Grantham Foundation for the Protection of the Environment
/OVERVIEW: The Grantham Foundation for the Protection of the Environment is one of the principle philanthropic vehicles of British investor Jeremy Grantham and his wife Hannelore. It focuses exclusively on environment and climate change grantmaking.
IP TAKE: This funder’s website provides information on grantmaking priorities and previous grantees, but it is not updated frequently and specific details about grants are limited. It’s not a transparent or accessible funder, so it will require some networking here to get through the door.
Grantham priorities support for organizations in California, New York, and Massachusetts, and groups outside of these three states will have to work very hard to get noticed.
PROFILE: Established in 1997, the Grantham Foundation for the Protection of the Environment was created by British investor Jeremy Grantham and his wife Hannelore. Based in Boston, the foundation seeks to “protect and conserve the natural environment.” Grantham studied Economics at the University of Sheffield and completed his MBA at Harvard Business School. He co-founded Grantham Mayo Van Otterloo, an asset management firm. Grantham’s reputation rests on his uncanny ability to avoid getting caught up in speculative asset bubbles and pinpointing when they will burst, including predicting the 2000 tech crash and 2008 financial crisis. In January 2019, Grantham committed 98% of his roughly $1 billion fortune to funding climate action. According to the Grantham Foundation’s website, “both environmental advocacy and applied research into climate solutions are vital” to solving the climate crisis, and, consequently, it makes grants focused on those two initiatives. The foundation’s environmental and climate grantmaking supports universities, research, major environmental groups, and journalism. In addition to its philanthropy, the foundation also invests in green technology.
Grants for Environment and Climate Change
All grantmaking and investing is conducted through a climate lens, and the foundation has established what it calls “long-standing relationships” with some of the world’s major environmental organizations, with whom it works “to advance novel environmental and climate solutions.” These include Rare, The Nature Conservancy, World Wildlife Fund, Rocky Mountain Institute, and Environmental Defense Fund. It has also given to the European Climate Foundation and the U.S.-based Energy Foundation, each receiving roughly $5 million in recent years. ClimateWorks Foundation and Windward Fund have also received support.
Grants for Higher Education
In addition to advocacy, research is one of the two key tenets of the Grantham Foundation’s climate funding, and its support for institutions of higher education primarily falls under this research initiative. Universities, primarily elite schools in the United Kingdom and the United States, receive the lion’s share of this support, totaling about a third of foundation grants annually, according to tax filings.
U.K. universities have all received grants into the millions, including the London School of Economics (home of the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment), Imperial College London (home to the Grantham Institute - Climate Change and the Environment), and the University of Sheffield (housing the Grantham Centre for Sustainable Futures). Universities in the U.S. that have received significant support from the foundation include the California Institute of Technology, MIT, Columbia University, and Yale.
Grants for Journalism
While journalism and communications organizations do not receive a large share of Grantham’s funding, tax records indicate that the foundation does support groups in this space. Most of these grants go to climate-focused groups, such as Carbon Brief, Inside Climate News and the Yale Project on Climate Change Communication. However, National Public Radio’s Boston affiliate, WGBH, and “Living on Earth,” a weekly public radio show, have also seen support.
Important Grant Details:
While the foundation ostensibly makes grants nationwide, a majority of its support stays in within a relatively narrow geographic area, just three states: California, New York, and Massachusetts.
Grants range from just a few thousand into the millions, but the average grant amount is just over $25,000. It does not accept unsolicited proposals or requests for funding and reviews project proposals by invitation only. It will not consider proposals with indirect costs above 10%.
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