Back in September 2021, Laurene Powell Jobs casually dropped the news that she planned to spend $3.5 billion over the next decade to address climate change. Details at the time were scarce, but we’re starting to get an outline of what this massive new climate philanthropy will look like.
A website that launched late last year and the foundation’s most recent public tax filings offer a first look at where Powell Jobs’ Waverley Street Foundation is sending money so far and who’s running the operation. They reveal the 59-year-old and her family gave out more than $200 million in 2020 and 2021, with several climate justice organizations receiving big checks, and a well-connected new policy shop and regrantor pulling in more than a third of that funding.
Powell Jobs has also tweaked her pledge by extending her deadline to 2035, giving her a bit more time than the originally announced decade. Even to meet that revised timeline, Waverley must nonetheless set a nearly unprecedented pace of giving. With more than $3 billion left to spend according to its website, the foundation will have to get an average of $230 million-plus out the door annually for the next 13 years. That’s more than the current annual environment program budgets of most of the field’s legacy heavyweights, including the Rockefeller Foundation and the David and Lucile Packard Foundation.
Where will it all go? The Palo Alto, California-based Waverley’s early grants paint a picture of a foundation that so far has turned to a few major organizations and a varied list of intermediaries — including both grassroots and larger, more mainstream environmental regrantors. It remains to be seen whether that reflects an enduring approach, or simply how it is moving funds as it works to hire staff and ramp up. Waverley has also gone big, with an average grant size of nearly $5 million over the two years we have on record. Incidentally, virtually all of the grantmaking outlined here, based on 2020 and 2021 tax filings, was completed before the news of the commitment broke in late 2021.
Waverley’s staff were not available for an interview, so this piece is based on its website, 990s, and responses to emailed questions. Here’s what we know so far about a still-growing philanthropy that is already one of the world’s largest climate funders — and what its early moves say about what kind of funder it will be as it grows even larger over the next decade-plus.
Who’s getting the checks?
Waverley’s biggest beneficiary is Climate Imperative, a policy group and regrantor founded in 2020 by Hal Harvey, who founded and led both Energy Foundation and ClimateWorks Foundation, the field’s oldest and most widely supported intermediaries. Harvey has been a pioneer in climate philanthropy, serving as environment program director at Hewlett during the 2000s and playing an instrumental role in the field’s early successes and failures.
Climate Imperative, in its own words, “provides funding, technical support, and expertise to inform the most important climate policy decisions.” The group, which has become a significant regrantor, received $77 million from Waverley over the foundation’s first two years. Powell Jobs serves on its six-member board.
Besides Climate Imperative, two organizations stood out from the list as virtually the only recipients getting multiple multimillion-dollar awards. One was Conservation International ($29.5 million over two years), which works in more than 70 countries and is known in part, and criticized by some, for its extensive corporate partnerships. The other was Clean Future Forum ($16 million), a Washington, D.C.-based operation that has regranted millions to organizations like EDF, Bipartisan Policy Center and National Audubon Society. Formed in 2020, it does not have a website.
Climate justice was not a priority in Waverley’s first year, with nearly all such awards granted in 2021. But the foundation made up for lost time. Climate justice groups and funds received more than $61 million in funding in 2021 alone, which comes to nearly 30% of all the grants issued by the foundation over the two years, based on my analysis.
The list of climate justice beneficiaries is dominated by a MacKenzie Scott-like list of international regrantors — Thousand Currents, Malala Fund, Global Greengrants Fund and Root Capital. Each received $10 million. (The latter three have also received substantial awards from Scott.) Other seven-figure grants went to projects housed at various types of intermediaries, including to the Fund to Build Grassroots Power hosted by the Windward Fund ($6 million), the Just Transition Fund at Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors ($4 million) and the Neighborhood Funders Group-hosted Amplify Fund ($3 million). Another major grant went to the First Nations Development Institute ($4 million).
Every dollar of Waverley’s funding in its first two years went to organizations based in the United States, according to its tax filings. That said, many recipients have a global presence or are known for their international regranting, such as Global Greengrants. Many more are national or regional in scope. About 60% of all funding in 2020 and 2021 — $125 million, by my count — went to groups based in two traditional power centers of environmental nonprofits and philanthropy, the San Francisco Bay Area and the Washington, D.C., region.
Who’s making funding decisions?
Waverley’s website is a welcome first step, but hopefully, more detail is on the way, whether on its grantees or its governance. It does, however, have a robust staff section, listing 13 staff and their backgrounds, providing insight into who’s making the day-to-day decisions. Notably, most have come on board since the grants described here were issued. For instance, its president, Jared Blumenfeld, was announced in August 2022.
There’s a lot of philanthropic experience throughout the foundation’s ranks, and unsurprisingly, a couple staffers come from Powell Jobs’ other philanthropic operation, the Emerson Collective. Others have spent time at racial-justice-focused Surdna Foundation, Ohio’s George Gund Foundation, the progressive regrantor Tides Foundation, Energy Foundation, Omidyar Network and Bezos Earth Fund.
Time in government is another commonality, starting with the Blumenfeld, former secretary of the California Environmental Protection Agency, and earlier, a regional administrator at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Members of his new team have served in positions with the Office of California Governor Gavin Newsom, the City of Oakland and the New York City Mayor’s Office, among other government offices. For a grantmaker of this size, there seem to be surprisingly few staff who have worked at the nation’s biggest green groups, which major climate programs often hire from, with only a couple members with such past experience, namely at WRI and EDF.
While the funder has been busy staffing up, the board of directors has not changed since Waverley was made public, according to a spokesperson. Former EPA administrator and current Apple executive Lisa Jackson is still chair, with Powell Jobs as vice chair. Her son and brother, who both work at Emerson Collective, also remain, along with her sister-in-law and two other Emerson Collective staffers. Two new board members will join in early 2023.
Promising first steps — and hopefully more ahead
When Powell Jobs announced her big goal for Waverley last year, I wrote with a colleague that we had “more questions than answers.” One of those was the degree to which the foundation would be transparent. At that point, it had been meeting its granting requirements by sending nearly every dollar to a donor-advised fund. Since such accounts require none of the disclosure mandated of foundations, there’s no clue as to whether those funds were distributed, and if so, where they ultimately landed.
We now can say, with some relief, that this foundation will not be operating in the dark. The foundation is issuing grants directly, which means that at a minimum, its IRS filings will list individual recipients and amounts.
Waverley’s website is another step in the right direction, and while the outfit is still clearly getting on its feet, we hope to see more information easily available online. Specifically, the transparency standard for any foundation giving in the hundreds of millions — a huge amount of potential influence on the future of climate action — is an up-to-date, searchable database of grantees and dollar amounts. It’s been the norm for large legacy foundations for some time, and even an unorthodox donor like MacKenzie Scott has recognized that it’s a must.
What the website does include is a tagline that promotes a people-centric funding philosophy: “Investing at the intersection of climate solutions and community priorities.” It’s an increasingly common positioning; for example, see the Walton Family Foundation’s strategic refresh of a couple years ago. And it’s encouraging that you can already see this thread in Waverley’s climate justice grantmaking and some smaller grants. At the same time, a major share of the foundation’s dollars to date have gone to some of the field’s largest and most well-funded organizations. Again, all of these grants were made before the team was formed and this positioning went public, but we’re eager to see how the foundation strikes a balance between heavyweights and community groups going forward.
The foundation’s level of spending toward climate justice thus far appears to put it roughly in line with the Climate Funders Justice Pledge, which asks foundations to give at least 30% of U.S. climate funding to BIPOC-led groups. While Waverley has not indicated whether it will sign the pledge, it seems to be on track to meet it, and officially committing would be a notable move from such a major institution.
Something else to watch in future years — it’s striking given its size that the foundation has yet to support any groups based outside the United States. Most likely, it’s simply been slow to set up the needed infrastructure. After all, even the Bezos Earth Fund took a few cycles to send its first grants to, well, the rest of the earth. Hopefully, Waverley follows the same path. With the potential for so many gains and so little funding outside U.S. borders, it’s another area where the foundation could set a prominent example.
Powell Jobs, whose roughly $12 billion fortune is made up primarily of stock from her late husband, Apple cofounder and CEO Steve Jobs, has long been a mega-philanthropist. But with Waverley Street Foundation, she’s leapt from a virtual climate nobody to nearly the top of the heap. Her varied approach is a welcome boost to climate philanthropy, which, for all its recent expansion, is still nowhere near the size of the challenge, let alone enough to address historical inequities and imbalances. Let’s hope we see even more transparency and a still broader approach in the years ahead.