent and implementation—one that OneNature seeks to address through an innovative, scalable solution.
🧠A New Kind of Partnership
OneNature proposes a strategic partnership model with foundations to address this gap.
Rather than positioning ourselves only as a grantee, we act as a service partner, supporting foundations and their grantees in embedding community wellbeing into environmental strategies. Through our field-tested Wild Happiness Approach, we provide the tools, training, and systems needed to assess, design, measure, and scale people-centered strategies.
We work across portfolios to help funders strengthen the social integrity of their environmental investments—from grant application design to long-term impact tracking. Our support extends to grantees directly, helping them build internal capacity to apply wellbeing metrics that reflect local realities.
🌀 The Wild Happiness Approach
Our approach centers around four interconnected steps:
🔹 360° Community Well-being Assessment
A participatory baseline that gathers data on how communities experience life—culturally, economically, socially, and ecologically—before any intervention begins.
🔹 Insight & Alignment
Synthesizing community insights to uncover alignment (or misalignment) between project goals and local priorities—informing more inclusive, adaptive design.
🔹 Co-Creation & Solution Design
Supporting grantees and communities to collaboratively shape interventions that reflect shared values and support long-term environmental and social outcomes.
🔹 Ongoing Monitoring & Learning
Measuring changes in well-being over time, feeding insights back into implementation, and creating space for reflection and adjustment.
Rather than replacing ecological metrics, this model complements them—offering a fuller, people-centered understanding of success.
Services for Foundations and Grantees
As a service partner, OneNature provides:
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Capacity building through training, workshops, and coaching for grantee teams
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Customizable toolkits for applying well-being metrics in diverse contexts
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Digital platforms to support shared learning, transparency, and real-time insight
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Baseline and endline assessment reports aligned with funder frameworks
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Strategic support for integrating social impact metrics into proposal design, evaluation systems, and grantmaking guidelines
This structure enables foundations to lead the shift toward more holistic, just, and sustainable conservation, where environmental integrity is inseparable from social well-being.
🌍 Long-Term Vision
Ultimately, our vision is for foundations to integrate community well-being as a core pillar of environmental funding.
That means encouraging grantees to apply well-being tools from the start, building internal measurement capacity, and contributing to a growing field of practice that understands sustainability as both ecological and human.
With the right tools and partnerships, funders can move beyond measuring what is easy—and begin measuring what truly matters.
We’re here to help make that possible.
👉 Learn more at onenatureinstitute.org
With gratitude,
The OneNature Team