RESTORE THE EARTH FOUNDATION INC
Our mission is to restore the Earth’s essential forest and wetland ecosystems.
Programs and results
What we aim to solve
Our programs
What are the organization's current programs, how do they measure success, and who do the programs serve?
Restoring North America's Amazon - The Mississippi River Basin
Our mission is to restore the Earth’s essential forest and wetland ecosystems. We envision the Earth in balance — its original vitality and natural abundance available to all, for generations to come. We are restoring 1 million acres in the Mississippi River Basin - North America's Amazon.
Where we work
External reviews
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Goals & Strategy
Learn about the organization's key goals, strategies, capabilities, and progress.
Charting impact
Four powerful questions that require reflection about what really matters - results.
What is the organization aiming to accomplish?
Restore the Earth Foundation's mission is to restore the Earth's essential forest and wetland ecosystems. Our present strategic priority is to restore one million acres of degraded land in the Mississippi River Basin - North America's Amazon – to its natural state.
What are the organization's key strategies for making this happen?
Restore the Earth Foundation's (REF) pioneering methodology to ecosystem restoration addresses landscape-scale efforts, leverages the power of public-private collaboration, utilizes an exclusive revolving funding mechanism, and produces verifiable measurements of environmental, social and economic impacts of the restoration.
Landscape Restoration
Landscape-scale restoration knits together a mosaic of existing core forest blocks and is integrated with adjacent productive working lands, restoring a wide range of ecosystems services with greater impact. The restored forest allows plant and animal species to migrate and re-establish populations in the new forest blocks, extending the benefits of forest and ecosystem service restoration to neighboring communities and beyond.
Public-Private Partnerships
REF believes that it can most effectively restore critical forests and wetlands by engaging a broad range of stakeholders. Partners include government agencies, NGOs, universities, corporations, community-based organizations, foundations, and individuals who work together to bypass gridlock and do the work of restoration. REF embraces these partnerships as they are an integral part of the Foundation's unique approach.
Financial Innovation
REF's Revolving Fund is the solution to complex and costly landscape-scale ecosystem restoration. It offers an innovative structure to do business, integrating the environmental and financial objectives of those with a shared value in ecosystems: government agencies, corporations, impact investors, and philanthropists.
Social Impact Model
REF's EcoMetrics Model measures the crosscutting value for each outcome produced by ecosystem restoration, and reports on those outcomes in monetary terms. REF provides a formal report to funders in a format that can be audited and accounted for as intangible assets on the funder's balance sheet. This allows funders to take credit for carbon-offset and other environmental benefits produced, in perpetuity; and if desired, they can use the environmental offsets to mitigate the portion of their climate footprint that cannot be offset at source.
What are the organization's capabilities for doing this?
Restore the Earth Foundation (REF) is led by a team of seasoned executives dedicated to restoring the Earth's forest and wetland ecosystems while delivering outstanding environmental, social, and financial returns.
Before co-founding REF, PJ Marshall spent more than 50 years as a top strategic marketing consultant for leading professional services firms such as Bechtel Corporation, Halliburton, and Fulbright & Jaworski LLP. Her broad experience working with senior-level executives in major international corporations makes her particularly suited to develop and lead the cross-sector partnerships that are at the heart of the REF strategy and business model.
Marvin (Marv) Marshall co-founded REF following a successful career as a real estate development executive in the United States and Canada. After his corporate career, Marv turned his skill at building large, high-performance, geographically distributed professional teams to the complex task of effectively accomplishing landscape-scale forest and wetland restoration. Just prior to co-founding REF, Marv launched Ecosystems Partners, LLC, an environmental conservation firm sourcing the best resources, contractors and practices for restoration projects, leveraging a wide network of local nurseries, landscape restorers, foresters, arborists, and environmental scientists. Marv's experience and passion in conservation and landscape-scale restoration gives REF the technical expertise necessary to achieve its mission.
The co-founders have strategically built a team that has both the expertise and passion needed to restore Earth's essential forest and wetland ecosystems. This is highly evident in the fact that REF has restored more than 50,000 acres of forests and over 3,000 acres of wetlands since its inception less than a decade ago.
What have they accomplished so far and what's next?
Since 2008, the founders of REF have secured over $40 million in private, federal/state funding to reforest over 50,000 acres along the Gulf Coast that were damaged by Hurricane Katrina. REF has also developed a sustainable, market-based solution to environmental degradation by integrating the environmental and financial objectives of all those with a shared value in healthy and resilient ecosystems. REF is currently seeking funding to complete the restoration of the first million acres.
Financials
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Operations
The people, governance practices, and partners that make the organization tick.
Connect with nonprofit leaders
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- Analyze a variety of pre-calculated financial metrics
- Access beautifully interactive analysis and comparison tools
- Compare nonprofit financials to similar organizations
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Connect with nonprofit leaders
SubscribeBuild relationships with key people who manage and lead nonprofit organizations with GuideStar Pro. Try a low commitment monthly plan today.
- Analyze a variety of pre-calculated financial metrics
- Access beautifully interactive analysis and comparison tools
- Compare nonprofit financials to similar organizations
Want to see how you can enhance your nonprofit research and unlock more insights? Learn More about GuideStar Pro.
RESTORE THE EARTH FOUNDATION INC
Board of directorsas of 10/28/2019
Don Blancher
Moffatt & Nichol
Amy LeGaux
Audubon Institute
Don Blancher
Moffatt & Nichol
Ed Pinero
The Pinero Group LLC
Marv Marshall
Restore the Earth Foundation
PJ Marshall
Restore the Earth Foundation