Calling All Daughters! New Fund Seeks to Mobilize Women on the Front Lines of Climate Change

It was at a conservation meeting in Kenya that Zainab Salbi, an activist and author who has been called the “Oprah of the Arab World,” discovered she shared a common concern about climate activism with businesswoman Jody Allen, the sister of the late Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen and trustee of his multibillion-dollar estate.

“We were talking about, how could we energize women to be part of the climate movement, because no one was talking to women, and no one was engaging women,” said Salbi of that fateful 2017 chat.

Salbi, who founded and formerly led Women for Women International, specializes in women’s rights, not climate issues. But as she learned more, she heard the alarms raised by the United Nations and others. For several overlapping reasons, women face particular danger from climate change—they are more likely than men to live in poverty, to lack basic human rights, to face violence during periods of instability, and to depend on threatened natural resources. Yet focus groups they ran with mostly American women reinforced their initial impression about the lack of mobilization. Salbi said participants told them “no one’s talking with us” and what is said is “patronizing.”

The response they dreamed up kicked off this Tuesday at SXSW: Daughters for Earth, a fund that aims to raise $100 million or more over the next two years—from philanthropy, major donors and small donations—to put in the hands of women working on front-line climate solutions around the world. It was launched as a project of One Earth, whose co-founder and executive director Justin Winters is one of the group’s other co-founders, and has long worked on climate issues.

The new fund is the latest addition to a growing lineup of efforts to direct dollars to women-led environmental and climate action abroad, such as the New York-based MADRE and the Global Alliance for Green and Gender Action, or GAGGA, which is a network of environmental justice and women’s funds. It also adds to a longer list of mostly U.S.-based funds that support a broader range of grassroots and front-line groups working on climate issues overseas.

“From our perspective, the more, the merrier,” Winters told me during a joint video chat with Salbi and Rachel Rivera, the group’s fourth and final co-founder, who is chief operating officer of Wild Lives Foundation, which Allen heads. “It’s just about increasing that pie and getting funding flowing the way it should be,” Winters added.

The launch comes at a potential tipping point for such funds. In the last couple of years, a growing list of apex donors like Jeff Bezos and Laurene Powell Jobs have committed billions for climate action. Overseas donations, at least from Bezos, have to date gone to major green groups or mainstream funding intermediaries for regranting. Domestically, however, Bezos has made some surprisingly large grants to environmental justice intermediaries. If he and others take a similar approach to their global green grantmaking, it would be a significant shift.

How the new fund works and who it supports

The fund kicked off with a $581,000 round of awards to 24 women-led projects, spanning Belize to Burkina Faso, with more African countries represented than any other continent. Grantees included groups like Akashinga, an all-women anti-poaching effort focused on protecting elephants in Zimbabwe; Swayam Shikshan Prayog, a regenerative farming organization in India; and Sustainable Surf, a Manhattan Beach, California-based nonprofit that works to protect oceans using surf culture. Grant amounts were not disclosed, but there’s a full list of grantees at the end of this article.

For this starting slate, grantees were chosen from the One Earth Project Marketplace, a sort of Kickstarter for vetted, on-the-ground projects related to energy, conservation and regenerative agriculture, with funding needs of $50,000 or less to more than $5 million. Many of the efforts landed on the database following recommendations from members of the new group’s advisory board, Winters said.

The group’s long-term vision is more participatory. Leaders plan to create a rotating grantmaking committee of grassroots activists, philanthropic leaders and environmental experts. They hope to have that in place for the next round of grants, which will go out before the end of this year. The fund also aims to make future grants multi-year with limited reporting requirements.

“At the core of Daughters is really a commitment to collaboration across the field, and working with many different organizations and leaders,” Winters said.

Who’s on board with the fund so far

There’s already some serious star power and experience on the new fund’s all-woman, 32-member advisory board. Prominent members include Mary Robinson, the first female president of Ireland, Liberian activist and Nobel Peace Prize winner Leymah Gbowee, and Silvia Earle, the first female chief scientist of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Other members span a variety of backgrounds, including the CEO of Mercy Corps, a Goldman Prize winner, an award-winning wildlife photographer and the founder of a luxury travel concierge service.

There’s also a touch of celebrity and billionaire support beyond Allen, with representatives from Ellen DeGeneres’ foundation, The Ellen Fund, and billionaire British entrepreneur Richard Branson’s nonprofit, The B Team. David Rockefeller’s daughter, Peggy Dulany, also has a seat representing Synergos, a nonprofit she founded. The team said the advisory board was built from their networks and advisors—and will continue to grow over the years.

The new campaign’s founders have some experience starting from scratch. Salbi founded Women for Women International at age 23 and helped it grow into a global humanitarian group that has given out more than $100 million in aid and loans. Winters has helped launch a variety of pooled philanthropic funds, including several species-focused vehicles: Shark Conservation Fund, Lion Recovery Fund and Elephant Crisis Fund.

Less than 3% of environmental foundation funding focuses explicitly on women and the environment, according to a report produced in 2018 by a pair of such funds, Global Greengrants Fund and Prospera. That tiny pot of money is mostly directed by small groups: those two funds, along with other local funds, accounted for more than half of such grantmaking.

Daughters for Earth is in early discussions about possible partnerships with several such funds, according to its leadership, including the Solutions Project, Global Greengrants Fund and Women’s Earth Alliance, which received an award in this round. Its grantees include still more funds, such as the AgroEcology Fund and the Quick Response Fund for Nature, which Winters also helped launch.

“For this century to change, we need to bring on feminine values,” Salbi said. “Part of that is to collaborate and partner and to do things together. We are a case in point, basically, of that collaboration.”

“Mobilizing every daughter”

Unlike some of its peers, Daughters for Earth is also looking to the masses for support. Rather than solely raising money from foundations and wealthy individuals, the new fund hopes also to bring in substantial small-scale individual donations—and at all levels.

Its launch this week at SXSW is emblematic of that push. Its website is packed with content for climate newbies, including a section focused on individual action. Of course, it also has a hashtag: #Daughters4Earth.

“The essence of Daughters for Earth is to mobilize every daughter,” Salbi said. “We’re all daughters. It doesn’t matter what age we are, or nationality, or ethnicity, or gender or anything like that.”

“We already have donors of all sizes,” she added. “From the $10 to the $10 million, it’s all sizes coming at this. That’s our unity. We’re all in this together.”

One donor on the higher end is Allen, who is co-founder and chair of the investment and philanthropic vehicle, Vulcan, which manages her late brother’s estate, valued at over $20 billion, which Paul Allen said he intended to mostly give away. Jody has committed a “significant amount” of funding to Daughters for Earth, said Rivera.

The team declined to release how much they’ve raised so far, but they said they expect to get halfway to their goal by the end of this year. They say $100 million is a first step, not an endpoint, envisioning the fund as at least a 10-year project. With Allen on their team and a star-studded cast of advisors, Daughters for Earth could be poised for a swift ascendancy.

As more and more billionaires pledge big bucks for climate, it’s an open question how much that funding—if it materializes—reinforces a historic overemphasis on technical, top-down solutions versus building grassroots power. Both science and movements are needed, but the latter has long gotten just pennies on the dollar. Efforts like this one suggest some potentially big-time donors are open to righting that inequity.

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Daughters for Earth’s projects and grantees to date:

AgroEcology Fund in partnership with We Are the Solution
AgroEcology Fund in partnership with Slow Food
Alliance for International Reforestation
American Farmland Trust in partnership with Black Family Land Trust and Kentucky State University Extension
Anishinaabe Agriculture Institute
Cameroon Gender and Environment Watch
Ceibo Alliance in partnership with 80 Indigenous communities
Community Baboon Sanctuary
Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund
Digital Democracy in partnership with Ogiek People, Chepkitale Indigenous People Development Project
Fibershed in partnership with California Cotton and Climate Coalition
Fibershed in partnership Rainbow Fiber Co-Op
Herbicide-Free Campus
International Anti-Poaching Foundation
Mujeres y Ambiente
Southern Plains Land Trust in partnership with The Quick Response Fund for Nature
Sustainable Surf in partnership with Wildcoast
Swayam Shikshan Prayog
WECAN International in partnership with Houma and intertribal women from the Bvlbancha Collective
WECAN International in partnership with Synergie des Associations Feminines du Congo
Wild Earth Allies in partnership with Imbereheza Gahunga
Women's Earth Alliance: Protecting the Forests and Peatlands of Kalimantan
Women’s Earth Alliance: Restoring the Kakamega Tropical Rainforest
World Agroforestry