Almost a Year After Launch, What Has Philanthropy’s Leading Climate Bill Implementation Effort Funded?

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After months of rumors, the details emerged last July: A handful of the nation’s largest climate funders had joined forces to spend $180 million over the next three years to ensure that the United States’ biggest climate bill in history, the Inflation Reduction Act, and other major legislation, benefited communities across the country. They called it the Invest in Our Future fund. 

When I broke the news about the fund last summer, it hadn’t brought on a full staff yet, but was already pumping money into the field. Nearly a year after its unveiling, and well into its second year giving out grants, what has happened with Invest in Our Future so far — and what has it funded?

Let’s start with the numbers. It has issued $25.5 million in grants to 20 organizations so far this year, on top of $60 million last year, according to the fund’s team, which now numbers 10 people. With the addition of $70 million over three years from the Ballmer Group, the fund’s single-biggest contribution to date, Invest in Our Future’s total budget now totals $240 million.

The Ballmer Group, which made its commitment public late last year, joins a lineup of backers that includes four of the largest legacy climate funders in the country, the David and Lucile Packard, MacArthur, Rockefeller, and William and Flora Hewlett foundations, as well as the Bill Gates-led investment and grantmaking platform Breakthrough Energy.

Then there’s the new leadership. Last December, following the unexpected departure of its first leader, the fund hired Peter Colavito, a former consultant to the Natural Resources Defense Council, Open Society Foundations and American Civil Liberties Union, who earlier served as a chief of staff and advisor at the SEIU. Other members of the team have come from positions with the Biden administration, the State of California, the philanthropy consultancy Tempest Advisors and the California Wellness Foundation. 

Finally, and most importantly, there are the grantees. They span regrantors, technical assistance providers, financial institutions and policy groups, including several groups that recently received funding from the EPA’s Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, as I reported earlier this month.

It’s hard to know precisely what to make of the fund’s grantmaking to date, mainly because only grantee names are available, not grant amounts. Nevertheless, I’ve assembled what I learned in speaking with the team, people in the field and a grantee, and reviewing the information available. 

From the first whispers about the fund last year, a primary concern shared with me was whether dollars would get out the door as quickly as needed. That persists. I spoke to a handful of people about the fund, and nearly all asked for anonymity to speak candidly. Several said they wished money was reaching grantees faster, given the implications of this year’s election. IOF’s team maintains it’s moving quite rapidly for a new outfit, and one grantee says the issue was with the field, not the fund.

Few people I spoke to raised concerns about the degree to which the fund is prioritizing equity and movement-building in its grantmaking, a leading concern when it launched. It’s difficult to evaluate such questions without details on how much each recipient is receiving, but the grantee list includes many groups known as environmental and climate justice leaders, and the team reports 43% of funding went to equity-focused groups in 2023 and nearly the same rate this year.

With a powerful lineup of backers, and more money than any other funder of federal climate legislation implementation, Invest in Our Future is the central player in philanthropy’s push to make the most of a once-in-a-generation tide of federal spending. At stake is whether the world’s largest historical emitter not only tamps down emissions but lifts up long-neglected communities in the process. Even more broadly, the fund represents one of the biggest-ever attempts by philanthropy to guide public-sector investment — a role many funders embrace, but rarely get a chance to play on this scale. 

Who’s received grants from the fund so far? 

Invest in Our Future did not share how much it’s giving to each grantee other than noting 90% of awards fall between $500,000 and $2 million, with an average grant size of $1.3 million. But its grantee list, consisting of those who have opted in to being featured, and spanning both 2023 and 2024 awardees, gives some sense of the types of groups it prefers. 

Like other large funding operations getting started on climate in a hurry (see most new billionaire donors in this space), Invest in Our Future has relied heavily on giving to regrantors, a widely used method of getting large checks to community groups quickly. 

IOF’s half-dozen intermediary grantees include one of the largest in the U.S., the Energy Foundation, as well as three well-known climate justice regrantors: the Climate and Clean Energy Equity Fund, the Hive Fund for Climate and Gender Justice and The Solutions Project. A couple worker-oriented funds are also on the list: the Families and Workers Fund and the Just Transition Fund. These are temporary destinations — this funding will flow to a variety of work.

In addition to the regrantors, perhaps the largest group of IOF grantees is made up of organizations providing technical assistance to applicants seeking IRA funding based on the fund’s grantee descriptions. These include the Environmental Protection Network, a bipartisan volunteer group, and Alliance for Tribal Clean Energy, which helps tribes access energy funding; and rural assistance providers, such as Beneficial Electrification League and the Rural Climate Partnership.

Another segment of grantees, which includes some of the groups mentioned above, are more known for their policy work and research. Examples include the progressive think tank Roosevelt Institute, public transit group Jobs to Move America and the Siting Clean Collaborative, a resource for siting energy infrastructure. As I previously reported, grantees also include several Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund recipients, including Climate United, Inclusiv, Opportunity Finance Network, and Rewiring America.

Of course, these are rough categories, and many grantees check multiple boxes. For instance, Invest in Our Future’s website details both policy and technical assistance work done by groups like US Climate Alliance, a coalition of governors working on state-level climate policies, and Solar United Neighbors, which supports homeowners in buying solar panels and other systems.

While we do not know which of these grantees are getting the biggest checks, the team says 43% of funding in 2023, and 40% this year to date, went to equity-focused organizations that support efforts to deliver benefits to underserved communities, an area of concern for several sources I spoke to prior to the fund’s launch. 

Efforts in philanthropy and the public sector have sought in recent years to create baselines for such spending, from the Climate Funders Justice Pledge, which has the more specific ask that at least 30% of funding to go to BIPOC-led power-building groups, and the federal government’s Justice40 initiative, which requires that 40% of benefits of certain federal investments, including on climate and clean energy, flow to disadvantaged communities. 

There are also 2024 fund grantees that have yet to be announced by Invest in Our Future. The team shared the following recipients with me: the solar movement group Groundswell (not to be mistaken with the Groundswell Fund); GGRF recipients NC Clean Energy Fund and Power a Clean Future Ohio; and the climate labor organization Texas Climate Jobs Project. A spokesperson said “all but a handful” of IOF’s grantees are on the website.

What does the fund’s leader say?

In its second year, Invest in Our Future has shifted its focus to state-based grantmaking after its initial slate focused on national groups, according to Peter Colavito, executive director, in an interview just three months after his start date. 

Colavito said the goal is to provide “just-in-time technical assistance” as a new wave of new federal programs roll out within multiple agencies, each with different rules and requirements.

He sees that move as part of a field-wide transition. “The climate movement, rightfully, put a lot of effort and time into moving the Inflation Reduction Act” and the other larger bills, he said. But implementation “happens in a much different way than federal legislation gets passed. That’s a change.”

Colavito said the fund’s aim has been to support work close to the ground and “invest in grassroots work that comes from a multi-issue, multi-sector perspective.” Its ideal grantees this year, for instance, “might be established folks in the climate space… who are connecting the people who might not have been connected to the climate space previously, but for whom implementation is an enormous opportunity.”

He gave the example of Forward Together Wisconsin, a grantee not yet on IOF’s website. It is mobilizing community and labor organizers to inform local governments and school districts about the IRA, as well as doing door-to-door outreach. 

“It's really connecting people from different parts of the city, the state, from different backgrounds, to implement — way beyond what normally you would see in a climate-based project,” Colavito said.

Forward Together Wisconsin is emblematic of the fund’s broader push to expand the philanthropic map.

“There was a real desire on the part of the leadership of the fund and the broader climate philanthropy, that I saw, to reach well beyond the traditional walls of climate movement, and climate philanthropy,” Colavito said.

How fast is the fund moving?

An assessment of the pace at which Invest in Our Future is getting money out the door depends on your baseline. Based on the fund’s original plan of disbursing $60 million per year, it is on schedule. Judged by its new total budget of $240 million, it is behind pace. Compared to some billionaire giving, it’s been slow. Judged against most philanthropic standards, it’s quick. 

“To think that a year and a half ago, the idea didn’t even exist for IOF,” said Colavito in February. Now the organization has made more than $85 million in grants.

Still, the question of the speed at which this money should move out the door hangs over the operation. Part of the issue lies with the climate field as a whole, which was slow to respond to the opportunities, according Alvaro Sanchez, the institute’s vice president of policy at Oakland-based Greenlining Institute, which received a one-year $1.3 million project grant from IOF for its Greenlining the Block program. 

“A lot of the concerns that people had with IOF, I had those concerns about our ecosystem — and the system didn't react quickly enough,” he said. “We just need a lot more coordination across the board.”

Another yardstick: this year’s election. The fund is entirely nonpartisan, as are virtually all of its backers (Breakthrough Energy has a 501(c)(4) arm). But for some, it’s concerning that this fund, which represents the largest-known source of philanthropic funding for implementation, has not front-loaded more of its spending given the very different futures represented by November’s election.

The hope, essentially, is to ensure that as many Americans as possible see tangible benefits as soon as possible — and to get as much work underway as possible prior to an election that could put future government spending on climate implementation in doubt. 

Foundations and other 501(c)(3)s, of course, cannot engage directly in political work. But there is also the undeniable reality that one of the country’s two major parties, the Republicans, rejects or at best ignores the hard facts of climate change, not to mention Donald Trump’s environmental plans. That is a policy reality, not just a political calculation, a situation that is surely not lost on a team with extensive experience in D.C. and other centers of power.

“We need these investments implemented as quickly as possible, regardless of the politics of the moment,” Colavito said in a follow-up statement, noting most funding will be allocated by the end of the year.  “The climate has everyone on the clock, and there’s no time to waste.”

The limits to both optimism and critique

Tamara Toles O'Laughlin, president and CEO of the Environmental Grantmakers Association, the climate field’s largest philanthropic network, said the choices Invest in Our Future makes matter, and she’s following the fund with interest. But she’s also keeping an eye on the big picture.

“Since none of this money adds up to enough money to solve the problems, there’s some limitations on what can be cautious optimism, but also what can be appropriate critique,” she said.

With federal bills expected to unlock as much as $4 trillion dollars in spending, much of it still ahead, some are concerned philanthropy’s spending is falling well short of the opportunity. As Archana Sahgal, the founder of the intermediary Hyphen, told me last year: “millions are never going to unlock trillions.”

Invest in Our Future was specifically designed, as Colavito puts it, to leverage government dollars to support communities — thereby bringing far more funding than philanthropy alone could ever provide. At the recent Atlanta conference of Climate and Clean Energy Equity Fund, which is a fund grantee, he encouraged those in the room to consider how their organizations can leverage such investments on their own. 

Yet many groups, particularly those who have not historically accessed such funding, will need support to navigate the onerous and unfamiliar federal application process, as Colavito also acknowledged. And the fund’s budget will only go so far.

“Some of that we can support,” Colavito said. “Some of that is about the entire ecosystem turning its eyes and mind to this historic opportunity to save our planet and recreate economic development in so many places.”