Meet Three Foundations Backing the Grassroots Opposition to Fossil Fuel Infrastructure

Indigenous demonstrators gather at the white house to oppose the Line 3 pipeline. Phil Pasquini/shutterstock

With climate chaos growing by the day, science and common sense dictate that the last thing our world can afford is more fossil fuel infrastructure. Yet U.S. oil and gas companies are still trying to break ground on new projects, whether pipelines or plants, frequently over the objections of the regions’ Indigenous communities and other neighbors.

Opposition to such projects has long emerged outside of formal organizations, often led by Native communities with scarce support from external sources. But a slowly growing list of foundations is funding the groups and individuals that mobilize to block these costly investments in the fossil fuel status quo. 

Backers of those efforts include some of the largest institutions in philanthropy, such as Bloomberg Philanthropies, with its support for the Sierra Club’s Beyond Coal campaign. Yet many much-smaller foundations are also playing key roles, along with individual donors. Their size allows them to be more flexible and responsive in funding fast-evolving movements, typically with a focus on grassroots and Indigenous-led resistance. The network of groups funding efforts to oppose the Line 3 pipeline in Minnesota offers a case in point. 

I spoke with leaders at the Swift, Panta Rhea and Kataly foundations to find out more about how they got started in this area of funding and the groups they support. With assets ranging from less than $20 million to more than $400 million, this trio of progressive philanthropies offers case studies in how such grantmakers approach this area. 

“There is something really valuable and unique about how modest-sized entities can actually move more quickly and do things that are more creative because the level of bureaucracy and hierarchy and delay just for educating, discussing and processing can be a much simpler process,” said Connie Malloy, CEO of the Panta Rhea Foundation. 

It’s a decent-sized chunk of climate philanthropy. ClimateWorks Foundation estimates that foundations spent an average of $115 million annually between 2015 and 2020 to challenge fossil fuel development, from targeting pipelines to fighting coal-fired power plants, with nearly half of that amount spent in the United States. Such funding accounted for roughly 9% of total climate mitigation philanthropy during that period. 

That could be seen as a relatively large share, with Bloomberg’s campaign likely accounting for a substantial chunk of the total. For comparison, another vital sector, transportation, receives an average of just $50 million annually, based on ClimateWorks’ analysis. Yet, given that oil companies and fossil fuel interests have stonewalled any meaningful climate action for decades, the urgency of ending the use of oil and gas, and the multiple approvals of continued extraction by an otherwise climate-friendly president, directly opposing industry deserves as much attention as developing alternatives.

Let’s take a closer look at these three.

Swift Foundation

Suzanne Benally spent a decade heading a nonprofit, Cultural Survival, but had never worked in philanthropy other than as a consultant before being hired as the executive director of this Santa Fe, New Mexico-based foundation in 2020.

“It certainly is, as an Indigenous person, a very challenging position and world to be in,” said Benally, who is Navajo and Santa Clara Tewa. “In many ways, it contradicts so many of your values and who you are.”

Benally’s arrival launched Swift into a year of re-envisioning itself. While the foundation’s learning continues, one priority that emerged was to ground itself in an Indigenous understanding of the world, guided by relationships with Indigenous leaders and communities. Opposition to fossil fuel infrastructure was a clear fit. 

“Any kind of extractive industry really is a violation of Mother Earth. And it’s also a violation of the Indigenous peoples who live in that kind of deep relationship with Mother Earth,” Benally told me.

Swift, which had an endowment of $65 million in 2020, gave $4.5 million in grants that year, up from roughly $3 million in prior years. Grantees in this area include Honor the Earth, a nonprofit run by renowned Native activist Winona LaDuke, the Canada-based nonprofit Indigenous Climate Action, and two key networks of environmental justice groups, Climate Justice Alliance and Indigenous Environmental Network. 

Such funding is not new for the foundation. Benally said Swift has always taken a “holistic” view that looks at the world as a series of concentric circles, with direct action as one of many needed approaches. The foundation’s commitments are long-term. Each grantee can renew its grant through a process intended to reduce burdens on grantees. 

Panta Rhea Foundation

One of the first grants this La Jolla, California-based foundation ever made was to a campaign battling the privatization of a community water source in the Mojave Desert. It gave the foundation’s founding board and donors a crucial and enduring lesson in the power of grassroots activism that ultimately shaped the family’s personal giving, CEO Connie Malloy told me. 

Today, Panta Rhea and the family donors who founded it support a wide range of fossil fuel infrastructure opposition. The foundation has helped buy land to stall construction projects. It has funded opposition to bills that restrict activists. Back in 2017, it supported resistance to the Dakota Access Pipeline. It also serves in the classic funder-convener role, backing efforts to bring together advocacy groups.

But it does not work alone. The foundation’s work in this area is often in partnership with fellow members of the Solidaire Network, a group of donors that has played a key role in organizing individual and institutional donors to fund fossil fuel infrastructure opposition. (The network’s executive director, Rajasvini Bhansali, also sits on the board of the Swift Foundation.) For Panta Rhea, whose team consists of four grantmaking staff, the collaboration has been a critical source of information, resources and funding relationships, Malloy said.

Panta Rhea’s grantees in this space include two well-known climate justice intermediaries, the Climate and Clean Energy Equity Fund and The Solutions Project. Indigenous-led groups have been one focus of its funding, with support going to the NDN Collective, a Native-led group whose work includes advocacy, impact investing and clean energy projects. The foundation has also supported grassroots communications and organizing campaigns through the CLIMA Fund.

Panta Rhea’s grantmaking reached $8 million in 2020, its highest level to date. The foundation has traditionally given 16% to 20% of its assets annually, but that does not tell the complete story of its work, as staff also assist with the founders’ personal giving, according to Malloy.

Its next frontier? Malloy would like to see more funders and donors—within Panta Rhea’s network, Solidaire and beyond—leverage their relationships with decision makers, whether by picking up the phone or starting a conversation at the next social gathering. To put their power and privilege to work, in other words, and thereby broaden the set of levers that philanthropy puts to work.

“Not all funders and donors are comfortable to move in that direction, or embrac[e] it, but there is some interesting experimentation happening,” Malloy said. “My brief experience in this world is that charitable grantmaking is kept very separate from those sets of relationships, and yet, if we really want to make traction on this level… I think us all being willing to call on the vast array of political and social capital that we have is really important.”

Kataly Foundation

This San Francisco-based foundation is both the newest grantmaker of the three featured here and the largest, with a $403 million endowment. Backed by Regan Pritzker, an heir to the Hyatt hotel chain fortune, Kataly launched its Environmental Justice Resourcing Collective in its second year.

The arrival of COVID saw the new foundation deploy a slate of one-time rapid response grants to environmental justice groups in 2020, but last year, it finalized a list of 78 grantees it intended to support for the long term. Fossil fuel infrastructure opposition is one cause, but not a sole focus. Like Kataly’s broader work, the portfolio’s lens is intersectional and emphasizes funding grassroots activists in front-line communities. 

“The fight against fossil fuels is both about the direct fights against pollution and pipeline development, but also about supporting organizations that are investing in the new type of infrastructure that is regenerative, that is sustainable, that’s life-supporting,” said Nwamaka Agbo, the foundation’s CEO, who has been in her position just over a year. 

Roughly six of Kataly’s grantees work directly on opposing fossil fuel infrastructure, Agbo said. Like its peers, those include several Indigenous groups, including the Native Organizers Alliance, the Indigenous Environmental Network and Native Movement. Kataly has also funded groups working on fossil fuel and water issues beyond the mainland United States, such as the Hawai’i Unity and Liberation Institute. 

It also backs local groups, such as Richmond Our Power Coalition, in its efforts to ensure the Bay Area city’s Chevron refinery is accountable to the community. State and national groups including Communities for a Better Environment and Climate Justice Alliance are also part of that work.

Perhaps most importantly, the Environmental Justice Resourcing Collective’s grants were not made by Kataly’s program officers or board. Instead, the foundation recruited nine environmental justice leaders, all women of color, who chose the grantee organizations. Members include heads of regrantors, like Gloria Walton of The Solutions Project and Vanessa Daniel of the Groundswell Fund, and nonprofit leaders like Enei Begaye of Native Movement and Tania Rosario Mendez of Taller Salud. 

Like Swift, the approach is also long-term. Kataly, which granted approximately $41 million in the past year, has committed to investing nearly $6.4 million annually in this portfolio for the next five years. 

“When we talk about, what does it take for us to win, what does it take for us to dream big,” it is key to “remove the resource question,” Agbo said. “What we know is to address these big existential problems, we need to resource accordingly.”