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:
- Air quality
- Climate change
- Energy resources
- Environmental and resource rights
- Environmental justice
- Forest preservation
- Sustainable agriculture
- 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.
