The Christensen Fund

The Christensen Fund

The Christensen Fund was established in 1957 by Allen D. and Carmen M. Christensen. Allen Christensen co-founded and led Utah Mining and Construction Company; the foundation's corpus was built from that industrial enterprise. Today, daughter Diane Christensen serves as President and Board Chair, maintaining family governance while day-to-day leadership sits with CEO Carla Fredericks. Since 2003, the foundation has pursued a focused mandate: supporting Indigenous Peoples in advancing inherent rights, dignity, and self-determination through the lens of biocultural diversity. The strategy deploys program-related investment loans alongside traditional grantmaking. Geographic commitments span the African Rift Valley, Central Asia, Melanesia, the American Southwest, and the Andean-Amazonian corridor. Confirmed partnerships include the ICCA Consortium and the International Funders for Indigenous Peoples, where the foundation holds founding membership. The strategy blends venture-philanthropy approaches with patient capital, targeting landscape-level resilience in food systems, cultural knowledge transmission, and community conserved areas. Governance sits with a board that includes Lisa B. Hendrickson, also a director at Avidbank Holdings, and Vilas Dhar, President of the Patrick J. McGovern Foundation. The foundation maintains direct ownership of income-producing commercial property in Menlo Park, California, and historically held a mixed-use resort asset in Papua New Guinea. Investment activity includes program-related loans structured as recoverable grants, deployed across United States-based initiatives. The structural differentiator is the foundation's insistence on investing through the biocultural framework rather than a conventional asset-allocation model. The entire endowment functions as a mission-aligned portfolio, where financial returns from Menlo Park real estate and PRI loans directly underwrite grants to Indigenous-led organizations. The family's collection of Pomo Indian baskets, now housed at Harvard's Peabody Museum, was repatriated or donated — a signal of long-term commitment to cultural restitution that runs parallel to the investment thesis.