As it Takes on Climate and Poverty, a Funder Launches a Research Initiative to Guide Action
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Bangladesh is experiencing increasingly severe and frequent flooding. Sk Hasan Ali/shutterstock
Last fall, King Philanthropies launched a new effort that immediately ran into an obstacle. Founded with a mission of improving the lives of the world’s most impoverished, the foundation was looking into doing more to address the impacts of climate change on the roughly 800 million people who live on less than $2 a day.
Rising temperatures, record droughts, failed crops and other climate shifts are impacting communities around the world, but the greatest immediate damage is hitting the world’s poorest people. As the foundation’s staff did their homework, they could not find the data-driven recommendations for action that they sought.
Their response was unveiled late last month, when King announced a $25 million gift over five years to establish the King Climate Action Initiative (K-CAI) at MIT’s well-known Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL), whose leaders include a couple of Nobel Prize laureates. The initiative marks King’s formal entry into climate philanthropy, with potentially much more to come through the funder’s new Climate and Poverty portfolio, and it aspires to provide a path for other funders seeking similar guidance.
“The urgent need to address climate change is on our minds. But there is a woeful lack of evidence about effective interventions that lie at the intersection of climate change mitigation and poverty alleviation,” Kim Starkey, president of the foundation, told me via email. “In J-PAL, we have found a partner that is able and eager to fill that gap in knowledge.”
K-CAI will support research on how best to tackle those twin challenges and look to scale up promising solutions through partnerships with governments and organizations in nations around the world. It will focus on four areas—mitigation (reducing emissions), pollution reduction (reducing co-pollutants), adaptation (solutions for low-income communities), and energy access (expanding affordable energy options).
“Many leaders are searching for the next great innovation that will save us from climate change, but there is no silver-bullet solution to complex problems like climate change and poverty,” said Claire Walsh, K-CAI project director, by email. “Policymakers around the world need a playbook of dozens of effective policy, technology, behavioral and program solutions to address these two global crises.”
The initiative also aspires to foster new relationships between the climate change and international development communities, which Starkey said her staff found “rarely collaborate and often speak entirely different languages.”
“A typical climate solution, for example, will focus on reductions in greenhouse-gas emissions, while a typical international development solution will highlight its impact on building human capital,” she told me. “As a result, we found it difficult to identify solutions that simultaneously address climate change and poverty.”
The Couple Behind King Philanthropies
King Philanthropies was founded in 2016 by longtime philanthropists Robert “Bob” and Dorothy “Dottie” King, who made it to No. 8 on the Chronicle of Philanthropy’s list of top givers from 2011, thanks to a big gift to Stanford University that year. Bob founded the investment firm Peninsula Capital, which is no longer operating.
The Kings’ net worth isn’t publicly known. But the size of past gifts—including at least a couple of eight- and nine-figure sums—demonstrate the Kings have serious giving power. And they intend to give the majority of their wealth away: In March 2020, the couple signed the Giving Pledge.
King Philanthropies has not been the couple’s sole means of giving. It has an endowment of only about $44 million, and gives between $3.9 and $4.5 million a year, according to the foundation’s most recent public 990 filing. Moreover, Starkey told me that most of the foundation’s grants are disbursed through a donor-advised fund, and thus do not register on 990s.
The foundation has always focused on extreme poverty, with a special emphasis on leadership. King looks for organizations with a clear mission, defined strategy, and a commitment to rigorous evaluation, elements Starkey championed in a book she co-wrote, “Engine of Impact.”
“One feature of King Philanthropies that makes it distinctive, I think, is our strategic emphasis supporting high-performing leaders and organizations,” Starkey said. “In our view, it is not enough to fund promising programs or initiatives.”
Past Giving Favors Universities, Personal Ties
The Kings have frequently given to higher education, with Stanford being a primary beneficiary. In 2011, the couple gave the university $150 million to establish an institute known as Stanford SEED, which addresses poverty by training and supporting entrepreneurs in developing countries. Last year, a gift of an undisclosed amount from the Kings led the university to give a new name, the Stanford King Center on Global Development, to a campus center focused on data-driven approaches to global poverty. Another King initiative, Global Scholars, supports scholarships for students from low-income countries. They have given sums to Stanford, Dartmouth College and the University of Wisconsin, Madison.
As is so often the case with donors, even those focused on evidence-based efforts, there are some personal connections at play. Bob earned his MBA from Stanford University in 1960, while Dottie is an alumna of the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Also, the Kings, who live part time in Menlo Park, which neighbors Stanford’s Palo Alto campus, have hosted international students studying at the university for more than 50 years.
“Opening our home to these students from around the world brought us unimaginable joy, learning and opportunities,” they wrote in their Giving Pledge statement. “We came to understand that our ‘neighbors’ go far beyond those who live in our town—they include the estimated 700 million people who are living in extreme poverty.”
While the grant to K-CAI and the foundation’s Climate and Poverty portfolio are new, they are not the first climate-change-related grants by King. Grants to international organizations like One Acre Fund and BRAC have supported farmers in adapting to climate change through measures like purchasing drought-resistant seeds, shifting their farming practices, or securing crop insurance. Another grantee, Landesa, helps small-scale farmers secure rights to land, giving them a reason to make investments—from planting trees to preventing erosion—that mitigate climate change.
The Kings’ climate philanthropy also goes beyond the funds flowing through their foundation. As an example, Starkey said they are among the supporters of the Kennebunkport Climate Initiative, a recently launched organization aimed at organizing young people to push for action against climate change. Again, there is a personal link: The Kings live part of the time in Kennebunkport, Maine, which predictions say could be mostly underwater in 80 years with no action on climate change.
The newly announced initiative isn’t the only reason to believe climate change may account for a growing portion of their giving in the years to come. In a public letter from the couple reflecting on the top 10 themes of 2019, the concluding item was titled “Addressing climate change as we look to the future.”
“Climate change is a defining issue of our time,” they wrote. “We are in the process of intentionally exploring ways that we might do more within the context of our work addressing extreme poverty. There’s no time to wait!”
