The Natural Capital Institute was founded in 2002. Read about our past projects here. Project planning for our current project, WiserEarth, began in 2004, and in January 2005, the Natural Capital Institute brought in software engineers and researchers and consulted with movement leaders to begin building the database and envisioning its content. Over the next year and a half, NCI partnered with experts in open source software and increased its data-collecting capacity by training teams in Cuimbatore, India and Guayaquil, Ecuador, as well as dozens of volunteers with expertise in a variety of languages, focus areas, and geographic regions. The expanded team researched and added publicly available data from the Internet and other sources, honed the WiserEarth content standards, values and principles, and continued to develop the database infrastructure.

The site was officially launched to the public in April 2007. Initial funding for WiserEarth supported the critical phase of building the platform, populating the site with a base of content, and listening to the needs of partners and community members. Since its release, WiserEarth’s functionality and tools have co-evolved with its users. No longer simply the world’s largest directory of environmental, social justice and indigenous community-focused organizations, WiserEarth now offers users social networking tools and groupware for people to connect and collaborate around issue areas.
.