Ohio River Valley Participatory Fund

A regional participatory fund making general operating support grants to small and mid-sized nonprofits serving northern Appalachian communities harmed by the fossil fuel industry across eastern Ohio, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia.

The Ohio River Valley Participatory Fund is an intermediary fund housed at Nonprofit Partners in Johnstown, a subsidiary of the Community Foundation for the Alleghenies, and its grantmaking is steered by regional nonprofit leaders rather than out-of-region program officers. The 2024 steering committee included Autumn Crowe of the West Virginia Rivers Coalition, Bishop Marcia Dinkins of the Black Appalachian Coalition, Gillian Graber of Protect PT, Michael Parker of Fair Shake Environmental Legal Services, and Shannon Smith of the FracTracker Alliance. The fund makes general operating support grants that back programs, projects, and capacity building at small to medium-sized organizations working in eastern Ohio, Pennsylvania, or West Virginia, in communities adversely affected by fossil fuel extraction and petrochemical development. Priority goals span environmental, health, democracy, justice, movement-building, and economic development work, which makes it one of the few regional funders that will pay for the unglamorous overhead a watershed group actually runs on. The Fall 2026 round closed on August 3, 2026, and the steering committee reduced both the maximum grant size and the maximum applicant budget ceiling for that round because of limited available funding. Watch for the next round and note that the fund runs virtual office hours for applicants rather than formal webinars. Supporters include The 11th Hour Project, the Argosy Foundation, The Heinz Endowments, the MacArthur Foundation, the McKnight Foundation, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, and the Myles D. and J. Faye Sampson Family Foundation. The geographic footprint is a close match to H2O's own service area.