Funder Spotlight: Oak Foundation Has a New Plan for Green Giving. Here’s Where the Money’s Going

Sustainable food systems, including seafood, is a big focus for the oak foundation’s environment program. BankZa/shutterstock

IP Funder Spotlights provide quick rundowns of the grantmakers that are on our radar, including a few key details on how they operate and what they’re up to right now. Today, we take a look at a Geneva-based funder’s environment program, which has refocused on energy, food and natural security—and says it wants to put its history of top-down, siloed decision-making behind it.

What this funder cares about

The Oak Foundation’s environment program has recently refocused on three major systems: energy, food, and natural security. Its energy work prioritizes six areas—oil, gas, plastics and petrochemicals, clean power, transport and sustainable cities—with a goal of accelerating the transition from fossil fuels to clean energy. Its food support also addresses multiple issues—meat consumption, the wild food supply chain, sustainable seafood and food security for coastal and Indigenous communities—in a bid to shift how the world is fed. Its natural security grants are largely focused on local networks of people who protect wildlife and biodiversity while living in symbiotic relationships with the natural world. 

In addition to these three areas, the foundation has seven newly launched campaigns: ending offshore oil and gas extraction, reducing aviation pollution, promoting healthy and sustainable food in China, preventing bottom trawling, reducing pesticide use in Europe and Brazil, reducing animal antibiotic use in Europe, and stopping deforestation imports into the European Union. The foundation’s environment program gave out nearly $70 million in grants in 2020, making it by far the largest area of work in the funder’s wide-ranging portfolio, accounting for 22% of all giving. With an overarching goal of embracing more projects with broad impact, the foundation may end up pursuing many of these priorities in tandem with its other goals, making specific labels less useful, just like in life.

Why you should care

With $300 million-plus granted in each of the last few years, Oak Foundation ranks among the largest foundations in the world—and its environmental grantmaking program ranks even higher. Win a vote of confidence from Oak and you can expect a large check: Its average grant size is $700,000, and the upper end hits eight figures. It is also closely tied to other big players in environmental and climate philanthropy, while at the same time having a longer and deeper history than most major players of supporting movement organizations, including groups opposing fossil fuel infrastructure.

Where the money comes from

Oak Foundation was founded in 1983 by Alan Parker, who made his fortune as the tax lawyer and early partner in Duty Free Shoppers. Parker helped “devise the tangled web of offshore companies and subsidiaries” that allowed the company to avoid taxes, according to the New York Times. Rich company dividends and canny investments in hedge funds and technology firms grew that fortune further, the newspaper reported. He sold his 20% share in the luxury retail chain for $840 million in 1996.

Parker—not to be confused with the late filmmaker and six-time Academy Award winner Sir Alan Parker—was born in what is now Zimbabwe to a British civil servant. He lives in Geneva, Switzerland, where the foundation is based. 

Where the money goes

To start, if you are seeking a grant from Oak, make sure your cause lines up with its regional priorities. For instance, the foundation funds a lot of climate work, but has mostly moved away from U.S.-focused projects. On a regional note, the foundation also directs funds to national programs in four countries—Brazil, Denmark, India and Zimbabwe—and maintains offices in the latter three, as well as in the United Kingdom and the United States. You should be aware that large organizations are the most common recipients, from major green groups like Greenpeace and World Wildlife Fund to intermediary funds such as European Climate Foundation and Energy Foundation. There’s a chance, however, that trend will shift as the foundation looks to back more community-driven work under its new strategy.

Open door or barbed wire?

Anyone can try for a grant from Oak, but the odds are steep. The foundation accepts unsolicited letters of inquiry via its website, yet the majority of funding is not awarded through such contacts. 

To have any chance, the foundation recommends carefully reviewing the relevant program page to ensure proposals meet its priorities, geographic area and other requirements. The foundation’s grants database, which is searchable by geographic and topical tags, offers insight into past funding.

Latest big moves 

In June, Oak released a new five-year strategy for its environment program. Guided by the lessons of COVID, evaluations of the foundation’s recent successes and failures, and feedback from partners, the plan zeros in on the three topics mentioned above: energy, food and natural security. The foundation acknowledges its prior work was often guided by top-down decisions and conducted through highly siloed grant portfolios. The new strategy aims to shift to more community-driven and collaborative funding models and to take a more intersectional approach to these new objectives. 

“Like so many foundations and large not-for-profit organisations, we made some very top-down decisions about where to invest. And this is not to say there is no value in that,” said Leonardo Lacerda, the long-time director of the environment program, in a foundation article on the new plan. “But so much of our work over the last decade has proven that the closer you can put donors, decision making, and resources to the people and the events you are looking to impact, the more powerful the result.”

One interesting thing to know

Oak is not an acronym or family crest—it stands for the oak tree because it “embodies strength, resilience, longevity and protection.” The foundation is committed to perpetuity—like the tree, it wants to live on for generations—but it also hopes to reflect the interests of each passing generation. As the years pass, it will be interesting to see how that desire manifests itself.

What we’ll be watching

Oak is a Western foundation that is, by its own admission, attempting to cast off its tendency to impose home-office decisions on faraway grantees. It is also a climate funder attempting to support fast-growing developing economies’ transitions to clean energy and to boost locally led conservation efforts. These should be complementary desires, particularly in the energy space, with solar and wind now outcompeting coal and gas on price alone. Nevertheless, any successes—not just in their eyes, but in those of the communities where they are active—could be a model for other funders.