Dear Mr. Bezos,
We are writing to thank you for dedicating $10 billion to the new Bezos Earth Fund and to welcome you to the world of climate-change philanthropy. As longtime grant makers and organizers for social justice, we know it can take years of work and many missteps to truly understand philanthropy, let alone climate justice. With that in mind, we’d like to share what we have learned and invite you and the Bezos Earth Fund team to discuss both our concerns and the potential for us to do extraordinary work together.
This work is far from simple. Newly minted donors, despite good intentions, can harm the people they’re trying to help and undermine climate targets they’re trying to reach. Perhaps the most important lesson we hope you’ll draw from this letter is this: Meeting behind closed doors and unilaterally deciding what is best for people who live the realities of climate change every day is the worst thing the Bezos Earth Fund could do. If you are sincere, you must share the power of your fund with people who work on the front lines of social change.
Here are some ways to do that:
Build equitable partnerships with grassroots leaders.
Your fund’s success or failure will rest on who makes the decisions and how those decisions are made. So, we ask not what you plan to do with the $10 billion, but how leaders on the front lines of fighting racial, gender, health, environmental, climate, and housing injustices would allocate these funds. A simple lesson, hard for some new donors to learn, is that the most effective solutions for communities come from the people who live in them.
If the Bezos Earth Fund wants to lead, the only path is one in which grass-roots leaders have seats at the decision-making table and control the distribution of resources.
The fund’s decision-making board must include at least two-thirds representation from people chronically affected by climate change and its root causes. You can achieve this by moving funds immediately to a network of already-established funds and grass-roots groups that let people affected by problems decide where money goes. These include groups such as NDN Collective, CLIMA Fund, Climate Justice Alliance, Indigenous Environmental Network, Thousand Currents, and the Building Equity and Alignment for Impact Fund, hosted by Grassroots International.
Learn from others’ mistakes and avoid supporting market-based approaches that allow companies to continue polluting.
We have seen major donors make the mistake of focusing their giving on large and mainstream environmental organizations, the so-called Big Greens. These organizations are often criticized for causing environmental harm through carbon-offset schemes and other approaches, To truly combat climate change, we need local solutions developed by local leaders who are building resilient regional ecosystems and economies that will enable us to meet our needs in a postcarbon world.
You could surprise the philanthropic establishment by funding grass-roots solutions accountable to the communities and places they serve and by supporting a larger network of organizations based in rural and urban communities around the country.
You could fund efforts social-justice movements are developing, which include democratic and sustainable businesses that give priority to a low-carbon future and put control of resources and power in the hands of the people they serve. You could support indigenous leadership, whose communities are often most affected by an economy based on extracting natural resources, and whose experience and wisdom can help build real solutions for healing our relationships with the planet and one another.
If these suggestions seem complicated, let us simplify: If you want to heal the earth, you must fundamentally shift power rather than extract it, putting local human needs and ecological health at the center of your work.
Recognize the philanthropy is no substitute for justice: Amazon must change its business practices if the Earth Fund is to be taken seriously.
The $10 billion you are dedicating to the Bezos Earth Fund is the equivalent to what you earn in roughly six weeks. Bizarrely, you are simultaneously asking the public to donate to a fund to supplement low-wage Amazon employees during the coronavirus pandemic. Before you look to save the planet, we ask that you pay a living wage, provide safe working conditions, stop engaging in union-busting activities, and act on the demands of your own employees to quickly and aggressively reduce the harm Amazon does to the climate.
We know climate and human-rights crises intersect, and charity is no substitute for justice. This is why, as grant makers and organizers, we support a full-scale, just transition of our economy. We know an economy designed to extract as much profit as possible for a few can never meet the needs of present and future generations. We call this “extractive capitalism,” and Amazon reaps its benefits.
An authentic response to this moment would require Amazon to stop the inhumane treatment of frontline workers and provide paid sick leave, health care, safety and protections, and a living wage for all employees. As philanthropists, we are following and funding the leadership of workers and frontline workers staging walkouts and strikes against Amazon policies. We need to know that you are taking actions that undo, rather than deepen, structural inequities.
Acknowledge that philanthropy is no substitute for paying your taxes: Amazon must pay taxes and advocate for higher tax rates for corporations and the very rich.
The scale of wealth accumulation in America today could happen only through an economic system built on the extreme extraction of our natural resources, the exploitation of human labor and suffering, and the avoidance of taxation.
Over the last several decades, we have seen the consequences of wealthy individuals using their resources to capitalize on disasters that don’t touch them and privatize essential public services.
Billionaires like you have asserted your influence over our politicians and government to weaken the public sphere and rig the economy in your favor. We have watched cities and towns suffer as public coffers run dry, social safety nets are shredded, and charity is called upon to meet fundamental needs. Even in Seattle, where Amazon has its headquarters, you held the city hostage in order to kill a small tax that would have helped provide housing for the homeless, even as your company takes billions of dollars in public subsidies.
We are here to tell you that what we need more than your philanthropy is for your wealth to be taxed and your employees paid a living wage. It is unconscionable that your own employees pay more in taxes than the world’s richest company.
We invite you to engage in deep dialogue to align your work in support of people and the planet.
In the coming months, the Bezos Earth Fund will be watched and held to account. We ask that you support the People’s Bailout to ensure the survival of working people and marginalized communities during the pandemic. We ask that you coordinate with others in philanthropy to provide emergency funding to frontline organizations.
We will not applaud billionaires for doing the bare minimum while upholding structures that protect their interests and privilege, and leave everyone else behind. Think about this: Your money, if taxed at the post-World War II rates that created the broad middle class, would be largely in the public domain. That’s why we call on you to spend it through a process that shares power while supporting the long-term organizing required to create a fair and just economy. Much good can be done with $10 billion, but this fund cannot be a cover as you continue harming people and the planet.
We call on you to immediately publish a plan for drastically reducing Amazon’s greenhouse-gas emissions, as your employees have demanded you do. We call on you to pay a living wage with real benefits to every employee. And we call on you to cease your monopolistic business practices that are tearing the heart out of small towns and large cities across the country.
This moment requires unprecedented action and equitable funding of grass-roots leadership. We call upon you, as well as other billionaires, to invest in the leadership of frontline community-based organizations that are already creating the just transitions we need to achieve a regenerative economy — one based on ecological restoration, community resilience, social equity, and full and fair participatory processes. As soon as you start taking these critical steps, we are ready and willing to support you with the experience, knowledge, and tools we have developed during the last 30 years.
Angela Mahecha Adrar is executive director of the Climate Justice Alliance. Kathryn Gilje is executive director of Ceres Trust.
