VF’s Foundation Set Aside $8M for ‘Outside Matters,’ and More for Earth Month
With namesakes like Timberland and The North Face, it’s hard to separate VF Corp. from the great outdoors — or its philanthropic aims from cliffside gains.
This Earth Month, the company’s foundation touted its findings from its third impact report released Thursday. In 2022, the organization donated more than $8 million in grant funding to a suite of 77 environmental and equity-focused partners. It estimated 3 million people were positively impacted across 93 countries. Last year alone, The VF Foundation, VF Corp. and its family of brands donated more than $23 million in monetary and product donations.
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The report outlined four funding areas: “Outside Matters,” increasing equitable outdoor access and conservation; “Worthy Work,” investing in next-gen educational pathways; “Free to Be,” fostering the freedom of self-expression and creative passions, and “Disaster Relief and Recovery,” which is on-the-ground disaster relief.
Some of the beneficiaries were Nature Conservancy, which supports native ranchers and their projects; Trust for Public Land, turning schoolyards into recreation spaces; Regenerative Rising, which devotes funding to regenerative agriculture projects, and Full Circle Expedition & Winder River Indian Reservation.
Team Full Circle made history last May as the first Black expedition team to summit Mount Everest, in The North Face, naturally. “People say to us, ‘Black people don’t do snow. We don’t ski, we don’t do camping,’” recounted climber Rosemary Saal, in the report. “And that can become a very real, self-imposed limitation. People don’t even know the things they can do unless they’re exposed to it.”
The impact report also spotlighted career mobility and designer funds like VF’s “RaiseFashion” platform, which has earmarked $200,000 over the past two years for designers like the Los Angeles-based twins behind label BruceGlen (known for the Insta-worthy rainbow gradient slipdresses made with more sustainable digital printing methods).
Across all of its efforts, VF is still prioritizing climate. Its current science-based targets underpin the precedence for not only a 1.5-degrees Celsius reduction pathway but also a net-zero target.
“We are proud to help seed the solutions to some of today’s most pressing issues that will grow positive change and meaningful impact around the globe,” Gloria Schoch, executive director of The VF Foundation and senior director of VF Corp., summarized in the impact report.
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