Six Questions for Deborah Philbrick, MacArthur Climate Solutions Program Officer

Deborah Philbrick, Program Officer, Climate Solutions, MacArthur Foundation

Deborah Philbrick’s first job out of graduate school was at Elevate Energy, a national nonprofit that works on energy efficiency access. The first project she ever worked on? A MacArthur Foundation-backed initiative on energy efficiency and affordable housing.

It proved to be a prophetic assignment. After nearly seven years in research and policy-related roles at Elevate, managing projects including the development of environmental justice processes for a $30 million solar program in Illinois, she joined the Chicago-based grantmaker at the end of 2019. 

She’s now a program officer in MacArthur’s Climate Solutions initiative, and was recently tapped to lead the team’s new democracy-focused portfolio. Not that it’s a wholly new area for the $8 billion grantmaker. Philbrick was part of a group at the foundation that distributed $15 million from the grantmaker’s $125 million 2020 bond sale to groups working on democracy.

“That gave me even more of an opportunity to really dig in with some groups that exclusively do democracy, as opposed to groups that are just working at that intersection between climate and democracy,” she told me. “It helped me hone those thoughts and really help figure out how those two pieces” interact.

Her new task is to guide $5 million in grants over the next three years at the intersection of climate and democracy, with a focus on the Midwest. The foundation board will vote on the first slate of grants in mid-March, and the team plans to focus a future round of funding on Texas. MacArthur is already supporting a range of related grantees, including youth engagement group Action for the Climate Emergency, national movement nonprofit Hip Hop Caucus Education Fund, League of Conservation Voters Education Fund, and Texas-based Lone Star Legal Aid.

I spoke to Philbrick about MacArthur’s climate funding, what outsiders should know about working in the Midwest, and what her beloved Liverpool F.C. soccer team can teach the climate movement. 

This interview was edited for length and clarity.

You lead MacArthur’s work at the intersection of climate action, democracy and voting rights. Take me through its origins. How did it get started?

It has a couple of different origin pieces, as most origin stories do. MacArthur’s Climate Solutions saw this pivot in our strategy toward the end of 2019–2020 that had to be board approved. Even before that happened, the Climate Solutions team and the foundation was investing in projects that would change the political discourse around climate. That was through our strategic communications work or our partnership with the League of Conservation Voters Education Fund, even though that was kind of narrowly focused around state policy. 

This was very much done with this lens of: We have a lot of the climate solutions at hand. We don’t have all of them, right? There’s still some R&D that needs to be done, there’s going to need to be some innovations. But we know so much of what we need to do and what we don’t have is the political will to make that happen. There were already currents of that in the previous iteration of the strategy. How little political will there is, and how much needs to be developed, really became apparent in our strategy refresh. 

How is MacArthur approaching this work? What types of groups is the foundation supporting, and what type of change is it hoping to spark?

We are looking at it through a state-based lens, as we do across the entire Climate Solutions portfolio. A real kind of turning point that we have made is that not everybody needs to come at this issue climate-first. If somebody cares most about police reform, child care reform, paid sick leave and also climate—climate, in my opinion, can be the fourth-most important thing to somebody. You still want to make sure that they have an equal right to vote. It really comes down to that. There is an active effort right now to suppress individuals’ votes. I don’t think that it is a coincidence that the areas that have the highest levels of air pollution also have the lowest rate of voter turnout. When you are systemically taking away access to resources for a group of individuals, of course, they’re not going to necessarily have the bandwidth to vote, as well.

You’ll see grants being made in the next year that are specifically designed to make sure that barriers are removed from people’s ability to cast a vote. We should be making voting easier for people. People should be able to vote at 7 p.m., if they want to; at 3 a.m., if they want to. So removing those policy barriers is something that you will see in the portfolio.

Also, your more traditional, on-the-ground digital organizing strategies—to the extent that we can in 2022 do in-person organizing—to really make sure that people know what their options are and how to cast a ballot. It’s completely nonpartisan work, but we want to make sure that people know. In states like Texas, in states like Ohio—which I believe has the second-highest rate of voter purging outside of Georgia—if you’re not part of the system, and if you’re constantly being kicked out of it and you don’t even know that you are being kicked out, then how do you know? That being said, MacArthur does not fund voter registration exclusively. But lots of those other pieces.

What’s an example of that funding?

We recently made an award to Lone Star Legal Aid, which is one of three legal aids across the state of Texas. This one handles Harris County, and the greater Houston area, as well. It’s like a 2- or 3-million-person footprint. That was specifically to fund their environmental justice team. They’re representing individual community members to make sure that they can accurately access FEMA dollars. So it’s allowing community members to play a different part of our democracy, right? 

Democracy work is not only voter registration and recruiting poll workers, which is incredibly important, and making sure that people know what their rights are and how to get out to vote. It’s also being able to access some of these more esoteric parts of the way that decisions get made. It might be putting public comments into an EPA rule-making session. There’s all of these different pieces of access. The bottom line here is trying to make sure that people who care passionately about climate and maybe not explicitly climate — but maybe having clean air so that their kids don’t have worse asthma attacks — have different points of access into these systems.

What attitudes do you encounter among other philanthropists funding the different elements of this intersection? Do you encounter funders who do not see a connection? If so, what do you tell them? 

Our top-line issue is decreasing greenhouse gas emissions. That is the North Star for a lot of funders. And we have some differences in how we think that gets done. There’s certainly some funders who are less interested in the people-power-generated piece of this. There are some funders who think that the power lies within either more grass-tops individuals or the incredible scientists who are doing a ton of work that absolutely needs to be done. But we are choosing to invest in different types of people. 

And what do I say to those people? I think that any funder—regardless of if you are an issue-based funder—if you are not paying attention to what’s happening to our democracy right now, that you are being a bit irresponsible. Because nobody’s issue will be able to make any progress if we don’t have democracy.

You’re focused on the Midwest. What should those from outside the region know about the climate landscape there, both the opportunities and challenges?

The latest number is that 26% of the country’s greenhouse gas emissions come from the Midwest. 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, right? That’s the math. 

Another thing that is really important is that there has to be a test case that happens here for people to believe. You can’t walk into a room with a bunch of Minnesotans, with a bunch of Michiganders, with a bunch of Illinoisans and say, “Oh, this really awesome program was off the charts in Vermont. It was off the charts in California.” They’re just not going to believe that that can be replicated. But if you say, “Oh, this went really well in Ohio, or this went really well in Wisconsin,” then all of a sudden, it seems feasible.

Finally, I saw you’re a Liverpool FC fan, which is my dad’s team, as well. Curious how you became a fan and whether you draw any lessons on climate from the team or from the English Premier League?

[Laughs.] I became a Liverpool fan because I was studying in England for a summer doing an internship at the Department of Health. I started shopping around for a team and I went to Liverpool. I fell in love with the city and I fell in love with the club. 

In terms of the parallels, I think it’s really important to have folks that can drop back and be a really strong midfield. If anything, it might be a good lesson that your midfield is the most important thing and not to get too hung up on your striker. 

Mostly, there’s gonna be draws and that’s OK. I’ve never really thought about this, but a draw is still a point. [In league soccer, a win is worth three points, a draw one and a loss zero.] Lots of times, in the climate fight, a draw can also be a point. Especially in the climate community, where you have so many different stakeholders, who you’re trying to get to kind of swim in the same direction, although they certainly might not agree with each other all the time. Sometimes, getting people to not fight each other is a win, right? Sometimes, not losing still gives you a point.

I’m surprised you say not to get hung up on your striker, given Liverpool’s lead attacker, Mohamed Salah, is leading the Premier League in goals and assists right now…

He is! [Laughs.] Yeah, there’s probably also a good parallel there around the importance of the Global South in this conversation, right? To have the lead goal scorer be an Egyptian, which coincidentally is where COP27 is going to be taking place. There’s often too much focus put on star players from the Global North—and that leaves out other talent.