A Vision for Change

From grassroots organizations are among the most effective climate action leaders on the planet. Their solutions are simultaneously mitigative, by taking on the industries driving the climate crisis and offering real, replicable and community-scale alternatives that reduce or prevent carbon emissions and/or sequester carbon, as well as adaptive, by integrating production-consumption-waste cycles that are far less harmful ecologically and that contribute to communities’ survivability.

But as effective as grassroots solutions are, they receive very little philanthropic support, as documented in numerous studies by the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy and many others.^[3] For example, Indigenous resistance to fossil fuel projects has avoided greenhouse gas pollution equivalent to at least 25% of annual U.S. and Canadian emissions.

Yet, Indigenous Peoples receive 0.03% of funding in the United States. Women’s environmental initiatives receive less than 0.02% of funding. And only 1.3% of climate philanthropic giving in the United States goes to frontline communities. The Yale School of the Environment found that several mainstream environmental organizations receive much more funding individually than do all the EJ organizations combined. “The Sierra Club, for example, received more than $200 million in grants, almost five times what all the environmental justice organizations combined received,” writes the study’s co-author Dr. Dorceta Taylor.

The story of F4FP and BEF is an example of how philanthropy can reverse this trend, follow the lead and work with frontline organizations to shift resources for community-led solutions. While this is a case study focused on organizing in the United States, we recognize that frontline communities globally bear the disproportionate impact of the climate crisis and have been similarly overlooked by philanthropy while leading climate solutions. The lessons and recommendations presented in this case study are also applicable to international grantmaking.

Imagine we woke up tomorrow and grassroots leaders across the country and around the world had the opportunity to steward $10 billion. What are the north stars, maps and paths forward that prioritize a healthy planet and healthy beings and don’t replicate systems of harm? What can philanthropy learn from frontline leaders’ visionary practices – and put into action? When the grassroots win, we all win. This means getting capital and resources to frontline communities that are stewarding the climate solutions we so desperately need.

We know the historic role of robust social movements in transforming society. We know how important it is to build them from the ground up by investing in grassroots organizations and networks. Powerful social movements are like the probiotics of a healthy democracy, creating on-the-ground alternatives to toxic ideologies and institutions. But just like probiotics need prebiotics as a food source to help them grow, movements need strong grassroots organizations and infrastructure to realize their full transformative potential.

It is essential that we align with and resource the solutions, strategies and operations of groups that have already been fighting for EJ for multiple decades. Aside from the obvious expertise frontline communities have on issues affecting their own bodies, families and environments, asking a billionaire to dismantle a system that made billionaires possible is ludicrous. Frontline

communities are essentially surviving in the “sacrifice zones” that make the accumulation of wealth and power possible. They exist at the expense of our “dig, burn, dump” economy, a system reliant on ever new manifestations of extraction and exploitation that stem from colonialism. This is why real solutions must come from those living in the crosshairs of environmental racism and the toxic, polluting industries that degrade human and environmental health, drive the climate crisis and pad investors’ pockets. Until that happens, true transformation will be unattainable; government subsidies will continue to benefit the fossil fuel industry and enrich corporations, investors and billionaires; and the public will continue to pay the price of increasingly extreme weather and growing income inequality.

Philanthropy deepens these inequities when it unduly funds large, predominantly and historically white-led environmental groups, which often reinforce the structural conditions that harm frontline communities. It also undermines its own environmental and climate justice program work when it benefits financially from the extractive economy through investment strategies. And now, a budding class of billionaires who have most benefited from the exploitation of labor and planetary resources are perpetuating the same harm and inequities through billionaire philanthropy that greenwashes reputations made through extractive capitalism.

Over the next decade, exorbitant resources – including billionaire philanthropy, generational wealth shifts, and federal funding – will flow toward climate mitigation and adaptation. We need measures in place to ensure frontline organizations have the absorptive capacity to integrate large-scale funding to expedite systemic change. Further, we need donors and funders to calibrate their role in the change process, orient as learners in relation to grassroots organizations and social movements, and utilize their voices and influence to organize their peers to do the same.

 

To download the PDF of “Good, Bad, Bezos And Beyond: Climate Philanthropy And The Grassroots” report, click here.