When the Donors of Color Network launched a new campaign in early 2021 to drive more money to climate justice groups led by people of color, the Kresge Foundation was one of the first foundations to sign on. The $4.7 billion institution had, after all, spent the past decade reshaping its grantmaking to focus on equity.
Called the Climate Funders Justice Pledge, the effort has since attracted dozens of signatories, including some of the field’s other biggest players. Those funders promise to commit at least 30% of their climate funding to BIPOC-led groups, or, at minimum, to be transparent about how much of their climate funding goes in that direction. Nearly two years since the launch, a new batch of funding from Kresge shows how the pledge continues to push committed funders to do even more.
The Troy, Michigan-based grantmaker announced earlier this year it had made $9 million in additional awards to BIPOC-led climate justice groups in 2021, upping such support to 39% of its climate portfolio, an all-time high for Kresge and reflective of a pledge-driven effort to fund all levels of the environmental movement, according to Rip Rapson, the foundation’s president. The foundation expects its 2022 grantmaking will meet or exceed that level.
“The pledge really helped crystallize for Lois [DeBacker, environmental program director] and the team the imperative of intentionality,” Rapson said. “There are often community-based organizations sort of working under the radar of traditional environmental philanthropy, and we needed to make a much more concerted effort to try to understand who some of those players were,” even if they were just getting off the ground.
Over the past decade, Kresge has tripled its support to BIPOC-led environmental organizations, a testament to a commitment that predates this campaign. Yet that milestone is also, in part, a result of the pledge. Rapson said it was only after being contacted by their team that Kresge began to formally track funding to such groups.
Kresge’s new funding is also only the most recent sign of the pledge’s enduring momentum. Late this summer, the pledge announced four new signatories, including one of the nation’s top legacy climate funders, the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, which committed solely to transparency. Others were the Christensen Fund, Solidaire Network and the Climate Initiative, a nonprofit regrantor.
A total of 32 funders have now joined the pledge, and the numbers are starting to add up. To date, the campaign has helped shift $60 million in new commitments to BIPOC-led groups from funders who are reshaping their programs to reach the pledge’s 30% floor.
“There is no good reason”
Despite all that has happened since the pledge launched, philanthropy still has a long way to go. While committed foundations like Kresge are shifting their funding and additional signatories are trickling in, many of the nation’s largest foundations have avoided taking a stand either way.
Roughly two years after the pledge debuted, a dozen top-40 foundations are still officially “in conversation,” having neither accepted nor declined the pledge. (Multiple funders in this situation declined to comment.) Another three foundations have never responded, according to organizers. (One of the latter, the NoVo Foundation, told IP it was not contacted.)
“There is no good reason why so many foundations are either refusing to commit to our Climate Funders Justice Pledge, or are staying silent,” said Isabelle Leighton, executive director of the Donors of Color Network, which runs the campaign, in a statement.
The situation mirrors foundations’ lackluster participation in Green 2.0’s annual report card, the leading tracker of diversity in the environmental movement. Published this month, this year’s report polled 50 funders and 60% declined to participate.
Infamously, environmental justice groups also only receive 1.3% of environmental funding from top national grantmakers, according to a much-cited study by Building Equity and Alignment for Impact and the Tishman Environment and Design Center.
The organizers of the Climate Funders Justice Pledge intentionally set the bar low, especially considering the fact that people of color make up 40% of the U.S. population and are more likely to live close to polluting industries and suffer from their ill effects. The pledge also included the transparency-only option to make it even easier for funders to get on board. Eager to change the low rate of response, Leighton said her campaign will increase pressure on holdouts in 2023.
“Next year, the CFJP will push harder than we ever have before,” she said. “Moving forward, we will take [funders’] silence as complicity in the harms that have historically been done to communities of color and as complete disregard for climate justice solutions broadly.”
Comfort, contradictions and “big, bold change”
Maria Lopez-Nuñez, deputy director of organizing and advocacy at the Newark-based Ironbound Community Corporation, has seen firsthand how groups run by those on the front lines of climate change have the ability not only to respond to needs as they arise, but also to make national impact.
“I always say, I feel more accountable than an elected official, because I can’t go to the laundromat or go supermarket shopping without a community member telling me what’s wrong,” Lopez-Nuñez said. “When we’re responding to the needs of climate change, it’s because someone’s been flooded out in their car.”
As an example of how groups like hers can scale up change, Lopez-Nuñez points to the 2020 passage of a New Jersey bill that advocates have called the strongest environmental justice legislation in the nation. Some have called it a “holy grail” for the movement.
“That was done only by grassroots groups in the state of New Jersey,” said Lopez-Nuñez, who also serves on the White House Environmental Justice Advisory Council. “It wasn’t like we had big think tanks come in and help us out.”
That success has led to other pushes across the country. Lopez-Nuñez’s group is helping support organizations in New Mexico and Michigan advance similar legislation, she said. The White House, too, has committed under the Justice40 initiative that 40% of the benefits from certain federal climate investments will “flow” to underprivileged communities.
Despite wins like these, the lion’s share of funding from most of philanthropy’s environmental portfolios — not to mention the largest checks — still tends to go to the nation’s largest environmental organizations. Numerous advocates say that while those established groups do critical work, many foundations continue to turn a blind eye to front-line movement groups. For Lopez-Nuñez, joining one of the field’s most well-known environmental justice networks, the Climate Justice Alliance, was critical for her organization’s future.
“The Climate Justice Alliance has been wonderful in helping us connect to funders that would otherwise not see us,” she said. “Organizing is not always a comfortable conversation to have for funders, but they want big, bold change, right? Those are kind of contradicting [impulses] — there’s a desire, but how do we get there?”
The movement funders helped build
Rip Rapson recalls that when his staff set out to launch the Kresge Foundation’s climate program, “It wasn’t self-apparent to Kresge that investing in next-generation technology or new forms of mitigation techniques wasn’t the right path.” Those methods promised scale and access to private markets, and the vastly greater resources available there, he said.
Yet the foundation ultimately took a community-focused approach because it is, at root, a place-based grantmaker. Rapson sees that first step as what set Kresge on a different path than peers who have not signed the pledge.
“For many of our colleagues, the fact that working in place is not their first impulse makes it hard for them to meet [the CFJP] pledge,” he said. Such funders typically back the nation’s largest environmental organizations, or at least mid-sized groups, and those “tend not to be organizations that either serve directly or are led by people of color,” he added.
Rapson has his own prescription for national funders who face this dilemma. “I think what they’re doing is tremendously important. It just makes it harder for them to [sign the pledge] — and more easy, I think, for them to say they’re ‘in conversation,’” he said. “I’m sure they’re thinking about it. If you want to do more than think about it, you’ve got to get on the ground. It’s really hard if you’re not on the ground.”
The scarcity of big-dollar green groups led by people of color also shows how the past few decades of environmental philanthropy have shaped, and limited, the climate movement. As I covered recently, foundations worked with their peers to help set up many of today’s largest groups, from NRDC to the World Resources Institute. Even today, a strikingly high number of climate philanthropy leaders have come from the latter.
Of course, if there are no large national groups that also meet the pledge requirements, it seems like funders should be considering what more they can do to change that. With billions flowing into climate philanthropy, this era will either preserve and enrich the status quo, or give rise to a new generation of green giants — one that is hopefully more representative of the people facing the greatest impacts. Efforts like the Climate Funders Justice Pledge are pushing for the latter, but it’s on funders to decide which future becomes reality.
Correction: Kresge increased its grantmaking to BIPOC-led climate justice groups by $9 million in 2021, not this year.