Foundation

Opportunity

Despite improvements in modern mining practices, the sector continues to face deep reputational and practical challenges rooted in unresolved legacy impacts.

Across the globe, hundreds of thousands of closed, legacy mine sites are not just environmental liabilities; they are a transformative opportunity to restore ecosystems, strengthen communities, and redefine the future of responsible mining. Unlocking this opportunity will require new models of philanthropy, finance, and partnership.

Today, many legacy mine sites remain contaminated, degraded, and often without a responsible owner. Some are literally abandoned. They damage ecosystems and disproportionately impact Indigenous and rural communities. At the same time, the global transition to clean energy, alongside technological change and shifting geopolitics, is driving unprecedented demand for critical and economic minerals. This creates an opportunity to repurpose these sites—some can produce minerals; all can be restored and repurposed.

RESOLVE launched Regeneration Enterprises to reprocess mine waste and restore sites where the value of metals can underwrite cleanup and restoration—reprocessing is part of the cleanup process. We need a parallel solution to address sites where traditional market mechanisms and public funding are insufficient, leaving communities and ecosystems behind.

1 Our Vision

Our vision is a future in which lands and communities affected by mining are restored, resilient, and generate lasting environmental and social value for generations to come.

2 Our Mission

We fund and advance the restoration of degraded mine lands, support community-led development and stewardship, and accelerate technologies that enable responsible mineral recovery and long-term ecological recovery.

Building on the work of Regeneration Enterprises and established with the support of RESOLVE, the Foundation expands and scales a model that integrates restoration, community resilience, and economic opportunity.

We focus on the most complex and underserved sites—where there is limited commercial incentive, insufficient public funding, and urgent need for action.

Regenerative Lands

We help mining-impacted communities to design and implement landscape-scale restoration, transforming legacy mine sites into ecological and community assets. It builds the partnerships, planning, and resourcing needed to advance long-term restoration, delivering meaningful improvements for nature and people.

Aravaipa Watershed, Arizona
The Aravaipa watershed is a rare and biodiverse desert riparian system critical to regional water resources and wildlife habitat. Legacy mining has left contaminated sites that degrade water quality and ecosystem health. The Foundation supports a community co-designed remediation approach to restore these impacts, improving watershed function and habitat resilience. This project will be implemented through the U.S. Good Samaritan Remediation of Abandoned Hardrock Mines Act Pilot Program, serving as a demonstration for scalable restoration.

Peace Diamonds Restoration, Sierra Leone
The Peace Diamonds Initiative demonstrates how post-conflict mining regions can be transformed through restoration, transparency, and community-centered development. By addressing the environmental and social legacies of artisanal diamond mining, the initiative supports ecosystem recovery while creating responsible, traceable value chains. This model shows how restoring degraded landscapes can also rebuild trust, livelihoods, and long-term resilience.

Salmon Gold

We restore salmon streams and surrounding habitat that have been impacted by placer mining in Alaska (US), and the Yukon and British Columbia (Canada). We partner with and train placer miners and local workers to rebuild stream function and enhance salmon habitat. By combining restoration with responsible mineral recovery, the program creates a scalable model that delivers ecological, economic, and supply chain benefits.

Clean Technology Accelerator

We help accelerate the development and deployment of clean technologies that enable mineral recovery from mine waste and long-term land and water restoration. By bridging the gap between innovation and implementation, the initiative unlocks new pathways to transform legacy mine sites into environmental and economic assets.

Our Clean Technology Accelerator supports the testing, validation, and deployment of early- stage technologies in operational settings. Working in collaboration with governments, research institutions, and innovators, the Foundation aims to unlock a new generation of technologies that make restoration more effective, scalable, and economically viable helping turn mine waste from a liability into a resource.

Regeneration Alliance

The Regeneration Alliance in Support of Nature Positive Mining and Metals Recovery. We convene and support a global alliance of partners to advance nature-positive mining and accelerate the restoration of legacy and brownfield mine sites. By bringing together industry, governments, NGOs, and communities, our initiative creates a platform to align efforts, share knowledge, scale solutions, and work together on policy and access to finance.

Across the mining and conservation sectors, there is growing momentum to address legacy impacts and restore lands and support responsible mineral production. However, efforts remain fragmented, with limited coordination, shared standards, or mechanisms to scale successful models. Unlocking the full potential of metals recovery from waste and restoration requires stronger collaboration, enabling policy environments, and shared approaches that can be adopted across regions and stakeholders.