Who’s Getting the Latest Checks from Lukas Walton’s Green Grantmaking Shop?

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Last October, Lukas Walton broke new ground for America’s richest family, becoming the first of the third-generation heirs to the Walmart fortune to launch a substantial public profile for his then-$1.2 billion foundation, Builders Initiative, and his larger philanthropic and investment platform.

The move unveiled an operation largely focused on the environment—food, agriculture, climate, oceans—and offering a mix of support for equity-oriented initiatives like the Justice40 Accelerator and efforts to drive market-based change, particularly through its investments. It also left unanswered questions, as, despite some transparency around its investments, the team has yet to release a complete list of grantees and awards. 

This month, the team shared details with Inside Philanthropy that provide fresh insight into where it’s placing its biggest bets. The 35-year-old’s foundation has made two major, five-year pledges: $30 million annually to the Catalyst program of Bill Gates’ Breakthrough Energy, and $20 million a year to climate philanthropy veteran Hal Harvey’s relatively new policy shop, Climate Imperative. Walton’s team also plans $10 million in grantmaking this year to climate equity efforts in the Midwest, backing grantees like the Chicago Frontline Funding Initiative.

The grants reinforce the impression left by the initial details released by Builders Initiative last year. Its grantmaking spans worthy branches of the climate movement, but based on what we know so far, the biggest checks and largest share of dollars seem to be headed toward technological solutions and national policy development. That’s in line with longstanding patterns in climate funding that have drawn criticism over the years, including from advocates calling for greater support for grassroots movement-building and local action.

That said, the team indicated that it will grant more than $200 million this year. The recipients for the remaining $140 million-plus in grants—which will go to its programs on oceans, food and agriculture, Chicago and COVID response, among other priorities—could change that balance. Oceans—a portfolio that will total around $35 million—and climate and energy are its biggest areas of grantmaking, according to the foundation. And some of Builders Initiative’s first steps in their climate justice portfolio could set the stage for much bigger giving in that area down the road.

What attracted Builders Initiative to these two big-dollar outfits

Breakthrough Energy is practically synonymous with Bill Gates, who authored a book on climate change during the pandemic—and its leadership includes veterans of Facebook, the White House, NRDC and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Climate Imperative, meanwhile, is led by Harvey, the engineer and former ClimateWorks Foundation CEO who has been a key figure in climate change funding for decades, including the unsuccessful push for a federal cap-and-trade system nearly a decade ago. His current outfit’s other top leaders include two veterans of the Sierra Club’s Beyond Coal campaign, Bruce Nilles and Mary Anne Hitt. 

It was such leaders that attracted Builders Initiative, said Bruce McNamer, the foundation’s president, whose experience includes heading a Washington, D.C.-area community foundation and a business-oriented anti-poverty organization, as well as several roles in the tech sector. “The thing about Climate Imperative that appealed to us is the fact that these are serious people, highly credible people, thinking about policy on these dimensions,” he said. “Similar with Catalyst: credible partners thinking about how you bring some of these emergent technologies down in cost.”

There’s also a family connection to both choices. Lukas’ cousin Sam Walton is a supporter of Climate Imperative, while another cousin, Ben Walton, and his wife, Lucy Ana, are among the investors in Breakthrough Energy Ventures, the venture capital arm of Bill Gates’ operation. 

“They trade notes,” McNamer said of the cousins. “We certainly talked to Sam and his colleagues as we were considering our participation in Climate Imperative. And they were quite helpful.”

There was another draw: As “anchor partners” in the campaign, they get to participate in Catalyst’s leadership council, McNamer said. He hopes that can inform the foundation’s work—and they can contribute to the group’s deliberations.

What will these pledges—$150 million to Catalyst and $100 million to Climate Imperative—support? Catalyst’s grant will support its efforts to drive technological innovation in direct air capture, clean hydrogen, long-duration energy storage, and sustainable aviation fuel. The money for Climate Imperative will support development of big-picture policy. 

Backing climate equity in the Midwest

While Builders Initiative is backing global efforts to address technological gaps and develop policy, it has a very local lens when it comes to climate equity. The foundation is focused on the Midwest—and building long-term capacity among such groups. 

“What we’re trying to do is build direct, one-to-one relationships with the people here in the region,” said Ryan Strode, who was hired late last year as the foundation’s program officer for climate equity. Strode most recently managed climate and environmental justice grantmaking for Franciscan Sisters of Mary, a faith-based Missouri foundation, and earlier spent nearly nine years with Arabella Advisors, according to his LinkedIn. 

The foundation plans to start by building relationships and trust with front-line leaders in Chicago, build out needed infrastructure in collaboration with those groups and then bring that model to other cities around the Midwest. Strode suggested it would be slow to scale.

“You can only go as fast as they’re ready and able to go. We’re trying to do this with care and attention,” he said, later adding: “It’s going to take us time to figure it out.”

Many other large-scale funders have turned to major climate justice intermediaries when they want to give big fast, but lack the relationships or capacity to make oodles of smaller grants to local groups. Strode noted Builders Initiative has several grantees in common with one national grassroots funding intermediary, the Climate and Clean Energy Equity Fund. But mostly, it is working with local and regional groups, such as the Chicago Frontline Funding Initiative and the Midwest Environmental Justice Network. Both are among the grantees of Strode’s former employer.

Builders Initiative is also taking a shot at flipping the script on a classic environmental funding dynamic. As Strode describes it: “Oftentimes, larger funders like us fund big NGOs to then regrant to smaller grassroots groups. That has resulted in a pretty difficult power dynamic over time. And, frankly, neither of those kinds of groups prefer that arrangement.”

Instead, Builders Initiative gave a one-year, $500,000 grant to Blacks in Green (BIG), a Chicago-based network of groups working to create “green, self-sustaining, mixed-income, walkable villages” within Black neighborhoods. BIG can subgrant that funding as needed to larger organizations, such as the Environmental Defense Fund and NRDC, to support their work. It’s the first time it has tried such an approach, but it is in conversations about several other similarly structured projects.

More climate money for the Midwest

About a quarter of the greenhouse gas emissions in the United States come from the Midwest. As Deborah Philbrick, a program officer in MacArthur Foundation’s Climate Solutions initiative who is focused on the Midwest, told me in a recent Q&A: “You’re not going to get to where we need to be, in terms of our greenhouse gas emissions, if you’re only focused on the coasts. It’s just a numbers game.”

And yet, the Midwest receives just 11% of climate and clean energy funding, according to numbers from Environmental Grantmakers Association’s Tracking the Field database provided to IP. That’s good enough for third place among U.S. regions—and much better than the Gulf Coast, for instance, which receives just 0.3% of funding despite well-documented pollution problems—but well below its share of emissions.

Funding for environmental justice groups makes up a tiny sliver of that already small slice. According to an oft-cited report from Building Equity and Alignment for Impact and the Tishman Environment and Design Center, just 0.7% of green funding from Midwest grantmakers went to such organizations, or $1 million out of $134 million in total grants.

“The Midwest has been a hole in funding for climate and environmental justice for a long time,” said Strode, adding he was very excited for the opportunity to do this work “at scale” in the region.

With this $10 million round of regional funding and other potential investments within this year’s docket, Builders Initiative could start to change that narrative. Whether it also contributes to ending the national gap between climate justice groups and historically better-funded technology and policy operations remains to be seen.