Scan the bios of the top leaders in climate philanthropy and the name of one Washington, D.C.-based think tank comes up again and again: the World Resources Institute.
Over the past two years, nearly a dozen veterans of the globe-spanning nonprofit have joined the ranks of climate philanthropies, with several taking top spots at some of the field’s biggest and most powerful players. And it’s not a new phenomenon, as several of the space’s longtime leaders also have done stints at WRI.
You might mark the start of this latest wave of hires with Andrew Steer, who left his post as WRI’s president and CEO in April 2021 after Jeff Bezos chose him to head the Amazon founder’s $10 billion climate fund. Two other high-profile moves followed. Yamide Dagnet departed WRI to become director of climate justice at Open Society Foundations that December, and a month later, Helen Mountford went off to lead ClimateWorks Foundation.
Look further down the organizational charts and there are even more hires from WRI in philanthropy. One of the field’s newly arrived climate mega-funders, Laurene Powell Jobs’ Waverley Street Foundation, added a WRI veteran as strategy director in May. Another still-growing top 40 climate grantmaker, Sequoia Climate Foundation, has recruited two staff from WRI in the past two years. Steer has also recruited two of his former WRI staff to join Bezos Earth Fund, including its new chief of science. Another WRI staffer is serving at the Climate Justice Resilience Fund while keeping a role at the think tank.
There are also leaders of environmental grant programs at well-established foundations who spent time at the think tank early in their careers. Jonathan Pershing and Walt Reid, who lead the environmental programs at the country’s two biggest legacy green funders, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, respectively, both once worked at WRI. And Ji Zou, the president of Energy Foundation China, one of the nodes in the philanthropy network created by ClimateWorks Foundation, was once the country’s lead for WRI.
There has long been something of a revolving door between major green groups, top climate foundations, and for that matter, government. (I wrote not long ago about all the philanthropoids who joined the Biden administration after the election.) It’s also pretty common for foundations to recruit program staff from their own grantees. But all of these recent hires, combined with the three longtime sector leaders, have left a surprisingly large number of WRI alumni calling the shots in climate philanthropy right now. I couldn’t find any other green group, including environmental behemoths like The Nature Conservancy and Sierra Club, with a bigger footprint.
“It is a bit weird, occasionally getting onto group calls of multiple institutions and suddenly being like, ‘Wait, we used to all be in the same place,’” said Mountford of ClimateWorks. “As somebody said to me the other day, WRI seems to have been a very good cultivation ground.”
Those crowded teleconferences spark some questions: How has WRI created so many candidates that philanthropy finds so attractive? What made it such fertile soil, or what factors have led foundations to keep pulling from the same patch? And, finally, what does the presence of so many WRI alums in climate philanthropy tell us about the field’s present and future?
There are plenty of good reasons funders would turn to the group, clearly a widely respected outfit that has expanded its work significantly in recent years. Current and former staff told me WRI’s emphasis on evidence-driven action, community-based approaches, and international scope have created a talent pool well-suited to the current moment. Yet that reliance may cause problems of its own. Academics and movement advocates say climate philanthropy’s historic reliance on a small group of major environmental groups has led grantmakers to prioritize certain solutions reflective of the backgrounds and biases of those leaders and institutions.
“There weren’t that many places to turn”
There are a few key reasons that WRI has put so many people in high places in climate philanthropy. Pershing, who served at the director of WRI’s climate, energy and pollution program before a distinguished career as a climate diplomat and his current role at Hewlett, said the seeds of WRI’s influence today were planted by the organization’s first two presidents, James “Gus” Speth and Jonathan Lash.
Both picked issues that were “a little ahead of their time,” eschewing local causes in favor of a focus on the world’s shared resources, Pershing said. For instance, WRI “worked on climate before it was popular.”
“As those issues became more salient in the global discourse, people were going, ‘Well, who do I turn to?” Pershing told me. “And there weren’t that many places to turn.”
It was a more recent WRI president, Andrew Steer, who grew the organization to its present size and scope. During his almost nine years at the institute, its budget grew four-fold and its staff five-fold. Asked why he and so many of his peers landed in philanthropy, Steer credited key strategic choices, including an early focus on the economic impact of climate change and, particularly, building major coalitions between governments, nonprofits, the business world and other sectors.
“That approach, which is now quite commonplace, frankly, is attractive to foundations and philanthropies that nowadays want to leverage their money,” Steer said. He cited WRI’s role in partnerships like the Energy Transitions Commission and the Global Commission on the Economy and Climate.
Elizabeth Cook, executive vice president for governance and development at WRI, echoed those themes. She also cited the organization’s global focus, work in and with major emitting countries, evidence-based approach, and community-informed process as driving factors. It’s a formula philanthropy finds attractive, she said.
Within WRI, it is a “source of great pride” that the organization has served as an often-tapped talent pool for philanthropy and other sectors, Cook said. “While it’s always hard to say goodbye to great colleagues, we’re still on the same team.”
Philanthropy is not alone in tapping WRI staff for big roles. One of the best-known WRI alums is Manish Bapna, who left in August 2021 to head NRDC, one of the world’s biggest environmental groups. Another former staffer, Jennifer Morgan, went on to co-head Greenpeace and now serves as a climate envoy for the German government. Others have taken leadership positions in businesses like Amazon and agrochemical giant Syngenta, as well as in the U.S. government, including at the State Department and the Department of Energy.
“A pretty tight relationship”
The plethora of WRI alumni at the highest reaches of climate philanthropy and beyond can also be seen as the latest chapter in a long history of close ties between the nation’s top funders and big green groups, dating back to the formation of now-prominent NGOs in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
Foundations have historically been led by well-connected, upper-middle-class elites, and in turn, have both funded and hired from green groups led by similar peers, said Robert Gioielli, a University of Cincinnati history professor who studies the early history of U.S. environmental organizations. Ford Foundation, for instance, provided the startup funding for NRDC, which he said was founded not by the era’s best-known activists, but by lawyers hailing from educational and personal backgrounds much like those of the foundation’s program officers.
“There’s always been a pretty tight relationship between [the country’s top environmental organizations] and major foundation funders,” he said. That dynamic “historically has created a relatively closed group that has the power to define what environmental activism, environmental reform, environmental policy looks like.”
In the view of climate philanthropy scholar Edouard Morena, WRI itself is a product of that funding ecosystem. Foundation support for WRI’s founding in 1982 was rooted in funders’ conviction that the “right” multilateral institutions, such as think tanks like WRI, and sufficient supporting data would lead to a “mutually beneficial solution” to transform society, wrote the University of London lecturer in a 2018 article. In retrospect, it’s clear that one flaw of that approach was underestimating the willingness of fossil fuel companies and their allies to leverage political power, hide evidence, deny facts and delay by any means in pursuit of continued profit.
Today, the prevalence of WRI veterans in positions of grantmaking power suggests the institution’s vision of climate progress will be the one favored by its staff-turned-grantmakers. That’s not inherently the case, of course, and plenty of staffers go on to form very different or more expansive worldviews than those of their former employers. Big climate groups like WRI, and their leaders, are always evolving. But some fear that any organizations without those relationships, namely grassroots groups operating outside of elite circles, will have to work twice as hard to get on those funders’ radars.
“If you’re hiring people who believe in these kind of big, scalable, technocratic solutions — what I would [call] false solutions, for a lot of them — that’s what’s going to continue to get funded,” said Senowa Mize-Fox, senior movement engagement associate for climate justice at the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy. “If we had more resources, we could do this at a larger scale, but we can’t, because all of this money is continuing to go to these big, technocratic solutions.”
A familiar pattern
When multiple top climate philanthropy leaders are plucked from one of the field’s leading grantees, it suggests the age-old revolving door is still spinning, even if it now looks like a Zoom call filled with familiar faces.
But WRI veterans say that the organization is more diverse than its Big Green predecessors — and thus, these appointments are not a monolithic group. Many of the recent appointees mentioned above are outside the once inescapable white-male profile. Their work histories, too, represent a variety of sectors, if primarily reflecting service in border-transcending, multilateral organizations.
Foundation trustees making these decisions might further argue that only groups such as WRI have the scope and reach that properly prepare their staff to lead major philanthropies. Insofar as that is true, it is also a reflection of the fact that these are the types of groups that have been scaled by philanthropy into multimillion-dollar international organizations in the first place. It’s a question of chickens and eggs. WRI, after all, was established with funding from the MacArthur Foundation in 1982.
As for where these leaders are sending funds, there’s only a limited public track record available so far. Lately, we’ve seen notable funding flowing outside the traditional circle of mainstream organizations from this circle. For instance, OSF’s program is focused on climate justice and is a full signatory to the Climate Justice Funders Pledge, whose transparency pledge has also been joined by ClimateWorks, Hewlett and Packard. And to be clear, it does not appear that WRI veterans are favoring their former employee any more than before. WRI was, for example, a frequent grantee of ClimateWorks prior to Mountford’s arrival and remains a regular recipient.
“If the evidence was that these three institutions were just sending their money to the same-old, same-old, then that would be an interesting avenue to explore,” Steer said, referring to Bezos Earth Fund, ClimateWorks and OSF. He emphasized that his fund has sent most of its U.S. funding, more than $300 million, to climate justice groups. “We haven’t given any money to the big greens” for U.S. work, he added. The fund has, however, sent hundreds of millions to such groups for overseas work.
It’s worth taking a moment to emphasize that the World Resources Institute veterans I’ve encountered are thoughtful, well-informed, conscious of the field’s history, and incredibly dedicated to ensuring philanthropy does all it can at this precarious time, including breaking with past practices. The organization itself has produced — and continues to produce — groundbreaking and vital research that is pointing the way forward.
At the same time, there is a stubborn, insular tendency in philanthropy, environmental and otherwise, of which we should always be wary. It seems short-sighted for any sector to rely too heavily on any one organization, no matter its virtues. And it seems particularly unwise when that sector, namely environmental philanthropy, has a history of operating — by its own admission and to its own detriment — as a closed circle. Of course, each foundation’s board makes its own choices. But the prevalence of WRI veterans in climate philanthropy seems like yet another signal that foundations should push themselves to cast a wider net when deciding who calls the shots.