After more than 30 years as an environmental grant maker, Lois DeBacker will be retiring from the Kresge Foundation on September 27. DeBacker, managing director of the foundation’s environment program, was among the early proponents of making grants to environmental-justice groups — first at the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation, which she jointed in 1991, and later at Kresge, which she joined in 2008.
DeBacker has been hooked on environmental issues since high school when she raised money to help save old-growth forests. She studied environmental policy in college and worked for a state senator before she began working in philanthropy.
In her time as an environmental grant maker, DeBacker has seen shifts from traditional conservation to a growing focus on climate change to the more recent shift to supporting community-based groups led by people of color. She was at the forefront of many of those changes. She led Kresge’s transition from a grant maker that funded big green groups like the Natural Resources Defense Council, the Nature Conservancy, and the Energy Foundation, to one that focuses on people, urban issues, and small, community-based groups.
In 2014, she led the design of the foundation’s Climate Resilience and Urban Opportunity initiative, a $29 million, five-year effort to help organizers in urban communities better address climate challenges. Fifteen organizations each received a $660,000 multi-year grant. It was developed with input from climate-justice leaders across the country, and DeBacker sees it as one of her most important achievements. The foundation was also among the first to take the Climate Funders Justice Pledge. A decade ago, less than 10 percent of Kresge’s climate grant dollars went to groups led by people of color. Today it’s 39 percent.
Grant makers’ response to climate change continues to shift, she says. Climate change is so potentially devastating that it’s what she calls an “everything issue.” She says grant makers to every cause need to think about how climate change will impact the causes they care about.
Still, DeBacker is optimistic about the future of environmental grant making and is proud of her career. “It’s really nice to look back on my career with enormous gratitude for the really wonderful jobs I’ve had and to hope that I made a positive difference,” she said. “It’s a real special moment in my life to be thinking about that.”
The Chronicle spoke with DeBacker about the ways environmental grant making has changed, her role in making grants to community-based urban environmental and climate organizations, and her optimism about the future of the field.
Your first philanthropic job was with the Mott Foundation in 1991. What were some of the pivotal moments in that job for you?
The year I started was the first People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit. That was the year that the principles of environmental justice were articulated. Mott had some really progressive environmental grant making around issues of toxic contamination in local communities. Exposure to environmental justice and some of the leaders in that community was very important.
I also served on the board of a nonprofit called the Environmental Support Center. It no longer exists, but it was a really wonderful organization that was focused on capacity building for environmental-justice organizations. The board included some real luminaries, people like Richard Moore, now a board member of the Just Transition Alliance, and Lois Gibbs, the activist who discovered the toxic contamination in Love Canal and led the effort to relocate that community and a winner of the Goldman Environmental Prize.
I came to learn the things that I as a white woman from the suburbs hadn’t really been exposed to in my education or in my own life experience. It was really important to my growth as a person and to my understanding of the injustices that existed. It helped me understand the different ways that people define an environmental issue.
Did that experience inform your early grant making at Mott?
It certainly did. There are probably 15 or 20 such organizations that were doing really early leadership work on environmental justice that we funded. Lori Villarosa, founder of the Philanthropic Initiative for Racial Equity, was a communications officer at the time, and she was a huge advocate for racial justice. She ended up becoming a program officer handling a portfolio on that topic there. She brought in a training program about institutional racism and what it meant for our work. That was really pivotal to my understanding as well.
That wasn’t the prevailing approach to environmental grant making at the time. What did you see going on in the field at large?
It was certainly at the margins. I remember early on the Environmental Grantmakers Association had a small contingent that would provide trainings and try to infuse interest in racial-justice issues in the work. But the backdrop was very much conservation-focused grant making, which is really important. There wasn’t as much attention to urban environmental problems, for sure, or problems in communities of color. And there was a bit of an attitude on the part of some funder — not all, but some — who felt that those areas were someone else’s work.
How has the approach to climate philanthropy changed over time?
For such a long time, climate philanthropy rightfully has been focused on targets — there is an urgent need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. We need to cut our use of fossil fuels in half by 2030. We’re a long way from doing that. But we framed climate change in a technical way and less of a human-oriented way. A lot of climate philanthropy had this mental image of who a climate leader is. It was usually a white person. It might be a scientist or maybe a policy geek.
Grant makers weren’t thinking about how people were affected or about the constituencies that need to have their voices heard. Part of what we wanted to do was elevate the leadership and influence of people of color who are climate experts, who are policy geeks, and who are organizers, who are working in communities. Part of what we had to do in our transformation at Kresge from a pretty traditional environmental funder to one that is centering equity and justice in our climate work was to broaden our frame of what constitutes a climate issue.
That’s a big shift. Can you talk about that process and what it entailed?
The change happened in 2006, when Rip Rapson came in as president. Before that, Kresge had been doing almost exclusively funding grants for capital campaigns. The theory of change was that by developing a sophisticated fundraising capability, an organization would be stronger. We funded the construction or renovation of buildings across the U.S. and did some land acquisition. It was a good program, but it’s very limited.
When Rip started, he encouraged the foundation to think about other ways that it could deploy capital — grants for working capital, project grants, general operating support, program related investment. And then the foundation began to identify topics toward which those dollars should be focused — arts and culture, education, the environment, health, human services, American cities, and community development in Detroit.
Later, he decided to focus all of Kresge’s efforts on expanding opportunity in American cities. That became the impetus for the environment team, which was funding climate change, to say, OK, if our mission as a foundation is to advance opportunities in American cities, then how do we design climate-change programs that are focused on doing that?
It really set in motion a deliberate and sometimes excruciating planning process to reorient our work. We had done a lot of really good environmental grant making, but it was more traditional, largely focused on advancing energy-efficiency practices and supporting policy changes at the state level in the Midwest and the Southeast.
We decided instead to fund organizations that focus on people and organizations that are attentive to how climate affects low-wealth people and people of color in American cities. It took at least a year and a half of conversations with Rip and the board for the team to develop its new strategy, so we had time to talk with the organizations we had been funding.
Big grant makers can sometimes struggle to work effectively with small groups . How were you able to find new grantees and make sure that your funding was getting to sometimes very small, community based groups doing this work?
You find what you look for. There are strong, effective BIPOC-led organizations all across the country. Some of them are very small grassroots groups, and some of them are strong and powerful and have big budgets. We work our networks to find new contacts. Some of it is needing to reach into new networks or bringing on staff people who have different networks.
We also have supported a lot of intermediaries. There are really excellent intermediaries like the Climate and Clean Energy Equity Fund, the Hive Fund, the Solutions Project, and others that we support. They have great networks into those organizations, and they tend to provide both grant support and some kind of capacity-building help, either around communications or around policy expertise. They’re a great vehicle for supporting justice-oriented nonprofits. But there also are others, like the Greenlining Institute, the Chisholm Legacy Project, and PolicyLink — big, well-resourced, sophisticated organizations that can easily take a large foundation grant.
For the climate movement in the United States to be politically effective, it needs to be diverse from a perspective of income levels and class. It needs to be diverse racially and ethnically. To actually make progress on climate change, we need a very diverse set of people and organizations to help people see its relevance to their lives, and they need to see how climate action will make their lives better.
Did you change your grant-making process as you made grants to smaller community-based and justice-oriented groups?
We still make everybody apply through our grant-making system, which is a challenge for some people. We do have a streamlined application for grants of $50,000 or less. Different program teams have begun to experiment with different ways of applying. I think some of them have been willing to consider submitting videos. Some of our teams have looked at different ways of simplifying reporting on grants.
Kresge across the board has made a commitment to equity and to racial justice in its work. That has caused us to think more about how accessible our process is. We haven’t changed everything, but we’re clearly thinking about it and have begun to make some changes.
Where do you see climate philanthropy going in the future?
Climate change is an everything issue, to borrow a phrase from the Natural Resources Defense Council.
Climate change is an economic issue. It’s a housing issue. It’s an anti-poverty issue. It’s an infrastructure issue. It affects education when schools get shut down because of hurricanes or kids can’t go to school because it’s too hot in schools that don’t have air conditioning. The education field is increasingly recognizing that climate change is a threat to low-wealth students’ ability to graduate from college. They may lose housing because of a climate event.
The next challenge for philanthropy is to understand if I’m a human-services funder or I’m a health funder or a housing funder, what does climate change mean for the issues that I care about? Kresge’s thinking about that. Increasingly we’re trying to understand how we can incorporate consideration of climate change in all of our grant making programs.
Are other grant makers starting to act accordingly, or are they talking about change but not implementing it?
I don’t think anybody really has the answer. It’s a learning curve for us internally. Our American Cities program is now very much starting to explore this. If Detroit is experiencing more severe flooding, higher heat days, more instability in the electrical grid, what does that mean for our grant making there? If we know that there’ll be more disruptive storm events, what does it mean for housing?
I don’t think that there’s resistance on the part of funders in other fields. I think that we as philanthropy don’t know the answers. It’s a question that we need to start asking ourselves and thinking harder about.
The environment can sometimes be a tough area to feel optimistic about. When you think about your career, are you optimistic about philanthropy’s role in the environment?
We have to have hope. I’m optimistic about what we can do. I also feel a real sense of urgency. I think that there is a lot of progress that environmental philanthropy can make. I really do think that next generation of work on climate is going to necessitate different disciplines understanding that climate change is the terrain for their work. They will need to understand what climate change means for their grant making and for the populations that they hope to serve.
This interview was edited for brevity and clarity.
