The Lookout Foundation has two central areas of focus: trauma-informed care for young people, and sustainable agriculture. A third program seeks to support the intersection of these two areas.

The Foundation’s largest program supports innovative strategies that provide transformative services and treatments to complexly affected adolescents in New England and beyond to enable them to build productive and healthy lives within their families, their communities, and the institutions that serve them. The Foundation also supports evidence-based research to prove the efficacy of particular strategies and to inform the improvement of trauma-informed services and treatments. 

A second program supports sustainable, economically viable agriculture and forestry in New England that may also inform regional and national strategies for sustainable agriculture (including forestry) and farm and woodlands conservation. 

Lastly, a hybrid grant making program supports strategies at the intersection of the sustainable adolescence and the sustainable agriculture programs. The therapeutic benefits of farming and forestry stewardship extend no less to adolescents than to adults, and the Lookout Foundation supports non-profits engaged in working with complexly affected adolescents through place-based education and skill development.

While the Foundation’s grant making primarily centers on Massachusetts, Vermont and regional New England initiatives, it considers those outside the region if they are innovative and replicable. The Foundation takes a systems approach and seeks out catalysts that target root causes, integrate stakeholder action, shift paradigms and scale wisdom.