NCRP’s Newest Publication Gives Funders Tools To Combat Authoritarianism

Climate Justice Organizations’ Rally Cry is Echoing 

Movement groups have spent years sending out the same rallying cry: “Fund the frontlines. Fund a Just Transition away from the fossil fuel-based economy. Listen to us. Support us.” Funders have seen countless funder briefings, closed door meetings, toxic tours, reports, zines, and conferences. This message from the ground, however, has remained clear. The climate crisis is dire, climate justice groups’ work is critical, and they need these resources.

And now? Our communities’ safety is at dire risk on a national scale not seen in recent memory. Movement leaders routinely have their personal information exposed and their lives threatened. Climate Change denialism is on the rise in the US. Wealthy people at top levels of government are slashing critical programs and laying off hundreds of staff responsible for the climate science needed to inform what frontline communities are already experiencing. Meanwhile, human induced climate change is accelerating, and the consequences are upending our lives and the stability of the ecosystems we depend on to survive.

Philanthropy, however, has not met this moment or answered this call to action with the resources necessary for change.

The ClimateWorks Foundation (CWF) has noted this in their own reports about the sector. Overall climate funding has increased, between $9.3 billion to $15.8 billion in 2023, an increase of around 20 percent from 2022 according to their 2024 Funding Trends report. Yet only $175 million, or between 1.1 and 1.8 percent, of those dollars go to “other climate mitigation strategies,” an overly broad category that includes climate justice and just transition giving along with several other categories. For context, “carbon dioxide removal,” a technology-centric scheme criticized by movement actors as a counter-productive false solution, alone received $60 million in the same period.

Climate funding remains top-down too, even as it grows. Just 3 percent of environmental grantees received half of all philanthropic dollars for the climate in 2021, according to the Environmental Grantmakers Association. Too often, a concentration of funding goes to large, already well-resourced organizations.

This is not the funding strategy of a philanthropic sector committed to justice and transformation. For that to change, the biggest actors in climate funding must take responsibility and lead the charge.

An Echo Chamber of Influence

ClimateWorks Foundation positions itself as the “global platform for philanthropy” on climate solutions. As one of the largest climate intermediaries they link larger institutional foundations with grantees and claim to “enable the climate philanthropy community to operate effectively for greater collective impact.” Given their mission, leadership role, and access to wealth and expertise, CWF could be one of the largest funders of frontline communities and their solutions for a just transition.

However, an analysis of their grantmaking from 2015, the earliest year of publicly available grantmaking data, to 2023, the most recent year available, shows that CWF only gave about 1 percent of their grantmaking directly to frontline organizations. When broadening the analysis to include broader environmental organizations and networks with some kind of accountability, connection, or partnership with the frontlines, that 1 percent only increases to 4 percent.

In eight years, the number of Big Green organizations received over double that amount. Furthermore, think tanks that specialize in policy analysis and research and other intermediaries without a frontline-centered approach received the largest share of ClimateWorks’ grantmaking.

With the resources and connections at their disposal, CWF could be a powerful player to strengthen the climate justice ecosystem and elevate frontline groups. They could help build relationships between grassroots groups and CWF’s own funders, expanding their network into places grantmakers might not otherwise reach. Unfortunately, CWF appears to intensify existing echo chambers rather than bring needed community voices to the table.

This is apparent in their own grantmaking. Since 2015, ClimateWorks has received over $1 billion in funding from 69 funders and granted nearly $700 million to 499 recipient organizations. Separate from their funding for ClimateWorks, those 69 funders have given an additional $8 billion to climate issues since 2015. Today, 83 percent of CWF’s direct grantmaking goes to grantees that ClimateWorks’ funders had not previously funded since at least 2015. Even with CWF’s fluctuating grantmaking, that percentage has nearly doubled over time, up from 44 percent between 2015 and 2023.

While an overlap in recipient organizations is expected for an intermediary, the scale of this insular giving against the backdrop of CWF’s neglect of frontlines climate justice organizations raises the question of whether ClimateWorks is achieving “greater collective impact” for the climate ecosystem — and who gets to benefit from it.

Beyond Grantmaking

ClimateWorks also exerts considerable influence on the philanthropic sector through its research and convening power. While they often receive less attention than its grantmaking, these strategies present a similar missed opportunity for CWF to elevate grassroots voices and strengthen the climate justice philanthropic ecosystem as a whole CWF publishes a trove of research into climate funding trends, for example, but none are written from frontline movement perspectives. Many focus heavily on technocratic solutions. This is a problem, because if CWF only publishes research that analyzes a specific set of solutions, then that is what their funders and climate philanthropy writ large will point to as valid. CWF would strengthen their research by instead validating that the frontlines have had working and scalable solutions for decades.

The same can be said for the Funders’ Table, a twice-yearly closed meeting facilitated by ClimateWorks for key institutional funders, CWF staff, and a few hand-picked grantees. CWF describes the Funders Table as “an informal collaboration . . . for dialogue and collaboration” that is “not a decision-making body,” but it is clear that the meeting plays a significant agenda-setting role for both its participants and sector conversations at large. While the publicly available details are opaque, each meeting appears to be hosted by a different funder, with the list of attendees varying depending on the meeting’s focus. Imagine the impact ClimateWorks could have if this body featured movement voices regularly and co-created that agenda together, rather than operating at a remove from the frontlines.

Some Minor Progress

ClimateWorks does do some things well. They support the Youth Climate Justice Fund as part of their $2 million commitment to Youth –led climate solutions, which “aims to support climate justice young leaders with trust-based funding, resources, and youth-to-youth capacity development, enabling them to amplify their voices and to keep their vision and influence alive.” CWF also operates a small $4 million (as of 2023 data) Justice, Equity, Diversity and Inclusion Fund (JEDI) which operates adjacent to ClimateWorks’ 15 program buckets and aims to support both US and International organizations working around climate and environmental justice. And lastly, they have a global just transitions program which is currently funding work in 4 countries: India, South Africa, Indonesia, and Vietnam with a $20 million investment. NCRP applauds these initiatives and recognizes that they are still not enough. The work of grassroots, frontline organizations should not be siloed to specific program buckets and should be centric to CWF’s funding and influence.

How to Help Build Frontline Power

When it comes to resourcing people most impacted by the climate crisis, we need all hands on deck. The climate crisis is dire than ever, federal climate protections are getting stripped away, and our communities can’t wait. Now is the time for ClimateWorks to redesign its grantmaking and influence strategy to center the frontlines, particularly smaller, place-based local organizations who are often left out of climate conversations.

NCRP invites ClimateWorks Foundation and its funders to dig deep and get uncomfortable, to be more transparent in their operations, and to be bold and invite frontline groups to sit in positions of power and influence on its board and within its executive leadership. This includes making space for frontline leaders at Funders Table meetings, at events that they host, and webinars they speak at. It also means seeding more frontline grantees throughout CWF’s program areas, rather than relegating them to external working groups or siloed within a small JEDI fund.

NCRP specifically calls on ClimateWorks to take the following actions:

• Devote at least 25 percent of CWF’s total funding to frontline groups within 5 years.

• Double the amount of money going to the JEDI Fund within 3 years.

• Seed frontline grantees in every CWF portfolio within the next year.

• Set a public goal to discuss frontline-led/supported work and its funding implications as a top priority.

• Ensure direct frontline organizational representatives (not just intermediaries) represent at least 10 percent of attendees at every Funder Table meeting, starting with the next scheduled convening (in line at least with the percentage level they are funded at internally).

• Publicly share the list of Funder Table participant funders (at least organizations) and high-level takeaways from Funder Table meetings.

As part of this campaign, NCRP will be sharing what other funders and funder intermediaries are doing to level the playing field for these groups as examples of how CWF can shift their practices. When applying the lens of a just transition, all of us have a duty to organize to stop the bad (part of which includes holding funders accountable) and to build the new. There is a wealth of data and reports that showcase what funders need to change, but not as much on how they can change. NCRP wants to be mindful of that and bring in the knowledge and expertise of those funders who have shifted their practices to include and center frontline knowledge into how they grant out their resources and support their grantees in building power and capacity.

This content will be coming out over the next 2 years along with NCRP’s continuing narrative strategy and change work around challenging billionaire philanthropy in the climate funding space.

Methodology
NCRP obtained all grantmaking data for ClimateWorks Foundation and its funders from Candid. Organizations were manually coded into each category by NCRP staff based on their primary mission and strategies described on each organization’s website:
Academic – educational organizations, primarily universities, that are also dedicated to scholarly research.

Advocacy organization – organizations that that influence public policy or public opinion using tactics such as coalition building, lobbying, public education, research, and/or policy analysis. Some advocacy organizations may have some some accountability to frontline communities, they function largely as “grasstops” organizations that leverage influence on behalf of a community or group of people.

Big Green – large legacy environmental organizations that largely focus on conservation and wildlife preservation that have historically been well resourced. Big Green organizations may sometimes regrant funding to frontline organizations.

Intermediary – organizations that receive funding from larger donors or institutional funders to regrant and distribute to nonprofits.

Frontline Connections – Organizations with frontline connections include broader advocacy organizations, networks, or Big Green legacy environmental organizations with some kind of accountability, connection, or partnership with the frontlines.

Frontline Organization – organizations that are led by, or primarily serve communities that are impacted most by climate change and its root causes, including white supremacy, patriarchy, and colonization, and are also accountable to frontline community members.

Multiple International NGOs – organizations labeled in Candid as “multiple recipients” aggregated by regions, such as “Multiple East Asia and the Pacific recipients,” Multiple South America Recipients,” etc.

Think Tank – organizations whose primary role is to conduct research and analysis around particular issues to influence policy.

Other – includes professional alliances or networks, climate finance organizations, consultants, media organizations, and miscellaneous organizations.

According to Candid, ClimateWorks Foundation gave grants to 499 recipients between 2015-2023, the years for which funding data was available for CWF. Of those 499 recipients, 8 were aggregated into the “Multiple Recipients” category with a corresponding region. Because this category is an aggregation of multiple individual organizations, it was not possible to determine the strategies and roles of each individual grantee in this category. NCRP staff manually coded the remaining 491 recipients.
These recipients also include intermediaries that received funding from ClimateWorks Foundation to regrant to other organizations, and our analysis does not include any regranting from intermediary recipients of CWF.In order to determine common grantees of CWF and CWF’s funders, NCRP also used Candid to identify the 69 foundations that gave funding to ClimateWorks Foundation. NCRP then analyzed the grants of those 69 foundations that were related to climate issues, using a combination of subject codes:

1. Air quality
2. Climate change
3. Energy resources
4. Environmental and resource rights
5. Environmental justice
6. Forest preservation
7. Sustainable agriculture
8. Water access, sanitation and hygiene

After identifying all the climate related grants, we then isolated all the common recipients that received funding from both ClimateWorks Foundation and at least one of its 69 funders in the same year.

For years, billionaires and multimillionaires have privatized government services, lionized their wealth, and told us that the charity they direct – not the solidarity and organizing that movements lead – will solve the biggest systemic issues of our time.

We are living through the dire consequences of putting wealth on a pedestal at the expense of working-class Black, brown and Indigenous communities, who are forced to fight for pennies to resource their work. Despite having proven solutions, frontline, grassroots organizations are stretching themselves thin to move projects forward while also fighting back against dangerous opposition. They should not have to choose.

Today, with that in mind, NCRP launches the second phase of our Climate Justice and Just Transition campaign: holding climate funders accountable for their continued underfunding of these necessary frontline organizations. We’re doing so by spotlighting ClimateWorks Foundation (CWF), a prominent intermediary and influential force in the climate funding ecosystem.

At a time when the federal government is attacking nonprofits focused on climate and equity, NCRP stands with both funders and grantees in the crosshairs. But at moments like these, it is even more important that ClimateWorks stand in greater solidarity with frontline groups and share in the risk that communities on the ground face on a much deeper level.

And, while moving more money to the frontlines is NCRP’s ultimate goal, we also want to focus on who and what influences funders to continually under-resource these communities in the first place. Without shifting the power imbalance behind funding decisions, the act of moving the money becomes surface level lip service instead of a cultural change that transforms the way philanthropy operates.

In this opening part one of a two-part series, NCRP will explore the ClimateWorks Foundation (CWF) leadership and governance, pointing out the gaps in what CWF considers to be expertise in the climate funding space. In part two, NCRP will examine the echo chamber in CWF’s grantmaking, including both the overall lack of frontline representation among its grantees and the overlap of grant recipients between CWF and its own funders. Both pieces will include a call for CWF and its funders to better center and resource the frontlines and influence others to do the same.

*We want to note that on the data, NCRP would welcome additional information to clarify this picture further, but to date ClimateWorks has not shared additional information about their grantmaking, or programmatic work publicly. Also, as of publication, many pages about their justice and equity work have been removed from their website.

Challenging the Power of Billionaire Philanthropists

In 2023, NCRP pointed out the problem of The Filthy Five: five billionaires – Jeff Bezos, Michael Bloomberg, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, and John Doerr – who positioned themselves as climate “experts.” Their main credential? The obscene amounts of wealth they made, in part, off the backs of those who they purport to support through their philanthropic efforts.

Since then, the influence of billionaires in our society has become even more prevalent. Climate tech billionaire (and outright white supremacist) Elon Musk, for example, has bulldozed his way through the government as if it were Twitter (X) headquarters. Amid this extremely illegal and devastating misappropriation of government power, more and more wealth holders are falling in line. Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos’ philanthropic entities have both cut ties with essential grantees and programs to align with the current presidential administration. Bill Gates, who also claims to care about the climate crisis, is cutting staff and funding from his Climate Tech Fund: Breakthrough Energy. Other billionaires have continued to stay silent, preferring to maintain their wealth instead of mobilizing the resources necessary to support those most impacted.

This is not surprising, because wealth does not equal expertise. Philanthropy as it exists today often does not serve, and in some cases actively harms communities and groups on the frontlines of multiple systemic injustices, including the climate crisis. It is easy to be angry at billionaires and how they use their enormous amounts of wealth, including the ways they use philanthropy to boost their public reputations. But many institutional funders also have difficulty recognizing how their own choices play into the same pattern.

Over the past two years, NCRP has found that billionaires and institutional philanthropy engage in similar practices. This includes:

• Hoarding wealth, using a 5% payout rate from their endowment as the ceiling instead of the floor

• A tendency to fund or provide big pledges where the money often does not reach the groups on the ground that it purports to.

• Holding back resources on technicalities instead of shifting behavior and practice to be movement informed.

• Making frontline groups jump through hoops to receive minimal amounts of money compared to legacy organizations, think tanks and academia.

It is past time to be bold and hold climate philanthropy accountable for their role in underfunding the groups that have proven solutions, especially now.

Spotlighting ClimateWorks Foundation

CWF is a powerful and influential institution that has successfully positioned itself as the center of gravity in the climate funding ecosystem. To quote CWF from their most recent IRS 990:

“ClimateWorks Foundation’s mission is to end the climate crisis by amplifying the power of philanthropy. We are a global platform for philanthropy to innovate, collaborate, and accelerate climate solutions that scale by bringing together a unique network of grantmakers, grantees, researchers, and other implementing partners. We provide a suite of programs and services uniquely designed to amplify the power of a climate philanthropy community that is larger, more coordinated, more international, and growing faster than ever. Through our programs and services, ClimateWorks helps the field of climate philanthropy act with the ambition, urgency, capabilities, and interconnections needed to end the climate crisis”

As a funder intermediary, CWF both regrants funding from mostly institutional foundations, guides strategy at the tables it convenes, and disseminates research and data on climate funding topics and trends. With this profound positional power in the climate ecosystem comes a responsibility to center those who will be most impacted by the climate crisis and resource their work.

However, by their own measure, only 19 (or 2.6%) of CWF’s 728 grants and contracts in 2023 were considered “JEDI (justice, diversity, equity and inclusion) grants.” In the nearly two decades since ClimateWorks’ founding, the climate crisis has only gotten more dire with its effects on frontline communities only increasing. 2.6% is not progress; it is deliberate under-resourcing masquerading as such.

To be clear, the climate funding ecosystem as a whole shares this problem. ClimateWorks did not create this dynamic by themselves, and they are not alone in perpetuating it. But CWF’s unique influence in the climate funding ecosystem means that they have a duty – and incredible opportunity – to embrace a different path.

One obstacle to change is CWF’s current leadership composition. As part of our analysis, NCRP examined who within CWF is positioned to make major grant and programmatic decisions and where their knowledge and expertise comes from.

Below is a qualitative data set of 49 past and present board members and executive leaders of the organization sourced from 990 tax forms and CWF’s website.

Public information reveals that CWF leadership has ties to several influential institutions but lacks frontline, grassroots experience. Only 4% of board members and executive leadership combined have worked at organizations that have frontline connections. None have worked at organizations that are frontline led. Instead, the most common affiliations are with think tanks, various government departments and administrative committees, and international governance institutions like the UN or the World Bank. Positions like these represent roles of significant influence, where decisions can shape policy and impact global and national outcomes for climate initiatives. These affiliations are not inherently problematic. But when climate funding decisions are not accompanied by the input of frontline communities with lived experiences critical for a just transition to a regenerative economy, the funding becomes limited and uneven. If there is no one within CWF’s leadership who comes from frontline movement work, how can they adequately support those organizations and communities? What does that mean for those who need funding the most?

Shift the Influence, Shift the Resources

Local, grassroots and frontline place-based climate and environmental justice groups are often the first responders on the ground to climate and environmental injustice happening in their communities. They are also the most vulnerable to attacks and impacts from funding rollbacks. The need for rapid response and calls for legal and security support to help stem the tide of immediate threats will only grow. But for true stability, long-term, transformative support will be crucial, and that must start now.

NCRP calls on ClimateWorks Foundation to live into the deepest potential of its role as a “global climate philanthropy platform” by centering the needs of those who have always been most impacted by the climate crisis.

This will be much easier if its leadership reflects and honors those doing the work on the ground, rather than over-emphasizing a narrow, conventional definition of expertise. That ranges from who sits on CWF’s board and advisory bodies to who is invited to seats of power at their Funder Table.

ClimateWorks Foundation not only has the power to improve their grantmaking, but also the influence to shift other funders to do the same. It is time for them to utilize their resources to amplify and support the communities with proven solutions, directly.

In part two of this blog, NCRP will dig further into CWF’s grantmaking data, including the increase in overlapped funding for non-frontline organizations between ClimateWorks and their funders. NCRP will also look more closely at the ClimateWorks ecosystem and other programs within the organization that amplify their influence in this field.