Decades in the Making, a New Alliance Is Bringing Together Funds from the Global South

Maria Amália Souza kicked off the December 9, 2021 video conference with a chuckle and a beaming smile.

She had waited decades for this moment, but with the pandemic upending everyone’s schedules, she thought no one would show up. She need not have worried. More than 100 colleagues ended up calling in from around the world.

“We are really amazed that you all are interested in this effort that we’ve been dreaming of for about 20 years,” she told attendees. “Some of us longer.”

Those words kicked off the official launch of the Alianza Socioambiental Fondos del Sur, or the Socio-Environmental Funds of the Global South. With members spread from the Amazon basin to the cape of Africa and the remote corners of Indonesia, the alliance aims to be a collaborative force and united front for a world-spanning group of funds that move money to local people.

The group is getting off the ground as a new era of climate philanthropy dawns. Over the last few years, a new generation of billionaires has become the biggest force in environmental philanthropy, cutting massive checks — sometimes unprecedentedly so — to a range of green groups. Wielding enormous pocketbooks but often lacking the infrastructure, relationships or knowledge to channel that money to groups on the ground, one favored approach for these new heavyweight donors has been to pass funding to established regrantors, both in the U.S. and abroad. Among those beneficiaries are a couple of Alianza’s founding member organizations.

Souza cofounded and long served as the executive director for one such organization: Fondo Casa Socioambiental, or Casa Socio-Environmental Fund. The group, for which she now serves as a senior advisor, received $5 million from MacKenzie Scott in 2022, part of more than $150 million in awards the celebrated megadonor issued that year to green groups, most of them to grassroots environmental justice organizations. A year before, Samdhana Institute, another founding member of the alliance, got a still-undisclosed amount from Scott.

Yet even as funding flows from deep-pocketed U.S. donors to a growing constellation of green regrantors, the lion’s share of it is still being distributed by Global North organizations, an enduring pattern that those in recipient countries have long decried. Scott’s checks for Casa and Samdhana are exceptions to the rule. A few other Alizana members have received indirect bounty from U.S. billionaires, among other funders, via groups like Global Greengrants Fund, which helped seed Casa and some other Alianza members. And a few billionaire climate operations, like Laurene Powell Jobs’ Waverley Street Foundation and the Bezos Earth Fund, are sending some grants to grassroots groups and regrantors in the Global South.

As the billionaires and the field at large grapple with how to move money not just abroad but into local hands, Alianza stands out in a growing field for its collaborative approach. Eva Rehse, network and ecosystems director at the global philanthropic support organization WINGS, which the alliance joined last September, said that even in a philanthropic landscape that sees new climate intermediaries opening “left, right and center,” Alianza is emerging as a “critical actor” given its members’ deep expertise in funding and partnering with grassroots groups.

“They’re uniquely qualified to speak with and on behalf of movements, because they come from these movements,” Rehse said. “The other thing that makes them different is that, unlike other, similar collaborations, they're not Global North-driven.”

“Finding common ground to be a united voice”

Alianza’s vision is right there in its name: to be a network of funds from all across the Global South.

That was not quite the case upon its launch in late 2021, when seven of its nine founding members were located in Latin America. But the alliance has since added additional funds in Africa and Asia, which now account for nearly a third of its 14 partners. So far, all members have come from the geographic Global South, but the alliance considers the term more of a political one than a strictly geographic one, Souza said.

Despite their far-flung origins, members are united by their commitment to working in their local language(s), granting in local currency and focusing on grassroots organizations. Participatory processes are also core to Alianza’s members’ operations. The network’s newest member, the Youth Climate Justice Fund, is something of a geographical exception as a global funder, but otherwise operates similarly.

“There is no protection of this planet and the important biomes if resources don’t reach the hands of the people who are their guardians,” Souza said. “It’s not about any specific issues, it’s about all of them.”

Members of the alliance most often call themselves “funds,” with some adding “activist” or “socio-envionmental” to their self-descriptions. While at IP we often use the term “regrantor” as a neutral descriptor for any organization taking in philanthropic funding for redistribution, including in this article for clarity, Souza told me in a conversation last year she does not use either that term or “intermediary.” “These wash out all the value of what we do,” Souza said. That echoes a sentiment I have heard from some others running funds outside of the U.S., even if there are also funds that self-identify with those terms.

Early support for the alliance’s members came from funders large and small, including a few who were on that fateful December call. Open Society Foundations issued grants almost immediately to three Alianza members. Two regrantor organizations, the Global Fund for Community Foundations and the Inter-American Foundation, provided additional seed grants. The Charles Stewart Mott Foundation was another early supporter. But it was a billionaire family that really got the alliance moving. Alianza received its first-ever grant of $8 million from the Ballmer Group through the Forest, People, Climate collaborative.

It was, to some degree, a leap of faith. “I was like, we don't even exist yet,” Souza said. “Like, there wasn't even governance and structures in place.” But a year later, the network was ready for its check.

Today, the alliance has a two-person staff, led by Juliana da Veiga Lima Tinoco, who started as executive coordinator last June, and a three-organization steering committee, consisting of Casa, the Tindzila Fund in Mozambique and the Colombia-based Fondo Emerger.

The alliance’s work is still in its early stages as it builds alignment between peers operating in different countries, languages and cultures. Taking funding to regrant to members is not currently part of the plan, though Souza said “we’re not saying never.” Aside from monthly meetings and an annual in-person gathering, first steps include a 40-page anniversary report published last year and a delegation at COP28, among other conferences. Alianza also began participating in two G20 working groups this year. Another initial step: a lot of listening.

“What South-South collaboration actually means is to be knowledgeable of the differences and the diversity — and find common ground for us to be this united voice,” Tinoco said. “Most of all is being able to listen.”

“Networks and coalitions like Alianza are so important”

Alliance members come not just from around the world but also across the philanthropic spectrum — and many have deep ties to each other. Take Casa and Tindzila. For the former, creating the alliance was the fulfillment of a decades-long dream. For the latter, joining as a founding member was part of its own newly birthed vision for the future.

Alda Salomão, Tindzila’s director, launched the fund in 2019 after a meeting with Souza and other Casa staff. Salomão’s background was in land governance, advocacy and research — not grantmaking. But Casa provided her with an example of how a Global South regrantor could work, and helping launch the alliance offered community.

“I'm still learning how to manage [a] philanthropy institution, so being part of a network of philanthropic institutions was also a learning opportunity for me and for my team,” said Salomão, who is on Alianza’s steering committee.

For Lisa Chamberlain, executive director of the South Africa-based Environmental Justice Fund, the alliance offered expertise as she navigated the perilous path of scaling up her operation. “For a new fund like ours, in a kind of start-up and growth mode, the temptation is to just expand out exponentially,” she said. “It's difficult to resist that urge, but we've all seen organizations do that, spin out and implode.”

Chamberlain’s organization was the second African fund to join Alianza. She believes the volume of money flowing into climate philanthropy makes joining forces even more important. “No single fund is going to be able to absorb the kind of money that is increasingly available — and shouldn’t precisely because of those risks,” she said. “It’s why networks and coalitions like Alianza are so important.”

“Big conservation funders fell short”

Alianza is the realization of a long-time vision, and also an attempt to close a long-running philanthropic gap.

“Big conservation funders fell short on their strategy and they couldn't see why it wasn't working — and they still can’t, a lot of them, but they're beginning to,” Souza said. The alliance aims to marshal evidence that “make it impossible to ignore.”

It’s a big ask, but recent history has played host to such realignments. Major foundations are now just beginning to devote long-overdue recognition — and funding — to the critical role Indigenous peoples and local communities play in preserving a habitable planet, on the basis of overwhelming scientific evidence. Most notably, a coalition of governments and private philanthropies pledged $1.7 billion in 2021 for Indigenous protection of tropical forests.

At the same time, these regions continue to lag well behind the rest of the world in their share of climate philanthropy, despite some positive momentum. Climate funding for Africa and Latin America spiked in 2022, up 38% and 15%, respectively, but those two regions and Asia have typically received just 10% of foundation support for climate mitigation over the last five years, according to ClimateWorks Foundation’s annual report.

Souza is clear that she sees the alliance’s work to route money directly to the frontlines of the Global South as complimentary to what is already being funded by major foundations. “It’s not about one or the other,” she said. “They should have gone further, they’re beginning to, and we want to make sure that they go beyond faster, because we have no time.”

Alianza Members:
* founding member