With a New Leader, Climate Emergency Fund Gets Back to the Streets and Confronts Media Silence

You may have heard that a couple of billionaires went to space recently.

In fact, if you were watching TV, you could barely avoid the spectacle. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’ 11-minute jaunt in a rocketship got nearly as much airtime by TV morning shows as the climate emergency received in all of 2020, according to an analysis by Media Matters.

The comparison illustrates the appalling, persistent climate silence among America’s largest broadcasters. Morning shows, nightly news and Sunday political programs on ABC, CBS, NBC and Fox aired a grand total of 380 minutes of climate coverage in 2020, amounting to just 0.4% of all programming, according to Media Matters’ report.

Enter the Climate Emergency Fund. After COVID and a period without a director forced a slowdown in its work, the fund is getting back to its mission of supporting front-line activists who take attention-grabbing measures, like gluing themselves to trains, for example, to demand action on the climate crisis. The organization is also launching a new campaign to confront TV networks that have all but ignored the greatest threat to the future of human life on the planet.

In June, the fund gave 12 organizations a total $375,000, about half of which was for efforts to pressure the media. The fund has also hired a full-time executive director, Margaret Klein Salamon, who as the founder of grantee Climate Mobilization, helped lead a campaign that popularized the term “climate emergency” and related declarations by local governments.

“The climate emergency is accelerating so fast, and it’s already proving so damaging at just 1.1 degrees of warming,” Salamon said. The fund is “looking for organizations and activists who are willing to advocate for policies and programs that are on the speed and scale required. This is still really very rare in the climate movement. It hasn’t moved as fast as warming itself.”

Salamon, who has a doctorate in clinical psychology, draws on that background in her activism. She even wrote a self-help book, “Facing the Climate Emergency: How to Transform Yourself with Climate Truth,” to guide people through the emotions stirred up by this moment. She’s been struck by the continuation of life as normal amid a rapidly expanding crisis. “Intervening in that collective denial—that’s my theory of change,” she told me.

Based in Beverly Hills, the fund was started by a group that included heirs from two of America’s most iconic families: philanthropist Aileen Getty, granddaughter of oil tycoon J. Paul Getty, and filmmaker Rory Kennedy, daughter of the late U.S. Sen. Robert F. Kennedy. It also has some serious climate chops. The fund’s advisory board includes writers like Bill McKibben and David Wallace Wells and youth activists like Xiuhtezcatl Martinez and Katie Eder.

Fed up with gradualism and eager to challenge the status quo, the backers created the fund to support groups that push governments and the public to acknowledge the unfolding crisis, whether with glue or bullhorns.

“I have a lot of family members who are policymakers, and they tell me that when people are banging on their doors, they pay attention. It translates,” said Kennedy, who serves as a board member.

Who the fund supports

The Climate Emergency Fund focuses on supporting groups whose tactics—such as blocking traffic and leaving old boats in front of public buildings—might scare away other backers. Past grantees have included Mothers Out Front, Fire Drill Fridays, RISE and groups that helped organize the 2019 global school strike. How do they avoid legal issues? The group uses an experienced lawyer and is “very thoughtful” about how they structure their grant agreements, Salamon told me.

Sometimes, just completing the paperwork is a challenge. For instance, the fund recently gave a grant to an all-volunteer group that is one of many protesting the Line 3 pipeline in Minnesota. The process had to be paused for two weeks because the volunteers managing the process were at an encampment without cell service. “That’s the kind of thing that happens when you fund activists,” Salamon said.

Some groups come to the fund without existing fiscal sponsorship, and more than a third of all grantees are not 501(c)(3)s, according to Salamon. Support from the fund sometimes helps groups hire their first-ever employees, something she says the fund would like to do more often. One example is Extinction Rebellion NYC, a chapter of the British-based international movement organization, which received a grant from the fund this month.

“We were an all-volunteer organization,” said Yi Mun Chong, the organization’s strategy coordinator. “That brings a strain to how much we can actually do, because obviously, people are more focused on actually paying their bills.”

The organization’s $60,000 grant will pay for stipends for 12 members, from event planners and action organizers to photographers and writers, Chong told me. Many members have been working for the group without compensation for more than two years. The funds will also go to purchasing fliers, posters and digital ads.

With the new resources, the group plans to ramp up pressure on TV networks to devote more attention to the climate emergency. The organization has been holding weekly “low-risk” mobilizations in front of NBC’s Today Show, Chong said. But they also held an April “high-risk” action in which three women glued their hands to the glass windows of the show’s studio.

Going forward, NBC will remain their primary target, but they will take on other broadcasters in support of their sister chapters. The London branch, for instance, is focused on media mogul Rupert Murdoch, so last month, the group assembled in front of Fox News’ Midtown Manhattan building in clown costumes to protest the network’s misinformation.

Who supports the fund

The fund launched with a reported $500,000 gift from philanthropist and heiress Aileen Getty, who still serves on the board. According to Salamon, other top donors include Susie Tompkins Buell, founder of the clothing company Espirit, via her foundation; recording industry couple Frances and Steve Berman; Shannon O'Leary Joy via the EarthSense Foundation; the Kaplen Brothers Fund; and the Erol Foundation, which made a grant that went specifically to hiring a new executive director.

Most of the fund’s support comes from individual donors, either via direct donations or gifts from donor-advised funds or family foundations. It’s a top-heavy funding base, with 14% of the fund’s backers accounting for 89% of its funding over the past 12 months. The fund has raised more than $4.25 million in the two years since it was founded and distributed $3 million.

“A big part of my job is finding funders who are in emergency mode, who are freaked out, and who are willing to try something different, something that might freak them out,” Salamon said. “If you recognize that we need to be trying Hail Mary strategies, then we’re a vehicle to take funds and activate them in the streets.”

Aside from having two heirs from wealthy American families, the fund’s board of directors is stacked with experience from the film industry. Three of the six members have experience producing films. Kennedy, for instance, has made more than 40 documentaries, including one Emmy winner. Those connections have given the fund an unusual niche of supporters. “The type of people who tend to support documentaries tend to be more willing to take risks,” Kennedy told me.

While major donors make up most of its backers, the fund—which was named one of six “most high-impact, cost-effective, evidence-based” climate organizations by Vox in 2020—also gets a healthy flow of recurring donations via both its website and workplace gifts: nearly $12,000 a month, according to Salamon.

Bigger than a fund

Salamon estimates that in her prior job as executive director of Climate Mobilization, she spent more than half of her time fundraising. It sparked an interest in raising money—not just for her organization, but for the whole movement. The chance to do that work from within philanthropy drew her to the Climate Emergency Fund.

“There’s a lot of climate funders coming into play, but they’re largely going into gradualism, incrementalism, in various ways,” Salamon said. “We just really believe you can get so much more leverage, so much more bang for your buck.”

When my colleague Tate Williams covered the fund’s launch in the summer of 2019, its aspiration was to raise tens of millions of dollars. That has scaled back: Salamon said she hopes to raise more than $2 million this year. Ultimately, the goal is simply to get money to activists, not to establish an endowment. But Salamon also hopes to lead more philanthropists—individual and institutional—to act with urgency to back folks on the front lines.

“Nothing would change the climate movement faster than philanthropy saying, ‘This is an emergency, and we are going to be supporting organizations that are advocating for emergency speed transformation and not reform,’” Salamon said. “That’s my meta-goal. To get philanthropy into emergency mode and drastically increase support for the grassroots.”

With billionaires’ vanity trips to space receiving more attention than the emergency threatening the future of humanity, efforts to shift the narrative can use all the help they can get.

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