A group of wealthy donors is circulating a pledge among large foundations urging them to steer at least 30 percent of their climate-change grants to groups led by people of color, and seven grant makers have already made the commitment.
Climate-change grant making must support groups that are being directly affected by global warming to be effective, said Ashindi Maxton, executive director the Donors of Color Network, which created the pledge.
“This is not a diversity and inclusion checklist,” Maxton tells grant makers. “This is about creating an effective climate movement. The movement is not winning. It will win if you bring the communities who are most affected into the center, right into the game.”
The JPB, Kresge, Libra, Pisces, Surdna, and Tides foundations and the Meyer Memorial Trust have signed the pledge. The Hewlett Foundation has pledged to track the money it steers to Black-led climate-change efforts but has not committed to reaching the 30 percent mark.
The Donors of Color Network is a group of 53 wealthy donors and movement leaders who have the capacity to give at least $50,000 a year. The group, which started in 2019, includes Armando Castellano, chair of the Castellano Family Foundation, and Farhad Ebrahimi, president of the Chorus Foundation. It bills itself as the first cross-racial donor network for people of color.
Foundations that take the pledge agree to track their climate giving and contribute 30 percent to groups in which people of color occupy more than half of board seats and account for the majority of employees.
There is relatively little data on how climate-change grants are distributed. A study by Building Equity and Alignment for Impact and the Tishman Environment and Design Center found that in 2016 and 2017 about 1.3 percent of climate funding among large foundations in the Midwest and Southeast went to environmental-justice work, defined as work “rooted in, and accountable to, communities of color.”
Collecting Data
Kresge has required grantees to provide information about the racial identity of their boards and senior staff members for 15 years, says Lois DeBacker, Kresge’s senior program director for the environment. Collecting that data is “eminently doable” for other foundations, she says.
“We’re still fine-tuning the numbers, but we’re pretty confident that we’ll be able to meet that 30 percent,” DeBacker says.
A big reason DeBacker is confident Kresge can meet the 30 percent mark is that the foundation’s strategy as a whole is focused on racial equity. Its climate program in particular is directed toward helping people in American cities adapt to climate change and advocate more effectively for climate-friendly policies.
The movement is not winning. It will win if you bring the communities who are most affected into the center, right into the game.
DeBacker says the lack of grant money flowing to organizations led by people of color is partly because grant makers are limited in whom they view as experts on climate change. Too often, she says, foundations stress the technical aspects of climate work and neglect the human impact of global warming.
The Ford Foundation said it supports the pledge but declined to sign it because it wasn’t applicable to its work. According to a spokesman for the foundation, the “vast majority” of Ford’s climate grants are international, supporting people fighting for land rights and equitable governance of natural resources.
The Hewlett Foundation said that it does not set numeric targets for its staff or grantees as a matter of policy. But Jonathan Pershing, Hewlett’s environment program director, said the foundation has made a concentrated effort to support grassroots environmental organizations and climate-change groups led by people of color, citing as examples Hewlett’s role in creating the Climate and Clean Energy Equity Fund and a $12 million grant it made to the Hive Fund for Climate and Gender Justice.
Climate advocacy is critically important to reducing the effects of global warming, Maxton says. But, she adds, foundations often have a misconception that groups led by people of color are only involved in direct action and community organizing on climate issues. She hopes grant makers will also seek out nonprofits that work to create green jobs and produce technical fixes to the effects of a warming planet.
“There’s some real racial bias baked into the idea that the rigor is happening only in the big green groups,” she says. “And so we are saying to them, if by scaling the big green group like the Sierra Club could save the planet, it probably would have already.”
The Hewlett Foundation is a financial supporter of the Chronicle of Philanthropy.
