The story of the Colcom Foundation begins with Cordelia S. May. Born into the Mellon-Scaife family fortune, she enjoyed the unique status of being among the wealthiest women in America. Rather than use her significant income for personal gain, she put her money toward endeavors that supported the environment, birth control, and family planning. While many might think that May would use her philanthropic endeavors to keep up appearances, the woman lived a surprisingly reclusive existence, only growing more removed after her second husband’s passing in 1974.
Cordelia was a woman who respected the aesthetics and equilibrium of nature and worried that such an equilibrium would become undone. Her first charitable endeavors began at age 23; she started donating to organizations that supported family planning in 1952. It was her understanding that while a person cannot easily notice incremental population growth, the cumulative effort of that growth is gigantic. Minimizing the toll that a bloated global population count takes upon the planet’s health became her reason for living.
The Colcom Foundation enters the picture in 1996. Nearly a decade later, in 2005, the foundation would receive substantial funding through Cordelia’s last will and testament. Colcom Foundation acknowledges how many headlines mention imbalances between humanity and its environment; countless news stories cover droughts, pollution, contamination of groundwater, competition over resources, urban sprawl, malnutrition, and so on-all issues related to an excessive population.
Despite these many issues, the Colcom Foundation also acknowledges that humanity’s current focus on growth makes the average person blind to how many of these problems originate from excessive growth. The foundation understood that Cordelia was able to notice the problems of overpopulation decades before the general public; this is why it has offered grants to humanitarian endeavors invested in overcoming or delaying human overpopulation, especially within southwestern Pennsylvania.
Colcom’s main funding comes from grants from foundations, corporations, and individuals and from donations by individuals. It is a member of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers and the Center for Democracy and Technology.
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More about Colcom on https://pitchbook.com/profiles/limited-partner/53158-06