For almost 50 years, the Navajo Generating Station stood starkly near the border between Arizona and Utah, its three smokestacks jutting into the sky. The coal-fired plant closed in 2019 alongside the Kayente Mine. It was the largest coal plant in the West and the largest source of nitrogen dioxide air pollution in the U.S.
Both the Navajo and Hopi nations were hit hard by the plant and mines’ closures. Hundreds of jobs were lost, and in light of the financial losses incurred by the closures, the Navajo government cut its spending by 23% in the year after it closed, according to a report by the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis. The Hopi government, for its part, depended on coal operations for 85% of its public-services budget, which funds things like child care programs, healthcare and education.
For communities like these, shifting away from coal requires a “just transition” to ensure their wellbeing, which the International Labour Organization defines as “greening the economy in a way that is as fair and inclusive as possible to everyone concerned, creating decent work opportunities and leaving no one behind.” Doing so, however, isn’t always easy and requires cooperation and support from governments, yes, but also from philanthropy.
That’s precisely what the Just Transition Fund aims to do. Established in 2015 by the Rockefeller Family Fund and the Appalachia Funders Network, and with the support of Blue Moon Fund, the Hewlett Foundation, the Mary Reynolds Babcock Foundation, the Mertz Gilmore Foundation and the Freedom Together Foundation (formerly the JPB Foundation), the Just Transition Fund works to create opportunities for the communities that have been hit hardest by coal’s decline by advancing opportunities that are “equitable, inclusive and low-carbon.” To date, it is the only philanthropic institution that focuses all its work on coal community economic transitions.
How the Just Transition Fund helps communities access federal dollars
One of the fund’s strategies is to aid communities in securing federal funding so they can scale local economic solutions. For years, the Just Transition Fund has engaged in this work through its Federal Access Center resource hub, providing grants and technical assistance, among other types of support.
In its next step to better help tribal nations, the Just Transition Fund and the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Indian Energy Policy and Programs launched a partnership in 2023 to support two tribal nations — the Navajo and Hopi — that have been hit hardest by coal closures.
“The DOE has the goal of trying to expand the clean energy sector in these places,” said Heidi Binko, cofounder and CEO of the Just Transition Fund. “But these communities… have a basic set of infrastructure needs that they need to meet in order to do this.”
The partnership will provide crucial technical assistance and guidance to the Navajo Nation and Hopi Tribe so they can submit federal applications to build out necessary infrastructure, expand their clean energy programs and transition their economies away from coal. The Just Transition Fund will also build capacity to address staffing shortages in the tribal governments’ offices and advise leaders by offering policy recommendations to strengthen tribal government. On the grantmaking side, the Just Transition Fund awarded about $1 million to support the Navajo Nation and the Hopi Tribe with their federal grant applications.
The Biden administration allocated billions of dollars in federal funds to revitalize communities that were once reliant on coal. Last year alone, the administration’s budget, which was informed by consultation with tribal leaders, included more than $1 billion to fund tribal infrastructure; $4.5 billion to support clean energy infrastructure, including clean energy workforce development, increased funding for tribal broadband grants, additional funding for Indian water rights settlements, and funding to support economic opportunities in rural and tribal communities.
This is in addition to the funding allocated by the American Rescue Plan, which invested $32 billion in tribal nations and Native communities — the single largest financial investment to tribal governments in U.S. history.
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We’ve been tracking how philanthropic funders are seeking to guide the rollout of trillions of federal dollars made available through legislation like the American Rescue Plan, the Inflation Reduction Act and the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law — money that will continue to flow even as the second Trump administration takes the reins. In the climate space and elsewhere, grantmakers want to ensure underserved communities can actually access this vast spigot of funding.
“Just because the money is there at the federal level does not mean that these communities can access it,” Binko said. “If you’re from a rural place, you face a range of barriers to even begin to apply for these funds.”
Some of these barriers include a high cost-share — which can be as much as 50% to access some federal funding sources — navigating more than 400 rural economic development programs that are spread over 10 agencies, and often needing to hire a professional grant writer.
“It’s a very, very high burden,” Binko added.
Through the new partnership, a team of Indigenous grant writers will work with the Navajo Nation, the Hopi Tribe and community partners to identify economic development projects and write and submit federal grant applications for clean energy, reclamation and infrastructure projects.
There’s a lot of need. According to Binko, around 15,000 homes in those communities do not have access to running water, and there’s a lack of access to broadband. Much of the fund’s work involves helping Navajo and Hopi communities with basic, fundamental needs so their economies can develop and they can build clean energy projects. In a similar vein, the fund is helping almost 77,000 households in coal-impacted communities access broadband.
“There’s this historical opportunity, but the funding will not flow to any under-resourced rural community — tribal or otherwise — unless philanthropy helps. It’s a great opportunity for philanthropy to provide match dollars for them, to help provide grant writers, really to enable these communities… to reduce the barriers they face,” Binko said.
Making up for chronic underinvestment in Native communities
Native Americans make up 2.9% of the total U.S. population but receive a disproportionately small fraction of annual philanthropic grantmaking. A report from Native Americans in Philanthropy and Candid found that between 2002 and 2016, U.S. foundations awarded an average of 0.4% per year for Native American communities and causes. A more recent report from the First Nations Development Institute found that foundation support for Native communities between 2015 and 2022 hovered at less than 1% of total annual grantmaking.
The availability of federal funding and the difficulties communities have in accessing it represents an opportunity for funders to lend their support. It’s unclear what will happen when the next administration takes office, but Binko says the work remains the same, regardless of who sits in the White House. Clean energy and resilient economic outcomes won’t emerge overnight. The Just Transition Fund will continue its work to support long-term, sustainable economic development in the region.
“There’s a tremendous amount of capacity that needs to be built in these communities to not only access the federal funding that is available now but also to get these communities prepared for what may be coming down the road,” Binko said. “It’s going to be really critical to drive as much investment in philanthropy in these places as we can.”
Although the partnership is still in its early days, during its first 12 months, it has helped communities apply for approximately $200 million in community economic development funding.
Binko added that she hopes the partnership will show funders how “a relatively modest investment” can yield big results, and that it will inspire them to offer their own support for tribal communities. The partnership can also serve as a model that can be replicated with other agencies and other tribes to drive more federal dollars.
It’s also a model of how this type of work can be driven by local communities.
“That’s a really exciting thing about what our grant writer and what our partners are hearing on the ground. The ideas that they’re putting forward for federal funding are really the project ideas that are coming directly from community members and it’s what they most need,” Binko said. “To me, that’s a model of doing this in a way that is the only way that I think these efforts can be sustainable, which is [when they’re] driven by local communities from the bottom up.”
