Last year, Erika Rolston sat in a room full of community foundation peers at a national conference in Halifax, listening to one innovative urban initiative after another. She kept putting her hand up.

The moment captures something essential about how Erika leads the Rural Communities Foundation of Nova Scotia (RCFNS) as Executive Director: a steady insistence that rural is its own context, with its own inequities, assets, and logic.

Building Meaningful Relationships with Indigenous Communities 

Before programs, funding models, and strategy, RCFNS starts with relationships. 

About a third of RCFNS’s climate granting has gone to Indigenous‑led projects, not through a dedicated stream, but because roughly a third of applicants to the Joan Feynman Climate Change Fund come from Indigenous communities. The distinction matters: this is access by design, not by category. 

Low‑barrier granting is practiced throughout. Applications are kept simple. Erika makes herself available by phone to walk applicants through the process. Reporting can be done verbally: “just tell us some stories.” Where Indigenous organizations hold qualified donee status, administrative burden is intentionally minimal. Where they are NQDs, Erika strives to offer flexibility wherever possible.  

But the deeper practice is relational. 

Erika emphasizes the importance of accepting invitations into communities. When visiting Mi’kmaq communities, she brings a tobacco pouch as a gesture of respect within a tradition of reciprocal exchange. She arrives without an agenda, without a work plan to fill in, and without a partnership agreement to sign. 

Erika emphasizes the importance of accepting invitations into communities. When visiting Mi’kmaq communities, she brings a tobacco pouch as a gesture of respect within a tradition of reciprocal exchange. She arrives without an agenda, without a work plan to fill in, and without a partnership agreement to sign. 

This approach towards building trust-based relationships shapes everything RCFNS does. 

Rural Climate Action Is Equity and Resilience Work 

In rural Nova Scotia, pockets of extreme wealth sit beside pockets of deep poverty. Most households rely on private wells and personal vehicles, with no public transit and limited municipal infrastructure. Indigenous and African Nova Scotian communities are often the first to lose power in emergencies and the last to have it restored. 

In this context, climate resilience is less about emissions reduction and more about adaptation: wildfire preparedness, water security, emergency management, and food security.  

RCFNS is responding by supporting community‑defined solutions, including a youth climate action funding stream developed with partners such as Halifax Climate Investment, Innovation and Impact (HCi3) and the Unama’ki Institute of Natural Resources. One African Nova Scotian community plans to train youth to run comfort centres and manage emergency response. 

Climate Is Not a Program. It’s a Commitment. 

In 2025, RCFNS amended its charitable purpose to explicitly include climate change, food security, and land stewardship.  
Erika describes this move as essential. Embedding climate into an organization’s legal governing documents ensures it cannot be deprioritized when budgets tighten or leadership changes. It marks the difference between a strategy and a commitment. 

That commitment, however, does not erase constraint. 

The solution, as Erika sees it, is not just more resources for the Foundation – it is better coordination across the philanthropic sector as a whole. 

This does not necessarily mean pooling funds, but rather it’s about aligning timelines for funding initiatives, sharing knowledge, and coordinating criteria. The current model where grantees chase small grants with mismatched deadlines and heavy reporting requirements produces fragmentation and burnout.

She advocates for three-year coordinated pilots among climate funders, long enough to see real change.

The metaphor she returns to is simple.