At a Critical Moment for Action, Uncertainty Looms in Climate Philanthropy
/
With the climate movement about to gather in Dubai for the annual United Nations conference and the U.S. government in the first years of spending an estimated $4 trillion on climate investments and infrastructure, American climate philanthropy is in a state of flux, prompting concern among grantees and funders.
Some of the field’s biggest funders are going through leadership transitions; others are rethinking or concluding strategies, leaving nonprofit leaders and peer funders unclear whether funding will continue and concerned that the general turmoil will delay philanthropic support at a critical moment.
JPB Foundation, a green funding heavyweight, has named its second-ever leader, and will no longer have a dedicated environmental program as it reorganizes its funding under a new framework. JPB’s incoming President Deepak Bhargava said that while its funding will no longer be structured with dedicated portfolios on poverty and the environment, green grantmaking, including climate justice, will continue to be a priority under the new setup. The foundation “will continue to fund a significant number of the grantees in our current portfolios,” he said in a statement.
Meanwhile, although its climate funding will almost certainly remain strong, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, long the field’s leading legacy funder, is looking for a new president with the departure of Larry Kramer, a stalwart advocate for climate philanthropy. Further out, MacArthur Foundation’s Big Bet strategy on climate will end in 2026, leaving some wondering about its future in the field. Here again, MacArthur President John Palfrey has said climate change will likely remain a focus, but it’s unclear what form that will take.
Several green middleweights, as I once called them, are also in flux. Robertson Foundation is going through a strategic refresh under a new president. Open Society Foundations — whose climate program is relatively small despite the institution’s size — is letting go of 40% of its staff and is now under the leadership of founder George Soros’ son Alex.
These grantmakers collectively represented more than $500 million in environmental funding in 2021: Hewlett with $293 million, JPB with $120 million, MacArthur with $51.4 million, Robertson with $34 million and Open Society Foundations with $27 million. While many of those funding figures seem unlikely to shift significantly, the total reflects just how much of the field is in play right now.
There’s also the question of how some big new entrants to the arena are carrying out their climate commitments. Jeff Bezos and Laurene Powell Jobs have each promised to spend billions over the coming years, and together, the pair accounted for more than $700 million in funding in 2021. Yet the available evidence shows each has yet to ramp up to expected levels of spending, and Jobs’ outfit is going through a transition of its own.
In exchanges with a half-dozen people about the current uncertainty in the field, several told me that three other grantmakers had halted climate funding or planned to do so. All three institutions said that this is not the case (as such, I have not named them). Yet the volume of gossip is noteworthy given what it suggests about the state of the sector.
Tamara Toles O’Laughlin, president of Environmental Grantmakers Association, has heard similar concerns from across the field about funding levels, particularly for environmental justice work. “People have said that climate funding is getting scarce,” she said. “This is a landscape issue at the global level, at the national level, and it is highly intolerable. It flies in the face of reality, which is that these problems are not only not solved, but they are in a worse, more tender, more fragile state than possible.”
The turmoil comes amid a once-in-a-generation opportunity to leverage federal investment for the climate emergency, with four bills — the American Rescue Plan, the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, the CHIPS and Science Act and the Inflation Reduction Act — authorizing trillions of dollars in spending that is available in communities across the country. To access these funds, organizations on the ground will need to navigate a complex bureaucratic process that, for many, will require philanthropic support.
It also comes after a summer in which the crisis seemed to accelerate even faster than foreseen. July brought the hottest day on record, and then broke that record in each of the next three days. Scientists are (for the umpteenth time) warning that all indicators are pointing to red, and many world leaders sound almost despairing. “We are on a highway to climate hell,” said U.N. Secretary General António Guterres. The world is “collapsing,” wrote Pope Francis.
In other words, this moment would seem likely to inspire ballooning climate philanthropy and full-throated dedication to the cause. Even if these shifts do not amount to an overall drop in funding, it’s understandable that those on the ground are feeling anxious. For nonprofits, foundations’ strategic and staffing changes — regardless of the cause — puts in question whether current funding will continue, and whether programs will need to be reshaped or overhauled.
“Over the past few years in particular, staff turnover at key funders has delayed funds or completely changed the strategies of programs we count on,” said Todd Paglia, executive director of Stand.earth. “The irony is that if we ran Stand.earth like this and allowed projects to stall out for a year or more, to drop key initiatives altogether, to have our campaigns abruptly change course because we hired someone new, we would raise a lot less funding from foundations that do these very things.”
Long-time funders likely to stay the course, but where will the money go?
For the legacy funders undergoing shifts, much of today’s uncertainty seems to be less about whether they will continue to fund climate action than about which grantees and strategies they will pursue following the changes. Those grantmakers are publicly reiterating that funding will go on, but some nonprofits may be unsure what that will mean for their own funding.
MacArthur, for instance, emphasizes that while its Big Bets are winding down, they are solely a strategy for how to move money. Asked for comment, the foundation directed me to Palfrey’s post from last September, in which he’s clear that a change in approach does not mean departing the field. The Chicago giant has greenery in its mission statement, after all.
“While we exit our current strategies, crises such as climate change, nuclear risk, government corruption and overincarceration persist,” wrote Palfrey, who my colleague, Dawn Wolfe, recently profiled. “We expect to develop new work or new strategies to respond to these or other persistent challenges — even as our specific strategies wind down — guided by our just, verdant and peaceful mission.”
Hewlett, too, pointed to the foundation’s July announcement that President Larry Kramer will step down at the end of the year. In the announcement, Board Chair Mariano-Florentino (Tino) Cuéllar stressed continuity. “The foundation remains committed to its core areas of focus and that programs will continue to implement grantmaking strategies that are in place,” he said. Yet there is no guarantee that the next leader will put as high a priority on climate as Kramer, or bring the same energy to the task.
Kramer has been a high-profile climate philanthropy champion, helping bring together government-funder alliances on hydrofluorocarbons and, more recently, methane. He played a part in growing ClimateWorks Foundation and its network into a global infrastructure for climate mitigation philanthropy, as well as spinning off the Climate Leadership Initiative, a highly successful climate fundraising operation. And he’s been willing to publicly apply pressure to fellow funders, such as in his 2020 op-ed “Philanthropy must stop fiddling while the world burns.”
A big shift at one of the field’s heavyweights
Of all the shifts in the field, none seems to have provoked as much chatter and concern as changes underway at JPB. The New York grantmaker will no longer have dedicated environment and poverty programs after a reorganization of the foundation’s grantmaking under new categories, a shift started by incoming President Deepak Bhargava, a long-time immigrant rights advocate. Bhargava, who I interviewed earlier this year, is taking over for founder and donor Barbara Picower in the foundation’s first-ever leadership transition.
“Both poverty and the environment (including climate justice) will continue to be important topics the foundation will address,” he said. “As part of our ongoing commitment to climate justice, we have just approved a special round of funding to support implementation of the environmental provisions of the Inflation Reduction Act, with a focus on racial equity.” (See his full statement below.)
The foundation issued $11.5 million in IRA-related funding, according to a spokesperson. “Almost all of JPB’s current grantees will continue to get funding at least through 2024, or the end of their current grant term, whichever is greater,” they said. The foundation will decide on its areas of focus and those programs’ size “later in 2024.”
O’Laughlin called JPB a “groundbreaking” funder for its work to move money to people on the ground and reach groups that environmental philanthropy has rarely funded, and EGA even gave the foundation an award at the network’s recent retreat. But she has heard concerns about the ability of JPB’s grantees to continue down that path.
“That is not a one-and-done, big-investment kind of moment,” she said. “In order to support a multigenerational shift in the way that the work happens, you have to be willing to invest for multiple generations.”
Question marks around megadonors
Spend-down and limited-life philanthropies rarely follow a linear path, with funding typically ramping up to a peak followed by a wind-down. Yet the pace that Bezos and Powell Jobs’ grantmaking operations have taken in their first few years, from what we know, would leave them short of fulfilling their funding promises.
Three years after its first round of funding was announced on Instagram, the Bezos Earth Fund is behind the $1 billion annual average needed to fulfill the Amazon founder’s 10-year, $10 billion pledge. So far, it has made $1.9 billion in awards, according to a spokesperson.
The Bezos Earth Fund is still committed to its goal, and will grant $10 billion by the end of 2030, the spokesperson said, noting that its current total does not include long-term commitments. For instance, its urban greening initiative granted $50 million this year (which is included), and committed an additional $350 million through 2030 (not yet included). However, some of the fund’s major initial funding commitments also end this year, such as the three-year, $43 million grants awarded to a trio of environmental justice intermediaries — Climate and Clean Energy Equity Fund, Hive Fund for Gender and Climate Justice, and The Solutions Project.
Meanwhile, Powell Jobs’ climate philanthropy, Waverley Street Foundation, is seen by many I spoke with as being in turmoil after several staff departed earlier this year. We do not yet know how much it’s given in 2022, let alone this year, but its 2021 grantmaking was about half of what would be needed to spend its remaining $3 billion by 2035 as pledged. Waverley declined to comment.
That 2021 pledge, by the way, was originally to spend $3.5 billion over the next decade. But that shifted to “by 2035” when the operation launched its website, giving the operation more time.
These two billionaires’ commitments are much-needed infusions to the sector and stand in stark contrast to the lack of comparable commitments from most peers. While MacKenzie Scott has shown it can be done, getting this much money out the door of a brand-new operation has its challenges, and that may be part of the slow build-up.
Yet given past philanthropic reversals by billionaires — see Richard Branson’s broken $3 billion pledge — there’s understandable concern that this spending will not come to pass, at least not on the promised schedule.
Persistent concerns over climate justice funding
One more current running throughout the philanthrosphere regards the sector’s commitment to racial and economic justice amid political and legal headwinds, and as some grantmakers turn their attention to other topics. While climate justice saw unprecedented increases in funding following the 2020 racial uprisings, it’s still relatively scant, and grantees have long suspected that surge would be short-lived.
For Toles O’Laughlin, much of the concern she has heard from grantees and funders about limited climate dollars is related to environmental justice support. She attributes it to the Supreme Court ruling striking down affirmative action. While that ruling did not directly apply to foundations, it seems to have sent a chill through the field, though others I consulted had not seen an impact on funding. She also said some foundations are ending their post-George Floyd equity commitments, as groups had feared.
“Folks who did not have license to do so before have said things as shocking as ‘our George Floyd Money has run out,’ and they are pivoting at a rate that is dizzying from racial equity,” she said. “Some of these groups have either just withdrawn or withdrawn and decided to focus on things like democracy, as though you could have a healthy democracy on a planet that is not healthy, full of people who are oppressed. It's shocking.”
–
Funders and grantees: How has the Supreme Court ruling on affirmative action affected, if at all, environmental justice funding for you and your peers? And how do you think current funding levels compare to the years immediately following George Floyd’s murder? Let me know at michael@insidephilanthropy.com.
Statement from Deepak Bhargava, incoming president of the JPB Foundation
“Our focus in the next era of The JPB Foundation will be to build power for those who have historically been denied it, investing in the kind of organizing and movement-building that empowers people affected by social problems to shape the future. This builds directly upon much of the past work of the Foundation and many of the investments we have made over the years. To support this enhanced strategic focus, we will also be reorganizing our team. While we will no longer organize our work under the headings of the Poverty and Environment programs, both poverty and the environment (including climate justice) will continue to be important topics the Foundation will address, and we will continue to fund a significant number of the grantees in our current portfolios. As part of our ongoing commitment to climate justice, we have just approved a special round of funding to support implementation of the environmental provisions of the Inflation Reduction Act, with a focus on racial equity.”
