Today the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation named Conservation Strategy Fund as a recipient of the MacArthur Award for Creative and Effective Institutions. The award recognizes CSF’s innovative work using economics to conserve the world’s most important ecosystems and provides us with a grant of $750,000. The MacArthur Award honors and supports our efforts to creatively address the the loss of unique natural ecosystems by equipping front-line environmentalists with skills to calculate and economic costs and benefits of solutions and thereby come up with answers that will actually work. “The award comes at an incredibly opportune time for Conservation Strategy Fund, as we are being challenged to expand to meet a huge demand for conservation economics training from people in some of the more spectacular and threatened places on earth”, said John Reid, CSF founder and president. The award is not only recognition for past leadership and success but also an investment in Conservation Strategy Fund’s future. We will use this generous infusion of support to build our endowment and pass along our training and research know-how to organizations in regions that to date haven’t had access to CSF's services. Conservation Strategy Fund is one of only 15 organizations from six countries to be recognized today with the MacArthur Award for Creative and Effective Institutions. The MacArthur Foundation does not seek or accept nominations for these awards. To qualify, organizations must demonstrate exceptional creativity and effectiveness; have reached a critical or strategic point in their development; show strong leadership and stable financial management; have previously received MacArthur support; and engage in work central to one of MacArthur’s core programs. To read more about this prestigious award, click here. To read more about the 14 other recipients and their important work, click here.