The Organizing Committee for the 2028 Olympic and Paralympic Games Wednesday opened the second round of applications for its LA28 Resilience Champions Fund, which provides up to $100,000 for nonprofits across the region working on climate solutions.
The fund was launched earlier this year as part of a broader LA28 Resilience Champions Initiative, designed to strengthen community resilience leading up to and beyond the 2028 Games. In May, LA28 announced the fund’s inaugural cohort of eight nonprofit grantees, which each received $100,000 to implement projects across the region.
“Building a more resilient Los Angeles starts with investing in the people and organizations who know their communities best,” LA28 Vice President of Sustainability Becky Dale said in a statement. “With the second round of the Resilience Champions Fund, we’re excited to build on the momentum of our inaugural grantees whose projects are currently underway, and support more locally led solutions that can deliver a meaningful impact that starts before the Games and endures long after 2028.”
In a phone interview with City News Service on Tuesday, Dale said projects that received grants in May are underway, and given the overwhelming response with the first round officials decided to do another round and bring in another group of nonprofits driving locally led projects.
“We keep in close touch with our grantees. We were actually out a little over a week ago with the Santa Monica Mountains Fund, who we worked with to fund a dense native microforest adjacent to the Olympic and Paralympic Village at UCLA,” Dale told CNS.
LA28 had members of its volunteer program help prepare the ground for planning.
“Generally we work with a local group called Community Partners, who is our intermediary, and so they helped us design the fund, help us evaluate all of the applications, and then we work very closely with them on the measurement and evaluation to ensure that we have strong success metrics and transparency at the end,” she said.
Community Partners is a Los Angeles-based nonprofit intermediary organization and fiscal sponsor that works to foster, launch, and grow creative solutions to community challenges.
Round two will continue to support projects aligned with the fund’s three focus areas:
— Wildfire Resilience and Nature Restoration: Coming out of the devastating 2025 wildfires, LA28 will help build greater wildfire resilience and restore nature by supporting projects such as planting fire resilient native plants or pursuing vegetation management.
— Ocean Protection: With the Pacific Ocean as the iconic backdrop to sports such as sailing and beach volleyball, LA28 will enhance ocean health by supporting replicable solutions such as restoring wetlands and coastal habitats; and
— Cooling Solutions: In the lead-up to welcoming the world in the height of summer, LA28 will help keep Los Angeles cool by supporting projects such as native tree planting and installation of shade structures.
“The Resilience Champions Fund is opening opportunities for Chrysalis clients to be a part of the LA28 legacy,” President and CEO of Chrysalis Mark Loranger said in a statement. “This effort has strengthened our workforce development program by providing resources, expertise, as well as meaningful partnerships with other nonprofits tackling challenges across Los Angeles. We feel incredibly proud to be a part of a collective action that is going to leave our community better and more resilient.”
LA28 encourages interested nonprofits to apply through Oct. 30 at communitypartners.org/landing-page/la28resiliencechampionsfund/.