When Walt Reid and Lois DeBacker’s retirements became public last year, the pair became the most notable names in a wave of transitions within environmental philanthropy — one that comes amid renewed questions about the future of the sector’s years-long shift from a leadership dominated by white men and women to one that looks more like the U.S. population.
The pair were the longtime heads of, respectively, the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, one of climate philanthropy’s largest legacy funders, and Kresge Foundation, among the field’s most prominent environmental justice grantmakers. They joined a list of departures and promotions that by the end of the year included the leaders of environmental programs at the McKnight, Heising-Simons, Freedom Together (formerly JPB) and Open Society foundations.
“It’s notable, there’s no question about it,” said Sacha Spector, program director for the environment at Doris Duke Foundation, describing the year’s turnover as a “super wave.” “It opens up the possibility that we’re headed into a new era of leadership in the movement.”
Others departed from green affinity groups and intermediaries. Virginia Clarke, the longtime executive director of Sustainable Agriculture and Food Systems Funders, retired at the end of 2023, as did the president and CEO of The Funders Network, Pat Smith. Leaders at the regrantors Climate and Clean Energy Equity Fund, BuildUS and Mosaic also changed.
A December report by Green 2.0, the environmental sector’s leading tracker of demographics, offered a reminder of the stakes of this turnover. Among foundations, it found that the share of organization heads and senior staff who identify as people of color dipped in 2024. More troubling, the nonprofits it tracks reported the first-ever decline in the percentage of people of color at all levels in the history of the report. And low participation in its survey suggests Green 2.0’s funder statistics may still paint a more favorable picture than reality.
After years of slow but regular diversity gains in the once overwhelmingly white environmental philanthropy space, the sector may be at a new tipping point. In recent years, many green grantmakers, especially legacy funders, have embraced a broader, more inclusive vision of advancing environmental goals alongside other social justice goals. Yet the new Trump administration has declared war on diversity, equity and inclusion measures, and many top corporations are abandoning such policies, just as a period of generational turnover has begun within environmental philanthropy. Only a few years after many green institutions trumpeted new commitments to racial equity, philanthropy is facing a moment that will determine whether hard-won gains are stalled, if not rolled back — or if progress continues.
Why the turnover?
There are many individual explanations for this wave of transitions. Some have come after internal promotions, such as at the McKnight Foundation, and others came after short tenures. Burnout, too, may have played a role.
The turnover also followed a period of executive-level uncertainty and new beginnings at climate funders in 2023, both at places undergoing organizational overhauls like the then-JPB Foundation and OSF, as well as others that have seen longtime leaders depart, such as the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and Libra Foundation.
All that said, many I spoke with felt the sector is going through a changing of the guard.
“It’s a generational shift,” said Dion Cartwright, who was internally promoted in January as the new president and CEO of The Funders Network. Spector at Doris Duke and others also described the changes as “generational.”
Not everyone I asked has seen a notable uptick in departures. Some had not noticed any shift themselves, like Clarke of SAFSF or former Hewlett head Larry Kramer, both of whom are now outside the grantmaking sector. Others expressed uncertainty about whether the year had any higher-than-normal turnover.
Who’s departing, and who’s replacing them?
For a snapshot of this moment, consider hires by six of the organizations mentioned above. To replace the leaders of their environmental and energy programs, Kresge and McKnight elevated internal candidates, Shamar Bibbins and Ben Passer. The Funders Network did the same with Cartwright. Another three — SAFSF, The Climate and Clean Energy Equity Fund, and Mosaic — chose external candidates, elevating Clare Fox, Andrea Cristina Mercado and Eva Hernandez, respectively.
Those new hires bring an array of experience to their organizations. Some have worked recently as organizers or social entrepreneurs, and several are fresh from being grantees themselves, as is often the case with new philanthropoids. There was also a demographic theme: All but two of the departures were apparently white, and all but one of the incoming hires were people of color. Two are Black, two are Latinas, one is biracial, and one is white.
Yet data from Green 2.0 suggests many high-level hires in environmental philanthropy went the other way last year.
Last December, the organization’s 2024 Transparency Report, an annual survey of sector demographics, reported that the share of senior foundation staff who identify as people of color fell four percentage points to 36.4%, while the number of heads of organizations dropped less than a point to 23.3%.
The declines come amid what the authors called an “alarming” drop in the share of staff of color at all levels of environmental nonprofits, i.e., those foundations’ grantees. Racial diversity among board members, organization heads, senior staff and full-time staff each fell to lows not seen since 2021 or earlier. It was the first across-the-board drop recorded in the eight-year history of the Green 2.0 transparency reports.
There were bright spots for diversity in green philanthropy amid these declines. While diversity among foundation heads and senior staff fell, the percentage of foundation board members and all full-time staff who identify as people of color each rose by more than 10 points, reaching 35.6% and 58%, respectively, both of which represented three-year highs. Those figures are also slightly above those of the sector as a whole, based on the most recent Grantmakers Salary and Benefits Report from the Council on Foundations. On the other hand, diversity among all senior positions still lags behind that of the national population.
“It’s possible that some foundations are making concentrated efforts to address policies and practices that support all staff over the last year, but focused on entry-level staff, we found this to be an effort that needs to be expanded,” said Adriane Alicea, managing director of Green 2.0, in a statement.
Yet the reality may be worse than what the data shows. Alicea said Green 2.0 suspects foundations that participate in the survey are among those leading in this area, and the organization’s long-running struggle to get foundations to share their demographic data has recently grown worse. In 2023, half of surveyed foundations declined to participate, but last year, two-thirds of foundations refused.
Is internal support for funder diversity commitments flagging?
The Funders Network’s Cartwright, who has more than two decades of experience in philanthropy, said recent retirements and turnover have opened the door to leadership positions at a key time. Greater awareness of climate inequities and a focus on diversity, equity and inclusion within environmental philanthropy have meant perceptions of who can lead green grantmaking programs have “evolved” at several foundations.
“Folks are wanting people who have the lived-and-learned experience,” she said. “I’m not saying that Black and brown and Indigenous people are the only ones who should be leading. What I’m saying is, they should be given the opportunity.”
But some in the field feel that the rush to make commitments on racial equity has given way to retracting commitments or narrowing support, while long-running challenges for leaders of color have persisted.
“We’re also seeing a high level of turnover, particularly for Black women leaders, because of the lack of care and support that they have within their organizations, and the barriers they are up against as a result,” said Cartwright.
During our call, she said she had just spoken with a senior staff person at a major foundation struggling with a mismatch between the institution’s public pledges and actual internal support for them.
“People are panicking a little on what to do and how to move forward on the work,” she said. “Are more and more institutions going to change their focus? Or are people going to be ten-toes-down into the work?”
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Green giving’s racial equity journey has been “a long, slow arc”
Lois DeBacker’s recently concluded career provides a snapshot of environmental philanthropy’s racial equity journey. When she was hired by the Mott Foundation in 1991 for her first-ever job in philanthropy, she had spent her entire working life in what she described as “largely a white, upper-middle-class kind of movement — not exclusively, but largely.”
It was not until she arrived at the Flint, Michigan, grantmaker that she was exposed to environmental justice. Her then-colleague, Lori Villarosa, who now leads the Philanthropic Initiative for Racial Equity, had just attended the First National People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit, now seen as a seminal event.
“It really made me appreciate how much the environmental movement at the time was unaware of issues of environmental justice,” said DeBacker, who would put such concerns at the center of Kresge’s program. “I had that learning curve myself, and I think others in environmental philanthropy chose or did not choose to go on that learning journey.”
One of the biggest changes she saw during her 33-year career in environmental philanthropy was growing recognition of the importance of supporting groups led by people of color, and changing “our mindset of what an environmental leader looks like,” she said. The field now recognizes environmental justice pioneers like Robert Bullard, Beverley Wright, Dorceta Taylor and the late Bunyan Bryant.
“It’s been a long, slow arc,” she said.
“You’ll probably see a lot more exits”
Environmental philanthropy and its leaders, like the rest of society, will change as a generation of baby boomers retire. The departures of the last few years appear to mark the beginning of that shift.
“I know a lot of people who are in philanthropy or in the funder affinity groups who are looking to get out,” said Clarke of SAFSF, who expects accelerated turnover. “You’ll probably see a lot more.”
There will also be the usual churn. For instance, the head of the Bezos Earth Fund, Andrew Steer, announced Saturday that he would step down from the Amazon founder’s philanthropy. “I have always found that change in my career has been refreshing and energizing, and I feel this is a good time for another change,” he wrote on LinkedIn.
Cartwright also expects more generational departures, and urges philanthropies to invest in leadership pipelines, particularly internal ones. Her own trajectory represents one such story. Before joining the network as an employee in 2016, she was a fellow in one of The Funders Network’s signature programs, PLACES.
Without such investments, she is concerned the sector will lose hard-fought racial equity gains. She counts her own organization, which she says is facing its own “generational shift,” as among those facing this challenge.
“You look at our senior leadership, you’ve got people who have been in position 15 to 20 years, mostly white women,” she said. “They’ve been evolving in their work, in their equity lens.”
“But it’s like, OK, what happens if they decide to retire?” she said. “Where are we as an organization? Where does all of that knowledge and history go?”
Over the coming years, many in environmental philanthropy will likely be asking themselves those questions. How they answer will shape the future of the sector.
