Grants and Contracts Manager

About the Water Foundation

The Water Foundation is a nonprofit philanthropy working to support lasting water solutions for communities, economies, and the environment. The Foundation complements strategic grantmaking with creative field-building and engagement with high-level decision makers and community leaders and helps funders identify and act on opportunities to better manage water.

The Water Foundation works in key watersheds across the West, as well as on federal policy, recognizing that water crosses political boundaries and natural places face similar challenges across the country. As a singularly focused water funder, the Water Foundation serves the entire water field, deploying staff expertise to move resources to the groups that can most effectively improve water systems that affect people and nature.

The Water Foundation’s partners span a broad spectrum: conservation organizations, environmental justice groups, agricultural associations, water providers, business groups, and local, tribal, state, and federal agencies.

In 2024, the Water Foundation launched our ambitious strategic framework to guide the efforts and impact of the organization in the coming years. This strategy, which reflects extensive field input from partners and stakeholders, identifies the Foundation’s approach to catalyzing and advancing lasting water solutions at the local, state, and federal levels. The Foundation prioritizes securing safe, equitable, clean, and accessible water for people, restoring and sustaining freshwater ecosystems, and building climate resilient communities and watersheds.

These three goals are critical to the future of water. In pursuing these goals, the Foundation supports the field in tackling immediate water problems, including polluted drinking water and collapsing ecosystems, in ways that alter system drivers, such as social inequality and outmoded infrastructure. We also work to mobilize new resources for water by convening the philanthropic community. In 2022, we expanded such efforts when the Water Table funder collaborative joined forces with the Foundation.

This integration offers the opportunity to channel additional resources toward sustainable and equitable water solutions.

Inequity and injustice underlie many of the challenges the Water Foundation is working to address, such as the failure to provide clean, safe, and affordable drinking water or access to free-flowing rivers and green space to all communities. The Water Foundation has engaged in a learning initiative to ensure that the principles of diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice are embedded and embodied in their individual behavior, institutional operations, and strategic programming.

There is a deep commitment to ongoing growth and learning in this area. The Water Foundation’s work is driven by the following organizational values:

• Collaboration: Strategize, act, and learn in partnership with colleagues internally and externally to advance our collective goals. Deepen connections across and between water sector networks and related issues like climate, health, nature, food, and equity.
• Humility: Recognize and center the knowledge, experiences, and leadership of our partners and the communities we serve, while honoring the power of nature. Listen to and learn from our partners and nature, so that we support a community-led and nature-based vision for a resilient water future.
• Sustainability: Advance resilient, intergenerational solutions that sustain the environment and those who depend upon it while honoring the intrinsic value of nature and strengthening organizations and communities that seek an equitable, alternative vision for the future.
• Transformation: Shape our strategies, work, and practices for systemic change towards a collaborative, just, and sustainable water future in the US.
• Justice: Align our policies, practices, and resources so that all people and ecosystems have genuine opportunities to thrive.

More information about the Water Foundation can be found erfdn.org.

In 2025, the Water Foundation launched an affiliated 501(c)(4), the Water Action Fund (Use the "Apply for this Job" box below). with a mission to ensure…