There’s a New Giant in Climate Change Philanthropy. Here’s Everything We Know So Far

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For more than two years, I’ve been hearing interest and excitement from people throughout climate philanthropy about the Sequoia Climate Foundation.

People brought it up in interviews. Respondents mentioned it in surveys. Its name showed up on major pledges. Founded in late 2020, it was reportedly massive, but public details were limited.

Late last year, however, Sequoia filed its first 990, and it became abundantly clear why everyone was so excited. In its inaugural batch of grants in fiscal year 2021, it sent out $126 million. I was also able to connect with its staff, and it turns out the foundation had since grown even larger. In 2022, Sequoia moved $180 million.

How big is that? More than triple the MacArthur Foundation’s annual budget for its “big bet” on climate solutions. Almost double what the Walton Family Foundation’s environment program spends annually. As far as environmental funding goes, Sequoia towers above all but some genuine giants, like the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation or the Bezos Earth Fund. And it is still growing.

From what we know, it has taken a diversified path, with a heavy reliance so far on regrantors. Much of its funding is flowing through top climate intermediaries, as well as other funds and fiscal sponsors. Roughly similar-sized chunks of funding went to several types of grantees, including major green groups, climate justice organizations, and policy shops. Sequoia also sent nearly a third of its awards to foreign grantees — and the foundation says roughly two-thirds of its grant dollars support international work.

While Sequoia doesn’t share who its donor or donors are, multiple partners and grantees said the foundation is an offshoot of Wellspring Philanthropic Fund, a human rights and social justice backer launched by three secretive hedge fund founders. A Sequoia representative confirmed that it “spun out” from Wellspring, originally using its back office. 

That trio of donors (one of whom has since passed away) includes C. Frederick Taylor, who was listed as Sequoia’s board chair in 2021. In 2014, Bloomberg revealed Taylor as one of the donors behind the hundreds of millions of dollars that flow through the entities now known as Wellspring. He is presumably Sequoia’s benefactor, or one of them, but it’s not certain; the foundation’s funding to date has flown through an anonymous LLC, with an apparent pay-as-you-go approach.

While Sequoia was not giving interviews, President Christie Ulman did provide us with some comments and a representative responded to emailed questions. Those exchanges helped round out what its website and IRS filings reveal about this new climate giant, whose 2022 spending should earn it a place among the top 10 environmental funders in the nation.

Sequoia is focusing on climate interventions that will have an impact by 2030, the deadline for the world to halve emissions under the Paris Agreement. Despite that goal, the foundation intends to stick around for the long term. 

“We have a lot of ambition as an organization and our portfolio, as you have seen, is growing and we hope it continues to grow. It’s not a spend-down institution,” said Ulman in the statement.

There are no public estimates of Taylor’s wealth, or that of his colleagues, but the billions the trio have already reportedly committed to philanthropy suggest this already-large operation has a very high ceiling. Here’s what we know about who Sequoia has supported thus far, what it has prioritized, the donors and team behind the fund and what might be next. 

A new funder lifts all boats in its first year

Look through Sequoia’s portfolio and one clear favorite sticks out: intermediaries. Nearly two-thirds of all 2021 funding, or about $76 million, went to such groups. Excluding groups serving solely as fiscal sponsors would bring that total down to $68 million, but still more than half, according to a foundation representative. 

As a new organization with a big budget, it’s no surprise it’s leaning heavily on such groups — whose role in climate philanthropy and beyond has grown exponentially in recent years — to get money out the door. A representative said that share should drop well below 50% in 2022 due to several factors, but particularly because a larger staff will allow them to “diversify our grantmaking.”

By far the biggest beneficiary of that initial burst of grants was the network of regional foundations launched by some of the field’s most prominent funders. Sequoia’s single-largest award of the cycle was a $28 million grant to the European Climate Foundation for a range of projects, and seven-figure awards went to ClimateWorks and Instituto Clima e Sociedade. The closely linked U.S. passthrough Energy Foundation, which shares many funders with ClimateWorks, got another $16 million. In all, nearly a third of Sequoia’s funds passed through that closely linked group of regrantors. Almost all the other major environmental pass-throughs and fiscal sponsors also got substantial awards, with multimillion-dollar grants to groups like Resources Legacy Fund, Windward Fund and Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors.

It’s tricky to track where all that money is ending up, given that so much passes through intermediaries. But where it is clear, it appears Sequoia spreads its funding fairly evenly among at least two categories: major green groups (more than $18 million, by my count) and climate justice and organizing networks (over $14 million). There are also grants to organizations particularly known for their policy work or to projects that name policy as a focus (more than $10 million). That said, many of Sequoia’s recipients are involved in policy debates to one degree or another.

In terms of the field’s largest environmental organizations, Sequoia favored a couple think tanks, with multimillion-dollar checks cut to the World Resources Institute and Rocky Mountain Institute, along with the Sierra Club and the League of Conservation Voters. About half of such grants were for clean energy projects, according to their descriptions. Climate justice grantees included Climate Justice Alliance, Green New Deal Network, and Climate and Clean Energy Equity Fund. Policy recipients included the Center for American Progress and CLASP.

Corporate, financial or economic goals also seemed to be the focus of about a half-dozen grants. For instance, Sequoia sent $500,000 to the Partnership for Carbon Accounting Financials, a global network of financial institutions working to adhere to the 2015 Paris Agreement. Such grants came to a smaller total, $5.5 million, by my count. 

As a reminder, this only reflects grants listed in fiscal year 2021, for which we have tax filings.

What types of issues does Sequoia support?

Grants for “clean energy” and “transition” efforts were common in its first round — the first phrase is in their mission statement, after all. Beyond that, there are some topics that stand out. Three grants totaling nearly $17 million mention “transport,” with two of the three going to the Energy Foundation. Other subjects — food and agriculture, refrigeration and cooling — also show up multiple times, but with far less total dollars.

Nearly a third of the fund’s grant dollars ($39 million) went to organizations based abroad, while about twice that sum (two-thirds, or roughly $80 million) supported work happening internationally, according to the foundation. Most of the first amount is the mega grant to the European Climate Foundation (ECF) for multiple projects. Sequoia’s president, Christie Ulman, serves on the supervisory board of ECF and collaborated with its CEO on an SSIR op-ed this August. The next largest foreign recipient was the Australia-based climate justice group the Sunrise Project (no relation to the U.S. Sunrise Movement), which got $5 million.

Aside from where the money is going, consider how the team is organized. Sequoia has director-led teams focused on both geographies (United States, China and India) and themes (oil and gas, finance, and communications and engagement), according to a spokesperson, as well as smaller portfolios for Europe, Brazil, Southeast Asia, and research and data. 

The foundation says it has come to focus in those areas based on analysis, not any issue preference. It uses a four-factor framework to both distribute resources across its teams and evaluate potential grants. First, it considers the speed of impact, with a focus right now on making change by 2030. Second is the scale of emissions the grant would impact. Third is the cost or, as Ulman put it, the “bang for your buck.” Fourth, there’s the probability of success. The foundation says it’s those four considerations, rather than a desire to work on any given issue or corner of the world, that determines who gets a share of Sequoia’s largesse.

Who’s behind the Sequoia Climate Foundation? 

Some philanthropic projects seek to burnish their founder’s reputation. Sequoia, however, keeps its donors’ identity tightly under wraps. Its website does not list its backers or board members. The foundation also declined to provide any details, and one grantee told me they had no idea who was behind the fund.

We can make a pretty good guess, however, given that Sequoia’s board chair is C. Frederick Taylor. Taylor, the president of an ultra-low-profile hedge fund, TGS Management, already funds another massive philanthropic operation. A 2014 Bloomberg Businessweek investigation revealed Taylor and two TGS colleagues were the donors behind a then-$13 billion network of anonymous philanthropic vehicles now known as Wellspring. At the time, it was the fourth-largest philanthropy in the United States, yet the men had avoided virtually any public attention. 

Almost a decade later, little has changed. Taylor’s brother, John Taylor, has long been Wellspring’s public face and serves as its president. There is still little public information about his brother, his wealth (he’s not on the billionaire lists of Forbes or Bloomberg) or TGS. One hint came in a 2017 report that the firm had won a bidding war for the services of a former Mathematical Olympiad against two hedge funds, Citadel and Renaissance. Each manages more than $50 billion.

There’s no indication whether Taylor’s two colleagues or their philanthropies support Sequoia. One of the trio, David Gelbaum, died in 2018. The other, Andrew Shechtel, did not appear in any filings examined for this story. The lone contribution to Sequoia in 2021 was a $181 million donation from an LLC, Twenty-One Holdings, which is one of three LLCs that regularly contribute to Wellspring.

The Sequoia-Wellspring connection is somewhat of an open secret in philanthropy. A spokesperson explained the relationship this way: “To expedite funding to the field, Sequoia initially leveraged Wellspring’s back office for first staff hires and grantmaking, and then spun out to become an independent organization with an independent mission.” 

Sequoia is also headed by Christie Ulman, who previously led Wellspring’s climate initiative. Ulman earlier spent three years directing the energy portfolio of the climate program at the Children’s Investment Fund Foundation, the philanthropy of another hedge funder, Christopher Hohn. Ulman came to philanthropy after holding several posts in the federal government, many in the U.S. Department of Energy. Her ties remain close, earning her an invite to a 2021 event with Secretary Jennifer Granholm.

The foundation’s team has grown fast since its launch — and it’s still hiring. It currently has 45 staff, up from 20 two years ago, according to a representative. All the new faces aren’t even up on its website yet. Ulman called it a “startup.” 

The foundation’s senior program staff draw from a variety of backgrounds, including roles at major green groups like World Wildlife Fund and World Resources Institute (no surprise), advocacy groups such as Ceres and Oil Change International, government offices and political campaigns in the U.S. and U.K., and philanthropic institutions like Hewlett and ClimateWorks.

“My impression is that they’re trying to build rather significant analytical capacity in-house as well, about these different countries where they’re working,” said Kelly Sims Gallagher, academic dean and professor of energy and environmental policy at The Fletcher School at Tufts University. Gallagher received a two-year, $1.3 million grant from Sequoia.

What kind of funder is Sequoia? 

It’s always hard to get a read on a new funder. But what Sequoia says about itself offers a helpful framework. The foundation’s website presents five guiding principles: urgency, exploration, global action, collaboration and belonging. And in our conversation, Ulman emphasized the importance of the foundation’s overarching vision.

“We started with a pretty clear and distinct North Star goal,” said Ulman in her statement. “It is preventing the worst impacts of climate change by accelerating the transition to clean energy. That guides, frankly, a lot of our work.”

Some of Sequoia’s principles are self-explanatory: The focus on 2030 is clear (urgency), and a third of funding is going abroad (global action). As for what might be called learning and evaluation (exploration), multiple grantees said that the foundation does regular check-in calls with Sequoia, and its staff showed an eagerness to learn from them, as well as to measure their work. 

“Their approach, as they describe it, is very science- and metrics-based,” said Roger Kim, executive director of the Climate and Clean Energy Equity Fund, which, in 2021, received $2.4 million from Sequoia. Kim said he has appreciated Sequoia’s commitment to learning about how his fund’s grantees contribute to policy change, even if that cannot always be measured with the precision of, say, tons of avoided emissions. “I feel like they’re an organization that is really committed to learning about these approaches.”

The foundation also has an in-house team that evaluates grants against its four-factor framework, according to a spokesperson, who called that team’s work “foundational” to Sequoia’s grantmaking. Ulman said that Sequoia attempts to weave together quantitative data from its evaluations with qualitative information about changing circumstances — whether the war in Ukraine or floods in Pakistan — into the processes and culture of how the foundation makes decisions, even if it’s a challenge to do so in real time. 

“We know that climate change is happening. We know the impacts. But it’s much less certain on how we rewire the global economy to avoid the worst impacts,” Ulman said. “To maximize our impact, we have this focus on learning — and there’s a time lag in the data that we have on climate change impacts.”

The foundation also frequently partners with peers (collaboration, another of its principles). These include some high-visibility projects. It’s on the long list of foundations that supported a much-publicized $328 million commitment to reducing methane emissions. It is one of two public supporters of the Clean Lighting Coalition. It is also a contributor to the Funder Collaborative on Oil and Gas, a project of the Rockefeller Family Fund backed by several of the family’s philanthropies and other funders. Most recently, it joined with other funders on a $500 million pledge for an equitable energy transition.

“I think it’s fair to say they are also risk-taking. The kind of work we’re doing in these developing countries, there’s no guarantee of success,” said Gallagher. “There was an impressive willingness to take a reasonable risk.”

“An important step forward”

The last principle on Sequoia’s list, “belonging,” seems like what many funders call “equity.” The bullet point’s language emphasizes the disproportionate impact of climate change on “underserved communities, communities of color and at-risk global populations,” and pledges that “people are at the center of everything we do.” It was this potential focus — from an organization born from Wellspring, a well-known human rights funder — that sparked some of the greatest enthusiasm at Sequoia’s arrival as a new force in climate philanthropy. 

“It is exciting to see a funder that is not just coming in to do climate at scale, but has such a focus on addressing disproportionate harm to at-risk communities,” said Danielle Deane-Ryan, director of equitable climate solutions at Bezos Earth Fund, who was one of the people who flagged Sequoia to me as a new player to watch more than a year ago. “They can play a role in inspiring other funders that have been going into the justice area to really accelerate and get this right.”

With only a year of grants to examine, it’s hard to get a full picture of how such work is playing out. Sequoia has made some big climate justice grants, but it also, for example, has not yet committed to the Climate Funders Justice Pledge. It’ll be fascinating to see where these principles take the foundation, particularly as its grantmaking continues to increase. That said, some see progress already, based on the fact that Sequoia uses traditional emissions-reduction language and a metrics-focused approach, while also positioning itself as a people-centered funder.

“Their willingness to engage on those questions — to really kind of grapple with like, ‘How do we get to those results if we don’t understand the people that are actually impacted by these policies and strategies?’ — is an important step forward, I would say, for the field,” Kim said. “There are plenty of other more metrics-driven climate funders that don’t have that curiosity or engagement or approach.”

What’s next?

There are a lot of reasons to like what Sequoia is doing. Big grants to intermediaries have helped it get off to a running start. Its grantees report independently that it is keen to learn from them. It is funding globally, with half of its international support going to foreign grantees — not to mention that it is operating at an impressive scale, with more to come. 

There’s also plenty of cause to be excited about what’s next. Few U.S. climate funders grant so much overseas, particularly ones just getting off the ground. With more time, hopefully that percentage will grow and reach beyond Europe. It’d be great to see more of the total go to the regions — and the local organizations within them — largely neglected by climate philanthropy. The foundation says it plans to move beyond intermediaries and “diversify.” And if Sequoia lives up to observers’ hopes for a mega-funder with an outsized climate justice portfolio, it could be another push toward correcting a longstanding imbalance.

There’s also ample room for improvement. Sequoia’s scale warrants a lot more transparency about who and what it is funding — and where its funding comes from. The foundation frames its approach as putting the spotlight on the work, not themselves, and a spokesperson said Sequoia would share more grantee stories as the staff grows. “Humility is a key piece of what we do and we like to shine the light on our grantees,” Ulman said in her statement, later adding: “We are not a brand-forward institution.”

Yet it’s possible to both practice disclosure and put grantees first. Another major new funder you may have heard of, MacKenzie Scott, recently offered a case study in walking that line. For an institution controlling so much cash, transparency is not only a democratic necessity, but also about effectiveness. How can funders and observers identify gaps if one of the biggest players — the 11th largest environmental funder in the United States in 2021, by my count — does not share where it’s sending its money? 

Such changes may be unlikely. Wellspring, which has been around for more than two decades, publishes neither a list of grantees nor any information about its donors. But the right wing is already deeply suspicious of Wellspring’s “dark money,” so perhaps Sequoia will take a different approach. A startup is about trying new things, and the foundation is emphasizing urgency and collaboration, after all. Humanity is careening toward climate breakdown. If not now, when?