Ray C. Anderson Foundation starts Live Oak, an effort to steer more climate funding to the Southeast, and names its director
The Atlanta foundation, which plans to close by the end of 2030, launched the Live Oak Initiative on Nov. 10 with Alexandria H. McBride as founding executive director. Live Oak advises funders and does not make grants itself.
Atlanta. The Ray C. Anderson Foundation of Atlanta launched the Live Oak Initiative on Nov. 10, an effort to bring more philanthropic money to climate solutions and community resilience across the Southeastern United States, and named Alexandria H. McBride its founding executive director.
Live Oak will work with regional and national foundations on new, collaborative ways of funding Southern led, community driven organizations, the foundation said. It will help funders find investment opportunities, connect people and institutions, and coordinate their work across the region around local priorities. The announcement names no dollar amount and no list of states.
An adviser to funders, not a grantmaker
Live Oak's own page says it advises philanthropic funders and does not make grants, and that it cannot respond to funding requests or proposals from nonprofit organizations. Organizations in the region would reach it through the funders it works with rather than by applying.
The initiative will be incubated within the foundation, and Ms. McBride reports to a subcommittee of the foundation's board. The foundation said Live Oak plans to become an independent 501(c)(3) nonprofit within a few years. Its co-chairs are Jay Lanier and McCall Filipovich Langford, two of the Anderson family's next generation who became trustees of the foundation in 2025.
“The Southeast does not lack leadership or solutions. What's missing is the sustained, flexible investment needed to bring promising solutions to scale.”
A foundation with an end date
The foundation announced in March 2025 that it will sunset by the end of 2030. It was endowed with about $50 million from the estate of Ray C. Anderson, who died in 2011, and it said then that it had awarded more than $36 million in grants since 2012. John Lanier, its executive director and a grandson of Mr. Anderson, said then that his generation was committed to helping new initiatives get started before the planned sunset.
Ms. McBride, an Atlanta native, was strategy director and senior program officer at the Waverley Street Foundation, where she led a $90 million national portfolio, and before that chief resilience officer for the City of Oakland, Calif. The launch announcement also carried statements from Dena Chadwick, president and chief executive of Philanthropy Southeast, and from Vasser Seydel, president of The Oxygen Project, a director of the Turner Foundation and a member of Live Oak's advisory board.
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