Eight Questions for Lydia Avila, Program Officer with the Climate and Clean Energy Equity Fund
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Lydia Avila, program officer, Climate and Clean Energy Equity Fund
In late 2020, about one year after Lydia Avila joined the Climate and Clean Energy Equity Fund, the organization was one of three climate justice-focused funds that received $43 million each from Jeff Bezos. Another recipient? The Hive Fund for Climate and Gender Justice, which Avila had joined as a board member the year before.
The grants were a historic infusion of funds to the growing climate justice movement, with several of the gifts exceeding what the recipients had received throughout their entire existence to date. As Avila emphasized to me, it also denoted a long-running rise in support for groups like the Equity Fund and greater attention—if not always transformative funding—to equity and justice within the environmental movement.
From her positions with both organizations, not to mention as board member of Greenpeace USA and on the steering committee of the Climate and Energy Funders Group, the former organizer has had a front row seat both to the impacts of the Amazon founder’s huge grants and the rapidly changing landscape of climate philanthropy.
Avila got her start as an organizer in college, working on efforts to ensure college access and retention for others like her: people of color, immigrants, first-generation college students, low-income students. That work eventually led her to the “sheer overwhelming crisis” of environmental justice, she said.
She went on to organize for the Sierra Club before returning to school to study nonprofit management at NYU. She later led the Power Shift Network, where her experiences trying to raise money for the organization made her determined to be a different type of funder. I spoke to her about the past year-plus, Jeff Bezos’ role as climate funder and what gives her hope.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Before the Climate and Clean Energy Fund, you worked in environmental and movement organizations, including the Sierra Club and Power Shift Network. What led you to the grantmaking side?
One of my biggest challenges at Power Shift Network was fundraising. Because of my background, I didn’t know anybody in the funding world, or wealthy donors or anything like that. It was really hard for me to get my foot in the door. I relied a lot on my predecessors and colleagues and friends in the field to grow our donor list. I was able to triple that, but it was a lot of really hard work.
One of the most frustrating things about the fundraising game was sometimes, I would have meetings with program officers that either blatantly admitted, or it was clear that they didn’t understand the fundamental theory of change that we were operating under. I had a program officer literally admit, “I don’t know anything about organizing, so can you break it down for me?” I was like, “Oh, my gosh, how is this person going to make a decision about the value of what I’m doing?” Like, that’s insane.
I wanted to be the program officer that I would have wanted for myself. Somebody who understands grassroots power-building. Somebody who understands building and wielding political power. Somebody who understands what it’s like to be an executive director and wearing a bunch of hats, including fundraiser. Somebody who’s compassionate about the ups and downs of running an organization and doesn’t place judgment on you because of the mistakes—because we all make mistakes. All of those things made me want to take on this role.
In late 2020, roughly one year after you joined the fund, your organization was one of three climate-justice-focused funds that got $43 million from Jeff Bezos. What has the last year-plus looked like for the fund?
The fund’s been around for six years and throughout that time, many of our funders have grown with us, they have stuck with us and have increased their grantmaking and/or made their grants multi-year. That’s been a huge part of our growth. I want to make it clear that the work that we’re doing is a result of a community of funders that have grown with us, and not just the Bezos Fund. But of course, that was big, a big impact.
We always intended to really deepen our investment in our existing states and expand to other states. That was always part of the plan, it was just a matter of how quickly we can do it. The Bezos funding did help expand and deepen our work. To put it into context, we started in 2016 with just three states and now we’re at 13, with likely two more added this year. In 2021 alone, a year after the influx of funding, we added five states. So it was quite a bit of growth very quickly. But again, I would guess that all of our funders have increased their grants and made them multi-year, if not the vast majority.
How has that funding impacted the organizations you fund that are working on the ground?
We’re standardizing multi-year core support for our grassroots grantees. Pretty much all of them at this point start at two years. They’re enough to add a whole new staff member, or at least like the equivalent there. They don’t have to, obviously, hire one staff member; they can spread the love around, but that’s kind of how we think about it.
Within our Policy Accelerator program, which does policy coaching and technical assistance, we’re launching this year a policy fellowship, a three-year grant that allows select grantees to hire a policy fellow, somebody to help them build up their policy capacity expertise around climate equity and energy equity issues. That was a huge need that was identified. These organizations that we support are led by Black, Indigenous and people of color and/or women. They’re just not as invested in, in that respect. They may have a lot of organizers and they might have a communications and social media person, but they don’t necessarily have a whole lot of policy capacity. Especially not somebody that specializes in climate and energy. It’s unfortunately sort of a luxury in the types of organizations that we fund. But it’s a need, because climate and energy policy is very wonky, it can get very complicated very quickly and the devil’s in the details. So the Policy Fellowship is to address a gap in the field.
The other kind of new thing that we started late last year is our climate disinformation war room, which is also a response to concerns in the field about misinformation and disinformation that is being spread by the fossil fuel industry and other special interests about the benefits of fossil fuels—and lies about the transition to sustainable renewable energy. It’s gone beyond just, like, climate denial to stoking fears in communities about what they say are the “dangers” of solar, wind energy, or whatever. We’re trying to get ahead of that. We’re currently doing this in four states. It’s a consulting firm, A/B Partners, that we’re working with that specializes in that and is working directly with our grantees. We’re hoping to expand it to all 13 states.
I would assume there’s some tension between the urgency of the crisis and the desire to get funds out the door versus the need to build relationships and understand the communities where you work. How have you balanced those imperatives?
That’s a great question. There’s sort of a process and formula that we use to identify and hone in on our grantees fairly quickly. I don’t know that it’s changed a whole lot because we have to get money out the door and it’s a climate crisis. More than anything, we’re just doing it at a larger scale. We’ve brought on two program officers in the last eight months. It was just me for like a year. [Laughs.] We’ve hired three more people and we’re hopefully gonna hire two more program officers. So we’re just trying to do it with more hands on, but not making the process any less meaningful.… The relationships still need to be invested in. That simply means we need more people to have those relationships.
Bezos has emerged as perhaps the largest climate justice funder, yet the company he founded and built, Amazon, has both immense climate impacts and a checkered labor history, and he’s now working on space exploration. As one of his grantees, how do you feel about those contrasts?
He has done a lot because there’s a lot for him to do, right? There’s just so many resources at his disposal that, of course, he’s made a huge splash. But I think that compared to what he is able to do, and has done, it actually should be more. And he needs to be doing more on racial justice and equity in particular.
I will say his team has been doing a good job of talking to the movement and to grassroots leaders. From what Roger [Kim, the head of the fund and a long-time grassroots environmental justice leader,] has told us, Bezos’s team has been very open and receptive to hearing from us.
But I’ll just leave it at that: There’s still more to do, especially around equity issues within the climate movement.
A New School study infamously found environmental justice groups received 1.3% of grantmaking from major climate funders. Research finds that imbalance is not just a moral but a strategic failing. Where do you feel the field is along the road to equity?
The conversations are happening. I’m just not sure that the dollars are following the conversation. I haven’t seen great evidence of that.… Unfortunately, the lack of substantial dollars is probably an indication that people are treating it like a checkbox. “Okay, we gave to a few Black and brown organizations, cool.” But not actually looking at it as a very key strategic priority.
If it was, then you’d be moving more than just like, you know, half a million dollars once a year. It would be drastically, and sometimes fundamentally, changing the way that you think about your grantmaking. And I just haven’t seen that, really, from big institutional foundations. The organizations that work with those most impacted we believe should be the ones leading. Instead, you’re funding them, like, all you want them to do is sign off on a piece of policy that maybe a Big Green group wrote, as opposed to them actually shaping and leading the policymaking and the solutions.
What are you most excited about in the climate justice space?
I hate to be corny, but I really do love my job and I love the people that I work with. They give me hope every single day. I’m like, “Thank God that you’re the people working on this now and that we’re able to invest in you.” They’re just such passionate leaders. They care so much about their constituents, their community. They look like their community and they come from the community that they’re working in. I know that a lot of them are dealing with a lot within their organizations and personally and whatnot, but their strength really gives me hope. It’s easy to become a climate pessimist or a doomsdayer if you don’t know people who are doing the work.
What would you most like to see in climate philanthropy?
I’m not in the democracy funding space as much, but we do join those calls. A key part of our strategy is that our folks are advocating for voting rights and a lot of them work on redistricting. But I would say I’m an exception. I don’t see a lot of climate funders joining those democracy spaces. In fact, there are a lot of climate funders that don’t fund democracy work, as though they don’t see the value or haven’t made resources available to fund things like voting rights and fighting voter disenfranchisement. To me, that’s very worrisome.
If we don’t protect democracy and the right to vote, and make voting as easy as possible for our front-line communities… we’re just going to continue to lose opportunities for good policy to be passed at every level—city, state, federal. We’re working in these silos of, “Oh, those are democracy funders and those are climate funders.” But actually, we need to be strategizing together a lot more. And climate funders, I want them to realize the value—and put money behind—protecting our democracy. It feels very fragile right now.
Correction: An earlier version of this article misspelled the name of consulting firm A/B Partners.
