Registration is now open for HEFN’s 2024 Annual Meeting, Beyond November: Philanthropy’s Role in a Thriving Environmental Health and Justice Movement, October 28th-30th in Durham, NC! Be sure to register as soon as possible to secure your spot at a reduced rate - registration prices will increase on July 1, 2024.
Leading up to an important election, this year’s theme speaks to the importance of building community capacity and resilience over the long term. Through engaging and interactive in-person sessions, site visits, and conversations with partners from philanthropy and the environmental health and justice movements, participants will envision how we can build stronger and healthier environments where we live, work, play, and pray, learning from partners based in North Carolina and beyond to understand how these very local issues are reflections and previews of what’s happening nationwide. We’ll learn from change-makers, innovators, and people doing the work, who will share their expertise with us in an invigorating in-person gathering that will provide participants with the space to collectively strategize to shift power to communities for greater self-determination, liberation and healing.
For more information, including a working agenda, venue details, hotel information, and more, check out the meeting website. Space is limited and interest is high, so be sure to reserve your spot now!
HEFN Grantee Partner Program:
HEFN members are invited to bring up to three grantee partners as their guest to this year’s annual meeting, continuing an important aspect of the meeting that’s been in place since 2018. This was formerly called the “Field Partner Program”.
We request that the Grantee Partner your organization invites:
Represent a group that your organization is financially supporting; and
Represent communities of color, low-income communities, women, indigenous or young people, or other groups highly impacted by environmental health and justice issues.
This opportunity is one of many actions flowing from HEFN’s 10-year strategic plan to mobilize philanthropy to accelerate solutions for environmental health and justice. Bringing more non-funder leaders into the annual meeting reflects the strategic plan’s focus on:
Ensuring those impacted have a meaningful voice in decision-making;
Helping funders understand major environmental health and justice problems;
Increasing support (including, but not limited to grants) to grassroots organizing and efforts led by people of color, low-income people, and young people; and
Supporting a more powerful leadership base for environmental health and justice.
It also is an opportunity to strengthen the racial diversity of environmental health and justice philanthropy’s convenings, while we work towards strengthening the racial diversity of HEFN’s membership.
2024 Annual Meeting Buddy System
In order to ensure that newcomers to HEFN feel welcome and supported at our Annual Meeting, we ask that HEFN members who have previously attended an Annual Meeting volunteer for our “buddy system”. As a buddy, we’ll ask you to reach out to your assigned newbie over email before the meeting, and commit to spending a bit of time with them in-person at the meeting in Durham (i.e. having a meal with them, grabbing coffee, etc.). There will be an option to sign up to serve as a meeting buddy during registration!
Register here: https://greenmeetings.regfox.com/hefn-2024-annual-meeting
For any and all Annual Meeting questions, please contact Kalila Booker-Cassano (kbc@hefn.org).
