How Do Grantmakers Get Started On Climate? Here’s How One Human Rights Funder Began

Sandra Nathan packed all wrong for the climate training.

She arrived in Oxford last September for an organization-wide meeting with a suitcase full of sweaters to cope with the fall chill. Yet temperatures were in the mid-70s nearly all week — and that was after a weekend high of 89 degrees.

The “shocking” weather in the English university city set the stage as Nathan and other Omidyar Group leaders gathered for four days of what she described as “jaw-dropping” sessions with well-known climate leaders and researchers on the grim realities the world faces.

“I came back on fire,” said Nathan, a managing director of Humanity United, one of a collection of groups funded by Pierre and Pam Omidyar. “I came back passionate, as my other colleagues did who attended,” she said. “We were kind of spark plugs, if you will.”

After staff returned from the training, Humanity United joined 20 other philanthropic institutions in signing on to a December call to action on climate adaptation organized by the ClimateWorks Foundation. It’s one of the most public acts that Humanity United — which backs global efforts to uphold human rights — has taken to date in its still-nascent journey into climate work.

Humanity United’s story offers a case study of a journey that many grantmakers are on — and countless more will undertake in the years ahead — that is, exploring how climate change is not only changing the world, but exacerbating the problems they seek to address, as well as multiplying the challenges their grantees face. Ultimately, those institutions must confront the question of how their work and grantmaking should change to respond.

For Humanity United, that does not mean it will make climate change its focus, or even a priority area, said Srik Gopal, who leads the funder as managing partner. But the crisis is becoming a factor the organization considers in everything it does.

“I would not call us a climate funder still,” Gopal said. “Climate for us is a lens, not a lane. It’s a lens around which we do our human rights work.”

A human rights funder’s journey toward climate

Founded in 2008, Humanity United’s areas of work include forced labor and human trafficking, peacebuilding and racial justice. One needs little imagination to see the overlaps with climate change.

Gopal said an archetypal example could be a farmer from Nepal who lost their livelihood as climate change upends rainfall, forcing them to move to a Gulf state for work, where they face not only exploitative conditions but record heat. And then there are those displaced from climate-driven conflicts, such as the war in Sudan.

The San Francisco-based funder’s decision to join ClimateWorks Foundation’s call to action, and even the training in Oxford organized by the Omidyar Group, are only the latest milestones along a multi-year path. Those steps followed a 2022 survey of 200 Omidyar Group staff in which 80% flagged climate as critical to the network’s work and operations, and built on the 2021 release of Humanity United’s first-ever organizational strategy, which identified climate change as a macro trend impacting its work.

Gopal said that in the years since, the team has been more aware of those overlapping factors and how they play out, such as in the case of the Nepali farmer. “Each of our portfolios have become a little bit more conscious, more savvy about these intersections,” he said.

Still to come? Making grants. The organization has made a few related research grants, all within an institutional portfolio that Gopal leads, but he said it could be years before climate starts to show up more directly in Humanity United’s grantmaking. “For us, it’s been more of an evolutionary timeline, rather than a revolutionary timeline,” he said. “My sense at this point is that when we refresh our strategy in 2025, this will actually be a bigger focus.”

One of the commitments made so far is to the Institute for Climate and Peace, which is researching the intersection, as its name suggests, of climate and peace, with a focus on small Pacific islands. Humanity United also supports a researcher, Kayly Ober, who studies the intersection of climate and migration. And it has backed work on “long-view leadership” by The Elders, a group of former heads of state founded by Nelson Mandela and now headed by climate champion Mary Robinson, the former president of Ireland.

“At this point, it’s more research, it’s more evidence-gathering,” Gopal said. “I think it’ll be a few years before it impacts direct grantmaking.”

Across the broader universe of Omidyar philanthropy, which includes Humanity United and the other organizations that make up the Omidyar Group, climate hasn’t been a major focus in the past. But in addition to the developing work at Humanity United, another sign of potentially growing interest was the decision by Omidyar Network (a separate funding entity) to back BuildUS, one of several recent climate pledges that have drawn in potential big-name climate funders.

‘The interest was much bigger and broader than anticipated’

When Humanity United joined ClimateWorks’ sign-on statement last year, it marked a period of discovery and growth for both organizations. Over the preceding year, Jessica Brown and the team at ClimateWorks had hosted several meetings and met with dozens of funders to ask one question: What is the role of philanthropy in climate adaptation and resilience? In other words, what should grantmakers do as climate-fueled fires, floods and famines affect more and more lives around the globe?

What they found reflects the growing awareness of climate risks from philanthropies like Humanity United, i.e., those outside the climate field’s traditional ecosystem, and the desire of such grantmakers to expand their response.

“The interest was much bigger and broader than we had even anticipated,” said Brown, who leads the foundation’s work on climate adaptation and resilience. ClimateWorks heard from funders “we don’t normally interact with,” she said, such as grantmakers focused on themes like health, democracy, migration, food security and poverty. Many told the intermediary that they were already thinking about or working on the topic.

The result was the call to action that Humanity United and 20 other philanthropic groups joined, released to coincide with COP28. It came a couple months after four major climate funders — the Kresge, Gordon and Betty Moore, David and Lucile Packard, and Walton Family foundations — unveiled what they billed as a “first of its kind” pledge to support climate resilience.

“What's just been so eye-opening is seeing the number of different types of funders,” Brown said. Not just of different priority areas, but from varying geographies and foundation types, from smaller family foundations to corporate operations. “We are really sort of broadening the tent to be inclusive of all those different types of funders.”

On the other hand, it was a small group, given the number of potential signatories. Not to mention that about a third of the total are intermediaries dependent on foundations for funding, including ClimateWorks itself and four of its regional partners, as well as two other philanthropic support organizations. Brown said the number of signatories “feels significant.”

Yet the statement was just a first step. The language now serves as a framework for a new funder collaborative on adaptation and resilience that ClimateWorks is helping develop and grow, with more than 40 grantmakers involved. Brown said she believes that funders have been drawn to the work by its links to justice and equity, the increasingly visible damage from climate-fueled catastrophes, and the all-encompassing nature of the threats that climate change poses.

As Brown put it, “Funders from across all sectors and priorities are coming to the table recognizing that these risks, these impacts, are really undoing years, decades, even generations of progress.”

Correction (April 15, 2024): An earlier version of this story misspelled Kayly Ober's name.

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