The Bella Vista Foundation
The Bella Vista Foundation focuses on both early childhood development and ecosystem restoration projects. Under their Ecosystem Restoration Grants program, they support organizations working to restore and revitalize high priority watershed ecosystems in California and Oregon.
Since 2017, Bella Vista Foundation has helped mitigate the impacts of climate change in California’s Sierra Nevada Mountains through Earthwatch’s Sierra to Sea program. The program engages local community members and high school students in free one-day citizen science events in Sierra meadows. The research project aims to understand how meadow restoration efforts could help to capture carbon, one type of climate change mitigation. This is a critical ecosystem, as one-third of California’s water originates in the Sierra Nevada.
I really enjoyed being outside instead of in front of a computer, learning about carbon meadow scientific research and its purpose, and hopefully helping to prove that restoring meadows is beneficial to carbon storage.
— Sierra to Sea Participant, 2017
YOUR SUPPORT MATTERS
Earthwatch depends on donations—above and beyond what we raise from volunteers who participate on our expeditions—in order to deliver our global conservation mission. In fact, volunteer contributions provide only half of the total resources Earthwatch needs to sustain over 40 field research expeditions, a wide variety of educational programs, corporate sustainability trainings, and more each year.