Sustainable Landscapes
Lookout’s reverence for all life compels the foundation to conserve the New England landscape for future generations of humans, flora, and fauna. The Sustainable Landscape Program partners with initiatives that support and commit long-term to a regional strategy of conserving and managing the woodlands, wildlands and farmlands of New England. The programmatic focus is on agriculture, land conservation and forestry, with an eye to pairing local economic viability with climate, biodiversity and environmental responsibility. Lookout grantees have missions and use strategic approaches to model innovative and proven methodologies, conduct research, manage and improve New England agricultural and forest resources, and educate stakeholders and the public. Support in this program area can include, but is not limited to, increasing local economic viability and community engagement and securing conservation of high priority and vulnerable farmlands and forests.
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.
Film
The Foundation’s Film program supports filmmakers and producers who bring diverse perspectives and experiences to bear in illuminating the human condition and exploring new avenues to nurture human creativity, community, and connection. The Foundation especially supports film artists and their specific projects whose voices or views are under-represented, new, and catalytic.
The Foundation prioritizes films treating topics that meet these criteria, including – but not limited to — Films that illustrate the capacity for human connection across diversity, inspiring stories of bridge-building across differences, films that explore the possibility of redemption in a broken world, tales of civility and kindness, and films that plumb the infinite depth and variety of the human soul. The Foundation is also dedicated to supporting documentary storytellers who connect audiences to issues related to global warming and conservation.
The Foundation supports film artists at every age of their career who demonstrate an artistry of craft and a commitment to film as a powerful force for cultural and social change. Regardless of career stage, grantees must evidence a solid legal, financial, administrative, and production foundation that supports their artistic work.
Trauma-Informed Adolescent Development
Until 2024, the Foundation’s largest program supported innovative strategies that provide transformative services and treatments to complexly affected adolescents to enable them to build productive and healthy lives within their families, their communities, and the institutions that serve them. After a decade of pioneering grantmaking in the field of trauma-informed research and support for youth across the spectrum of care, the Foundation has fulfilled its grantmaking objectives and ended this program. The Foundation is grateful to all its grantee partners for the significant impact they have had, and will continue to have, on the lives of young people.