How Green Philanthropy Has Changed—And How It Hasn’t—in Response to Calls for Racial Justice
/
March for Climate Justice NYC, September 2020. Ron Adar/shutterstock
What impact have the events of the past 12 months—George Floyd’s murder, a summer of uprisings, the inequities of the pandemic and more—had on how environmental and climate philanthropy addresses racial justice and equity?
Over the past month, I asked a range of climate and environmental funders to share with me how they think philanthropy has changed—and how it still needs to grow. Their responses, which also informed Inside Philanthropy’s look at how philanthropy as a whole has responded, reflect the promising early steps green funders have taken, while emphasizing how much more remains to be done.
Building on decades of hard work by environmental justice leaders, many green funders seemed to strengthen their understanding of the inherent connections between climate, the environment and racial justice, and launched some promising new funding initiatives and strategies. But green philanthropy still has much work ahead to close longstanding funding gaps, shake some stubborn assumptions, and solidify fundamental, lasting change.
Here’s what representatives from some of the field’s largest funders, progressive leaders and fast-rising newcomers had to say.
A broader lens
Calls to address racism and inequity in the environmental movement, including the massive funding disparities between white-dominated big NGOs and typically more diverse grassroots movements, date back decades. Legions of local and national environmental justice activists, such as Hazel Johnson and Robert Bullard, have toiled for years to change minds and shift funding. With that work setting the foundation, many said the past year pushed the field to act with greater urgency—and perhaps toward a longer-term shift.
“This time it feels different,” wrote Roger Kim, who leads the Climate and Clean Energy Equity Fund, by email. His organization was one of three funding intermediaries focused on environmental justice—including the Hive Fund for Climate and Gender Justice and The Solutions Project—that received $43 million each from Jeff Bezos’ new fund late last year. Bezos also awarded $12 million to NDN Collective and $10 million to Green for All.
“The persistence of environmental justice organizers and racial justice organizers... deserves an enormous appreciation for turning people’s outrage into power and creating the context in which climate funders now have to respond to the demands for racial justice,” he wrote. Funders “are beginning to understand that when we incorporate racial justice as central to addressing climate change, we get bigger, bolder and faster solutions.”
As an example, Kim cites the fund’s grantees in New Mexico. A coalition of groups, including Native American- and Latinx-led organizations, successfully pushed for passage of a bill that sets up a task force to help New Mexico, the third-largest oil-producing state in the nation, diversify its economy away from oil and gas and support workers in that transition.
Walt Reid, director of the David and Lucile Packard Foundation’s Conservation and Science program, sees two complementary trends in the field. First, funders are backing new climate movement groups that approach their work with a broader lens—one inclusive of racial justice—than in the past. Perhaps most prominent of these is Sunrise Movement, a Packard grantee, which famously held the protest that catapulted the Green New Deal into the public consciousness.
“A foundation like ours funds Sunrise because we want a progressive voice around climate action,” he told me. “And they center their work around climate. But they really work on a broad range of progressive issues.”
Second, Reid highlights how regranting organizations, particularly environmental justice-focused groups such as Kim’s fund or the Hive Fund for Climate and Gender Justice, both of which Packard also supports, are backing coalitions of groups that may not self-identify as environmental organizations. “They’re not trying to orient around just a climate-focused orientation. They’re trying to orient around issues that matter in the community, and then develop the climate side,” he said.
Again and again, leaders said they felt there was widening, if overdue, recognition that grantmaking on the climate emergency cannot be held separate from other issues, least of all racial equity, considering that communities of color in the U.S. and around the world are being hit first and worst by climate change.
“There’s been an understanding and growing awareness that it’s intersectional, that the work on climate is, in itself, a justice effort,” said Dan Chu, executive director of the Sierra Club Foundation.
New funding, new strategies
A variety of gifts and new initiatives over the past year show the different ways that racial justice and equity have been factored into climate and environmental giving, though they also threw additional weight behind many of the usual suspects in the field.
In February, we saw the launch of the Climate Funders Justice Pledge, under which foundations commit to direct at least 30% of their U.S. climate change grantmaking to environmental justice organizations led by Black, Indigenous and people of color.
That same month, a new national participatory grantmaking initiative called Mosaic issued a $3 million round of grants. All funding decisions by the project are made by a 16-member council, including both grassroots organizations like PUSH Buffalo and Alianza Nacional de Campesinas, Inc., and some of the nation’s largest environmental organizations, such as Earthjustice and the Natural Resources Defense Council. An equally diverse cross-section of funders supports the effort, including climate heavyweights—the Hewlett, Packard and Walton Family foundations—and smaller regional and family foundations, like the Caldwell Fisher Family Foundation and Posner Foundation of Pittsburgh.
Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, as noted, made several gifts to people-of-color-led environmental justice organizations that exceeded what those organizations had ever previously received, yet nearly 80% of his gifts went to some of the nation’s most well-funded and predominantly white environmental nonprofits. MacKenzie Scott, another major new green giver, prioritized leadership of impacted groups in her early gifts, albeit not in her initial climate giving.
Meanwhile, some well-established players in environmental grantmaking are more explicitly naming equity as a priority in their work. The latest land preservation fund launched by the Open Space Institute, for instance, is reducing matching requirements for groups led by people of color, among other measures to try to reshape conservation practices to ensure that benefits are broadly shared. The Walton Family Foundation’s environmental program aims to expand its work with tribes and grassroots groups, among other shifts, under a new strategic plan that sets diversity, equity and inclusion as a foundation-wide priority.
How environmental philanthropy can improve
Whether in green philanthropy or the sector as a whole, it is telling that a few long-called-for changes always lead the list of what still needs to be done. Unrestricted, multi-year grants and letting the people most impacted lead were among the needs most frequently pointed out by leaders I consulted with. While loosening grant restrictions seemed to gain traction as the pandemic hit, evidence remains mixed regarding whether it will translate to long-term change.
Crystal Hayling, executive director of the Libra Foundation, also urged funders to do the learning and reflection necessary to be “actively anti-racist.” Hayling, whose foundation has a program focused on environmental justice, has been influential in the philanthropic sector overall, helping to form the Democracy Frontlines Fund in 2020 to make rapid grants to Black organizers.
“It’s all about building trusting relationships with front-line groups,” she wrote in an email. “Funders need to ‘give the keys to the car’ to Black organizations that are building power.”
Even as more climate grantmakers awaken to the reach and relevance of systemic racism, Roger Kim sees some worrying that prioritizing such concerns will fracture needed political coalitions or delay already overdue action, while overlooking the deadly conditions that the status quo perpetuates for communities of color.
“Some climate funders are struggling because they believe that they have to make a choice between making progress on climate change or addressing racial justice,” he wrote. “This false either/or formulation is at the heart of their struggle.”
Many leaders highlighted the need for funders—green and otherwise—to push harder to remake their own ranks—and diversify their grantees. People of color represent just a third of employees across both environmental grantmakers and nonprofits, according to Green 2.0, versus roughly 40% in the population. And statistics are scarcely even available on other measures, such as disability or LGBTQ identity.
“Many foundations—including us—have more distance to travel to diversify their staff across the multiple and intersecting identities that individuals hold,” said Charmaine Mercer, a former Hewlett Foundation program officer who, last month, became the organization’s first-ever chief of equity and culture, a position that reports to the president.
In addition to some major funding pledges, Hewlett Foundation—one of the world’s largest climate funders—is taking a variety of internal steps to integrate equity into its culture, according to Mercer. It is building diversity, equity and inclusion questions into developing its grant strategy. It is analyzing demographic data of its grantees to catch potential implicit bias. Its leadership team has all done one-on-one racial justice coaching. And it has publicly documented many of those conversations and processes through videos, statistical analysis and a Q&A.
Funding data is hard to come by, but anecdotal evidence suggests a major surge in funding for grassroots green groups and movements over the past few years. Yet that funding is building on a very small base. Only 1.3% of funding by the top 12 national environmental grantmakers went to environmental justice organizations between 2016 and 2017, according to a study led by Building Equity & Alignment for Justice.
Gloria Walton, president and CEO of The Solutions Project, an intermediary climate and energy grantmaker that primarily funds groups led by women and people of color, is glad to see efforts like the Climate Funders Justice Pledge emerge. But Walton says a mindset shift is needed in philanthropy, as true equity would demand an investment of at least double that to correct historic underinvestment.
“We still operate with these corporate values around risk and return on our investment. We’re in this movement that requires our values to be more transformational,” she told me. “It’s not risky to invest in grassroots organizations; it’s risky not to.”
As she argued in a recent IP opinion piece, philanthropy is missing out not only by underinvesting in movement building by front-line communities, but by overlooking the climate tech solutions those groups are deploying. The changes we’ve seen in the past year are all encouraging signs, Walton said, but how these and other efforts play out will indicate how much power is truly shifting in the sector.
“With the racial reckoning, people are doing a little bit more,” Walton said. But she, like many leaders, is waiting to see whether the commitments hold, let alone grow. “Philanthropy is kind of known for being capricious.”
