New Study Underscores Longstanding, Persistent Biases in Green Grantmaking

A major new study of environmental funding is perhaps the most exhaustive examination to date of the overwhelming preference in green philanthropy for big, coastal nonprofits led by white men and focused on conservation.

“Examining Disparities in Environmental Grantmaking: Where the Money Goes” examines trends in the environmental movement that its lead author, pioneering environmental justice researcher Dr. Dorceta Taylor, and others have observed for decades.

“I wondered why the ideas and activities were good enough to get funding when whites presented them to foundations and government agencies, but not fundable when people of color proposed them,” writes Taylor, who left University of Michigan to join Yale in 2021.

Her conclusions will surprise no one who has been paying attention to climate philanthropy scholarship in recent years. The report’s extensive literature review section outlines the large body of research that the report builds upon. What’s powerful about this latest entry is that Taylor and her co-author have, in a single publication, taken a deeper survey of the environmental funding landscape than the many publications that came before it, including some produced by Taylor.

The 174-page report also goes deeper and wider than its many smaller-scale predecessors. For instance, by combining gender and racial demographics, it provides an intersectional lens missing from past studies. To take another example, funding is broken down not just by region, but by states and cities.

The result is a powerful reminder of the profound structural challenges and past failures that environmental philanthropy must overcome if it wishes to foster an environmental movement that is representative of our nation, adjusts for past disparities, and taps into the full power of people living on the front lines of the problems it seeks to solve.

Based on data from Candid on 220 foundations and more than 30,000 grants totaling nearly $4.9 billion awarded over three years, from 2015 to 2017, the report was issued through Yale’s Justice, Equity, Diversity and Sustainability Initiative (JEDSI) with the help of co-author Molly Blondell, a Yale environmental fellow.

The report was sponsored by the Nathan Cummings, JPB and Charles Stewart Mott foundations, as well as the London-based Generation Foundation. The environmental schools at Yale and University of Michigan also supported the report, as well as the donor-advised fund manager National Philanthropic Trust.

Below are the report’s key findings, the often-discouraging answers to the question posed by the report’s subtitle. In environmental grantmaking, the money goes to…

…the biggest groups

Environmental grantmakers love to give money to groups that already have a lot of it. More than half of foundation funding goes to nonprofits with revenues of $20 million or more, the researchers found. By contrast, groups with revenues of less than $1 million receive fewer than 4% of grant dollars. This phenomenon is so well recognized in academia that it has its own term: channeling.

Some of the most comprehensive foundation tracking efforts have come to the same conclusion. For instance, Environmental Grantmakers Association found that in 2018, its member foundations gave 54% of their funding to the 200 most well-funded groups.

…groups led by white men

It’s no news that environmental philanthropy has a bias toward the world’s two most privileged identities. Male-led organizations received more than two-thirds of grant dollars, the study determined, even as other research has found that roughly two-thirds of staff at environmental grantees are female.

Similarly, white-led organizations received more than 80% of grant dollars in a country where people of color account for more than 40% of the population and an outsized share of those most affected by environmental pollution and climate catastrophes.

Add up those trends and the result is a movement in which white, male-led organizations receive the majority of foundation funding — and trust. Such groups received about 61% of all foundation funding and 80% of general support grants, the authors find.

…the groups closest to foundations

Rather than turning to unseeded pastures, funders prefer to double down on groups in their own backyards. Foundations in the Pacific, Northeast and South Atlantic regions spend roughly 40% to 60% of grant dollars at home. Those are the wealthiest regions, so that means, on average, most grant dollars stay close to where the checks are written. But there are exceptions.

In parts of the country where there’s not a lot of funding, foundations tend to send dollars outside their borders. South Central and Mountain regions both send more of their grant dollars to other regions. This accentuates an already limited local base of funding for the regions to draw from. Only six foundations are based in the South-Central region and five in the Mountain region, according to the report.

The coastal concentration is far from a surprise. Some of the nation’s largest and best-known green groups are on the coasts. For such groups, foundations are but one of many sources of support, with most counting individual donations as a large share of their budget, sometimes exceeding grants. As long as these funding patterns persist, it seems unlikely the regional imbalance will shift.

…California, D.C. and New York

Foundations shower riches on the Golden State, in particular. California receives more grants and more funding than any other state, by nearly a factor of two. “California is the epicenter of originating environmental grants and receiving such grants,” the authors write.

Add the District of Columbia and New York into the mix, and the three account for the lion’s share of the nation’s environmental grants and funding dollars. This is a function of where money and power are located.

Thanks to the tech sector on the West Coast and finance on the East Coast, California and New York have the largest number of green grantmakers in the nation, with 42 each. Together, the two account for more funding than philanthropies in all the other states of the union combined. Washington, D.C., meanwhile, may lack in grantmakers, but it makes up for it as the seat of the nation’s power.

The report also lays out what I would call, with apologies to Charles Dickens, a tale of three cities. New York City and San Francisco generate 1 in 5 grants, according to the report. And those two, plus Washington, D.C., are the nation’s top three grant-receiving municipalities.

…conservation groups

Conservation organizations are the most popular kids in green philanthropy’s cafeteria. Various types of conservation organizations received about 24% of all grant dollars, roughly three times the amount of the runner-up, research institutions and think tanks, which were awarded 7.8% of funding.

… almost anything other than environmental justice

A study from Building Equity and Alignment for Environmental Justice has long been the most widely cited research on how much funding is flowing to such causes. It found that just 1.3% of the funding from top climate foundations went to support environmental justice, and of that total, only 9% went to groups focused on environmental justice.

This report offers a new comparison to complement that oft-cited percentage. Six so-called Big Green groups received, by themselves, multiple times more foundation funding than all the field’s environmental justice groups combined, according to the report. These include the World Wildlife Fund (1.5 times more), the Environmental Defense Fund (2.8) and the Sierra Club (4.9).

Are times changing?

It is easy to imagine some readers reviewing the report, agreeing with many of its conclusions, but shrugging it off based on the fact that most of its data is more than five years old. “That was then,” they may conclude.

It’s true that a lot has changed in green funding during the past few years. The biggest funders in the period examined by the report were the William and Flora Hewlett, David and Lucile Packard, and Gordon and Betty Moore foundations — traditional funding institutions with professional staff and high levels of transparency — as well as the more recent entrant, the JPB Foundation.

The four mentioned above are still big players, but living billionaires like Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates and Melinda French Gates, and MacKenzie Scott have now taken their places at the top of the heap.

Yet the emergence of Bezos, the Gateses and Scott as climate funders actually continues the coastal dominance this report highlights. And while Bezos and Scott are notable exceptions, the flood of new money into environmental philanthropy, particularly climate funding, has largely doubled down on existing centers of power. Coastal cities, conservation, white male leaders and the field’s biggest groups are still pulling in many of the biggest checks. Just take a look at the annual budgets of those same Big Greens, or the money pouring into newcomers that fit a similar profile.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with those locations, topics or identities, and clearly, some progress is being made. Yet the system remains out of whack. Too much is on one end of the scale, even after efforts by some older foundations to spread their grantmaking across a wider array of recipients. And as this planet-wide experiment we’re running with the climate makes clear with every new temperature record and catastrophe, unbalanced systems are unstable. Hopefully, philanthropists — whether old hands or newcomers — take note.

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