As the Ray C. Anderson Foundation continues its plan to sunset by 2030, it is incubating a new initiative to continue its environmental agenda.
The Live Oak Initiative is being launched by Several of the grandchildren of the late Ray C. Anderson, who, as CEO of Interface, became a national champion for corporate environmentalism and sustainability. Several of Anderson’s grandchildren are launching the Live Oak Initiative, and they have been working on the concept for as long as a decade.
Atlanta native Alexandria H. McBride will be the executive director of the initiative, bringing nearly two decades of experience advancing climate solutions, directing investment and building partnerships across philanthropy, government, nonprofits and the private sector.
John Lanier, executive director of the Ray C. Anderson Foundation, said Live Oak “will eventually spin out into its own standalone entity.” It is being incubated within the Foundation, and one of the first big steps was to hire McBride.
“We hired Alex back in June,” said Lanier, knowing McBride could not start until after her parental leave. “Dang it! We’re excited. We‘ve got a good one.”
The Atlanta-based Live Oak Initiative is being co-chaired by two of Anderson’s grandchildren, Jay Lanier (John Lanier’s older brother and an executive at Interface living in Asheville, N.C.) and their cousin, McCall Filipovich Langford, who lives in Alexandria, Va. All three are trustees of the Ray C. Anderson Foundation and part of the third generation (Ray Anderson’s grandchildren), or as they call it: Gen 3.
“This is a culmination of work that’s been going on for a decade,” said Langford during a Zoom interview with Lanier. “It feels like it’s precisely meeting the moment and the place of the Southeast.”
Live Oak is a new philanthropic effort designed to mobilize investment, strengthen collaboration and accelerate equitable climate solutions and community resilience across the Southeast.
It will complement the Foundation’s other four initiatives that it helped launch – the Ray C. Anderson Center for Sustainable Business at Georgia Tech, the Biomimicry Institute, Drawdown Georgia and “The Ray.”
The family looks at those initiatives as trees that were planted with the help of the Ray C. Anderson Foundation, calling themselves entrepreneurs in the environmental space.
Now Live Oak is the fifth tree to be planted by the Foundation.
“We really looked at those as trees in a grove,” Langford said. “The initiative was initially called Fifth Tree. And we really started talking about the South and what was the iconic tree of the South. It represents metaphorically what we’re trying to ensure is seeded in our community as we sunset.”
Langford said Jay Lanier, who was not able to be part of the interview, really best describes the metaphor. Live oaks weave their roots within each other and help secure the coastal grounds that’s beneath the South.
“We were talking about everything that Ray built and everything that the foundation lived on to carry forward. It really had manifested in this big, beautiful tree,” Langford said. “It’s okay that the tree dies. Live oaks do this really beautiful thing when they die.
“They explode all of the nutrients that they have been gathering and storing for a thousand years into the ecosystem in a burst that literally changes the ecosystem,” Langford continued. “What we want the Ray C. Anderson’s Live Oak do is coordinate, collaborate, seed and move resources in the Southeast ecosystem, in a way we haven’t yet seen.”
By sunsetting the Foundation, the aspirational goal of Live Oak is that it will explode in the ecosystem with a burst of new roots that will seed new environmental alliances in the Southeast.
“We’re meeting the moment,” Langford said. “The South has been working really hard against a lot of odds, but we’re not a deficit place. There are real climate solutions, real frontline communities on the ground that are holding the solutions. They just really need a funding support boost, and we think this can drive real change far beyond the life of a foundation.”
McBride, who grew up in the West End, witnessed how environmental justice, racial equity and economic opportunity intersect. She spent 20 years working in climate change and environmental justice efforts. Most of that time, she worked with national funders and foundations, but something was missing — being able to be on the ground to see the results.
“Part of what drew me to Live Oak was that we had a family with a playbook,” said McBride, adding the family members knew how to “tap into the local expertise” that already exists.
“We have unique opportunities and assets that we can bring to the table,” she said. “I’m excited to use our perspective as funders, and to be honest, our privilege as funders, to talk to other funders and ensure we’re connecting those resources to community organizations and leaders who aren’t necessarily in the rooms but are already leading those solutions.”
Live Oak will convene other environmental entities to work on grassroots initiatives that are contributing to a greener environment.
“I’m excited because the sunset does not mean we’re stopping the goal of increasing impact in these communities,” McBride said. “We’re really showing what climate work could look like when it’s Southern-led and intersectional.”
With the anticipated 2030 sunset, the Ray C. Anderson Foundation has been spending down its corpus, which is now at $36 million. John Lanier said the Foundation is help launch the Live Oak Initiative, which will spun off before the sunset. He said the plan will be to provide Live Oak with about $3 million of flexible operating capital when it becomes its own entity.
McBride said she believes there’s an existing appetite for national funders who wanted to come to the South.
“We at Live Oak are seeing this unique opportunity to help bring funders along and to use the playbook that we’ve seen over the many years at Ray C. Anderson Foundation,” she said. “Our goal is to use the beautiful live oak metaphor that McCall was sharing. It’s certainly a burst. That’s not about us. It’s about growing the table.”
In the past five years, two of the largest environmental funders have exited the scene. The Kendeda Fund sunset in 2023, and the Ray C. Anderson Foundation will sunset in 2030. They said the need was too urgent to create a foundation in perpetuity. The Turner Foundation has also shrunk its environmental giving over the past decade.
But John Lanier said Live Oak will help bridge the gap.
“Instead of handing a baton off to another funder to follow any example that we might have set, our hope is to break that baton into 1000 pieces and hand them all out,” Lanier said. “We want to help others find their space so that it’s not one or two philanthropic organizations that understand the need to take care of the South… We think with Alex’s leadership, we can help bring so many more funders into this space, and that will yield the greatest change.”
Several times in the conversation, Lanier, Langford and McBride used the words “audacious” and “bold” to describe Live Oak’s work in bringing the environmental community together. They also said the results of the mid-term elections on Nov. 3 bode well for the environment.
Lanier also said there will be at least one more Ray Day, one of the most popular annual events the Foundation organized at Serenbe, where dozens of organizations, nonprofits and companies display their contributions. Hundreds of people were drawn to the family-friendly event to learn about the latest and greatest in environmental innovation.
Lanier said the plan is to have at least one more Ray Day before the Foundation sunsets.
