Move over Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan, there’s a new billionaire power couple in climate philanthropy. Last week, Steve and Connie Ballmer let the world know they have committed more than $200 million to stopping climate change over the coming years.
The former Microsoft CEO and his wife are focusing the first-ever climate grants from their Ballmer Group on keeping the world’s forests healthy and thriving, with the bulk of their pledge going to well-known groups that work on deforestation, including a pair of networks that focus on Indigenous land rights.
The commitments establish the Ballmers as climate mega-donors, and, with one of the largest fortunes in the country at their disposal, this could be only the first step. They join a growing number of billionaires who have launched efforts over the last year-plus to help save humanity from climate catastrophe, such as Yvon Chouinard, Laurene Powell Jobs and the Sobrato family.
The announcement from the Ballmers is another instance of heirs pushing their ultra-wealthy parents to write their first (or latest) checks for the cause, just as with the examples listed above. In this case, it’s the couple’s eldest son, Sam Ballmer.
“Sam has chosen to focus his career on climate change, and it is his passion and commitment that has led Ballmer Group to expand into this new area,” reads an announcement from the LLC.
It’s worth noting there are plenty of examples of wealthy donors giving one-off donations (see Lynda and Stewart Resnick) or making big promises (see Richard Branson) on climate change, but with little or no follow-up. While there’s no reason to think the Ballmers fall into that category, and this is a notable first move, there is never certainty on what will come next. That said, here’s what we know about this giving and what may lie ahead.
Who’s getting Ballmer climate bucks?
If your organization is lucky enough to get a grant from the Ballmer Group, it is often large and multiyear. The Ballmers’ climate grants so far stick to that formula. A total of $217 million in pledged support — an average of about $50 million a year, at least initially — will go to just six recipients.
More than half of those dollars are pledged to one group, the Climate and Land Use Alliance ($118 million), a grantmaking collaborative whose members include major green funders like the Ford Foundation, the David and Lucile Packard Foundation and the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation. Another grantee in the same vein is the Tenure Facility ($12 million), which helps Indigenous communities secure land tenure and other rights, and whose recent backers include new climate funders both large (Jeff Bezos, MacKenzie Scott) and those at a more modest level (the Sobratos).
These two groups, both networks that distribute funds to other organizations, are among the leading beneficiaries of philanthropy’s push to expand funding for Indigenous-led conservation efforts, including a much-publicized, multi-partner, $1.7 billion pledge last year.
Two other major Ballmer recipients are the ClimateWorks Foundation’s Drive Electric Campaign ($50 million), the philanthropic effort to accelerate the shift to electric transportation that I profiled earlier this year, and a New York-based conservation and research nonprofit, Wildlife Conservation Society (two grants totalling $25 million), for deforestation-related projects.
One force guiding many of the Ballmers’ pledges was the Audacious Project, the grantmaking arm of TED (of viral talks fame) which has attracted a wide range of mega-donors and is becoming a burgeoning force in climate philanthropy. The Ballmers credited it for their grants to the Tenure Facility, ClimateWorks and Woodwell Climate Research Center ($6 million).
Who’s leading the effort?
The Ballmer Group has a roughly 40-person staff, according to its website, but the new climate initiative’s only listed staff member to date is its lead, Sam Ballmer.
He joined his parents’ philanthropy in February after a seven-month stint as a student research assistant at the University of Washington, where he focused on groundwater management, according to his LinkedIn profile. Sam worked earlier at the anti-homelessness nonprofit New Story, where he managed the organization’s partnerships, as well as at an investment platform as a digital marketing manager.
That said, he’s not exactly working solo. The effort has been aided over the past six months by the Climate Leadership Initiative, a ClimateWorks initiative to attract new mega-donors that was spun off several years ago and has guided a long list of ultra-wealthy individuals making their first climate grants, as well as serving as a close partner of the Audacious Project.
The Ballmers’ climate grants serve as an illustration of ClimateWorks myriad relationships in the field, and its often central role in the grantmaking of new climate funders, which is just as its founders intended. Not only did ClimateWorks birth the organization that advised the Ballmers (CLI) and get one of their grants — it is also a fellow funder of one of their grantees (CLUA) and serves as a pass-through for Bezos Earth Fund grants to another Ballmer grantee (the Tenure Facility).
What might come next?
Even before they added climate, the Ballmer Group had a crowded grants portfolio, including (take a deep breath): behavioral health, child welfare, criminal justice reform, housing and homelessness, K-12 education and public safety. Not only is that far from the full list, but those areas often account for a broad range of work. As we’ve noted in the past, the Ballmers give to an extensive array of nonprofits via their anti-poverty funding, education funding and much else besides. Of course, when you have roughly $91 billion at your disposal, there’s plenty to go around.
It seems likely we’ll see similar variety within the couple’s climate portfolio. That’s already true, thanks to their involvement in the Audacious Project, which has backed projects across a variety of areas. This first round of grants alone spans land conservation, electric vehicles, permafrost research and carbon market standards.
That list lines up with all the areas mentioned in the announcement, including the open-ended goal of “reducing emissions.” Sam Ballmer’s bio on the website, however, offers one more potential grantmaking area: “lessen global oil and gas dependency.” There’s also a wide variety of ways to pursue such a goal, so it’ll be fascinating to see what approaches the Ballmers take.
There’s also a bigger-picture goal that may prove important. The Ballmer Group’s tagline is “economic opportunity for all,” and the announcement’s headline reads, in part, “helping children and families by fighting climate change.” All climate action has some such impact, but perhaps we’ll see more focused dollars for that goal.
The Ballmers might also take a page from a fellow billionaire sports team owner with a new environmental portfolio: Home Depot cofounder and Atlanta Falcons owner Arthur Blank. Blank’s foundation staff have worked with the folks who manage the NFL team’s stadium, which Blank owns, on its environmental impact. Such efforts can be simple greenwashing, but done right, they can act as a far-reaching cultural example. Perhaps this new line of work can inform the new $1.8 billion arena the Ballmers are building for their NBA team, the Los Angeles Clippers.
One big question is whether future Ballmer funding will mainly flow to large and established nonprofits or branch out to build a broader movement. This round included several groups — the Tenure Facility, CLUA and ClimateWorks — designed to take in big gifts and distribute them more broadly, an essential role in a rapidly growing field. Yet there’s some concern in the movement that new donors like the Ballmers will further the preeminence of certain donor-favorite intermediaries and groups, while other domestic and international regrantors have yet to receive such support.
Like other major commitments by new donors, the couple’s climate grantmaking will inevitably either reinforce or shift longstanding funding patterns and disparities. With the largest share of their dollars going to groups working on Indigenous rights, they are taking a stand on one such imbalance. Perhaps they will also help build a broader, more diverse field with a wider range of well-funded organizations. Given the Ballmers’ announcement this week that they had invested $400 million with four Black investment managers, it seems that theme is already on their minds.