How to Fight the Climate Crisis — and Save Your Nonprofit Money — Explained

Wood rot, mold, mildew, insect damage, and chronically high humidity inside buildings that are hundreds of years old: These are just a few of the threats to artifacts and structures that plague the Strawbery Banke Museum in Portsmouth, N.H.

The culprit is sea-level rise driven by climate change. King tides — the highest tides each month that occur due to the orientation of the moon — are pushing the Piscataqua River far above the normal high-tide mark. The river doesn’t overrun its banks. Instead, the ground water table gets pushed up, and in the basements of many of the museum’s 37 historic buildings spread over 10 acres, brackish water — nearly two feet high at times — bubbles up from the ground, flooding basements, boosting humidity, and causing more and more damage.

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Three decades ago such flooding happened only during rare storms, says Rodney Rowland, the museum’s director of facilities and environmental sustainability. Now it happens like clockwork, once a month. Dig down a couple of inches in any of the basements’ dirt floors and water pools in the hole, just waiting to be pushed upward.

The museum’s buildings and 1 million artifacts, many of which are stored in basements, are at risk, as are artifacts that haven’t been excavated — including Native American tools and ceramics from European settlers. They are being compromised by the upwelling of water as well as surface flooding caused by the growing number of extreme storms.
Droughts, fires, flash floods, heat waves, hurricanes, sea-level rise, and many other climate change-driven calamities present new, bigger, and more regular dangers to nonprofits across the country. Organizations are taking steps to adapt to the increased risks. As housing groups build new projects, they’re elevating foundations and adding green space to stave off flooding damage. Disaster-relief nonprofits are switching to building materials that can be dried out after a storm and reused. At the same time, many organizations are also trying to reduce their own carbon footprint, often switching to renewable energy sources that are cheaper and more resilient.

The challenges can feel vast and overwhelming — much like climate change itself.

The good news is that today, perhaps more than ever, there is money available for these projects. The federal Inflation Reduction Act set aside tens of billions of dollars for efforts to adapt to climate change and drive energy efficiency. Some of the money is earmarked specifically for nonprofits. Foundations are also starting to support this work, and more nonprofits are collaborating with each other and setting up forums to share their experiences and resources.

“Organizations that thought they had a little more time to sort these things out realized that they don’t,” says Tatiana Ausema, a senior program officer at the National Endowment for the Humanities, which has two grant programs that provide funding to nonprofits that are dealing with the impact of climate change. “There’s some real urgency to this work.”

The Strawbery Banke Museum is taking dramatic and expensive steps to make sure its collection survives the assault of climate change-driven flooding. It’s starting with the 1758 Penhallow house. The old foundation, made of stacked stones and mortar, is vulnerable to the water. This year the museum made the painful decision to sacrifice history — the core of its mission — to adapt to the new reality.

This summer it will jack the house up about 10 feet above its foundation. Workers will tear out the entire historic foundation and put in a new one made of poured concrete that will let groundwater in and then pump it back out.

“These have been very difficult conversations,” says Linnea Grim, the museum’s CEO. “We’ve really focused on what are we saving, and how we can be the best stewards of these properties.”

Solar-Powered Smart Grids

As organizations take steps to protect themselves and reduce their carbon emissions, they’re finding that the changes lead to benefits that go beyond addressing a single risk like flooding.

In Puerto Rico, where many nonprofits were damaged and then cut off from power after Hurricane Maria, a network of nonprofit health clinics has been rebuilt with new solar-powered smart grids, radio-based communications networks, and solar-powered water pumps. These systems don’t simply generate electricity or provide a communications link. They also ensure that these groups can help people get the help they need during the next climate-fueled disaster.

That’s important given the many climate-driven crises that have struck the island chain in recent years, says Charlotte Gossett Navarro, chief director for Puerto Rico at the Hispanic Federation.

“Over and over again, after each of these disasters, these organizations are the first to be there for their community,” she says. “They’re the most effective and efficient in responding quickly and flexibly and then adapting to whatever the needs are.”

At the same time, nonprofits are also taking steps to assess and reduce their contributions to climate change. Some are doing things as simple as switching to LED light bulbs, while others are making big investments in things like geothermal energy systems. Sure, they’re curbing greenhouse-gas emissions, but in a lot of cases, they’re also saving money by slashing energy bills.

It’s not unusual for nonprofits to reduce their utility bills by 20 percent through simple, inexpensive changes, says Dennis Creech, a co-founder of the Southface Institute, which has made matching grants for energy-efficiency efforts to hundreds of organizations.

“This is money that an executive director doesn’t have to go out and raise. That’s money that they can put to mission work. It’s money they can put to staff bonuses. It’s money they can do anything they want with,” says Creech, who is now adviser for sustainability at the Kendeda Fund. “It’s not a one-time thing. It’s every year. It’s like setting up an endowment.”

Of course, getting a handle on an organization’s future climate risk or energy consumption can be complex. Nonprofits often lack expertise and worry about the cost of making changes. But there has never been a better time for groups to begin this work. Organizations focused on a wide array of missions are sharing their experiences and resources as they identify climate risks, take steps to protect their organizations, and reduce their emissions.

Foundations are funding assessment efforts, and the federal Inflation Reduction Act earmarked tens of billions of dollars for climate projects. “There’s a lot more money available than there used to be,” Rowland says. “People are really starting to understand that the time to take action is now.”

Thelma and Louise

Staggering utility costs were a key motivator for the Sabathani Community Center in Minneapolis to try to figure out how to power its facility differently. The center serves about 40,000 people a year on its two-block campus, which includes a 286,000 square-foot former middle school. The complex includes a work-force training center, several day care units, office space for 24 community groups, and 48 apartments for the elderly, as well as plans for a 72-unit housing complex set to open in 2024.

Justin Leaf, Sabathani Community Center

Deep in the basement of the school are two massive boilers — nicknamed Thelma and Louise — that cost about $27,000 a month to run. Janet Brown, a neighbor whose children attended early-childhood programs at the community center 30 years ago and was the associate director of a climate-education nonprofit, volunteered to help write grant applications for the community center when it needed funding during the pandemic. She also worked with the local power company to get a baseline on the center’s energy efficiency. It scored a zero.

Brown, who now contracts with the community center as its project coordinator, began to identify energy-efficiency projects with the lowest costs and biggest returns and sought grants to cover the cost. For example, the community center swapped all of its incandescent bulbs for LED bulbs with a grant from the Minneapolis Foundation’s Climate Action and Racial Equity Fund. The savings from that project alone was $35,000 a year.

When Brown went up on the roof to inspect it over the winter, she expected to find 10 inches of snow from a recent storm. Instead, so much heat was radiating through the roof that all the snow had melted. “Now we know where all of our heat is going,” she says with a laugh. The new insulated roof will be completed this summer and should further reduce energy costs.

“It’s not worth doing all of these renewable-energy projects,” Brown says, “if you’re not already being cost effective and making the best use of the energy that you have right now.”

More Money for Climate Projects

A growing number of grant makers are turning their attention — and grant dollars — to green-energy projects. The Frankenthaler Climate Initiative is in the third year of a $10 million grant program to help visual-arts organizations become more energy efficient and move to clean energy. The McKnight Foundation’s Midwest Climate & Energy program distributed $32 million in grants in 2022, including money to help nonprofits assess and plan clean-energy projects and adapt to climate-change risks — and it’s helping them find ways to finance bigger projects, too.

Where to Get Money for Climate Projects

David Plunkert for The Chronicle

Federal Funding Sources

The Inflation Reduction Act
It includes $39 billion in competitive grants for a wide range of projects to help nonprofits and other groups adapt to climate risk and cut carbon emissions. Grants from these funds are being awarded by many federal agencies, including the Department of Agriculture, Department of Labor, and Environmental Protection Agency. For the next decade, nonprofits can receive direct payments for 30 percent or more of the cost of their renewable-energy projects when they file their informational tax returns.

The Department of Energy
The Renew America’s Nonprofits program, part of the Biden administration’s bipartisan infrastructure bill, will award $45 million in grants of up to $200,000 to nonprofits for energy-efficient building improvements.

The Environmental Protection Agency
Nonprofits are eligible for many EPA grants, which can be used for projects to install renewable-energy sources or provide public education about climate change.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency
Many nonprofits are eligible for FEMA assistance, which helps people prepare for and recover from natural disasters through their local or state government. Since 2018, FEMA’s Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities grant has also helped communities build climate-resilient infrastructure.

The National Endowment for the Humanities
The endowment runs the Climate Smart Humanities Organizations program, which provides matching grants to museums, libraries, archives, historic sites, and other such groups for climate-related projects.

Other Funding Sources

State and Local Government Grants
Many state and local governments have grant programs for climate resilience or efforts to reduce carbon emissions, including California Climate Investments, Connecticut’s DEEP Climate Resilience Fund, the Resilient Maryland program, New York’s Climate Smart Communities program, and North Dakota’s State Energy Program.

Grant Makers
Private foundations and other grant makers — including the 11th Hour Project, Direct Relief, Frankenthaler Climate Initiative, Kresge Foundation, McKnight Foundation’s Midwest Climate & Energy program, Minneapolis Foundation’s Climate Action and Racial Equity Fund, New York Community Trust, and Southface Institute — have all provided grants to nonprofit efforts to adapt to climate change or curb carbon emissions through resilient infrastructure and clean-energy projects.

In Puerto Rico, dozens of nonprofit community health centers, lifelines to low-income residents, have rebuilt the facilities to be stronger after Hurricane Maria, thanks largely to multimillion-dollar grants from the Hispanic Federation and Direct Relief, which funded new solar-powered projects and a more resilient communications system.

“Our future is defined by climate change,” says Darielys Cordero-Rosario, executive director of the Puerto Rico Primary Care Association. “Organizations need to have an active role in updating infrastructure.”
A broader range of supporters may want to fund energy-efficiency projects if nonprofits use the language of foundations and frame the projects as building their organizations’ capacity rather than combating climate change, says Sarah Sutton, co-founder of Environment and Culture Partners and co-author of The Green Museum: A Primer on Environmental Practice. “Your community foundation, your private funder who’s been a longtime supporter, will understand that.”

McKnight funds the Center for Energy and Environment, which helps organizations assess their current energy use and how they can become more efficient. Another grantee, Elevate, similarly works with nonprofits and utility companies to help nonprofits become more energy efficient.

The largest pot of money that nonprofits can tap into is from the federal government. The Inflation Reduction Act contains $369 billion for climate-related projects, $39 billion of which has been set aside for competitive grants.

In June, the U.S. Department of the Treasury announced that nonprofits will receive cash payments for programs that would otherwise offer tax credits for some renewable-energy projects. Nonprofits can recoup 30 percent to 70 percent of the costs of qualifying projects like solar installations when they file their informational tax returns. That money will be available for 10 years.

“It’s historic that nonprofits, which are tax-exempt, actually have an opportunity to be incentivized through tax credits,” says Aubrey Relf, senior manager of research and impact at Forward, a company that consults with nonprofits and governments on obtaining federal grants and tax credits and has aggregated information about federal grants on its website. “It’s a game changer.”

Money from the Inflation Reduction Act is moving out through many federal agencies. For example, Relf says, groups can get grants through the U.S. Department of Agriculture to partner with local governments to plant trees in the neighborhood around their facilities to reduce temperatures.

And the U.S. Department of Labor is offering grants to help nonprofits train people for jobs that have a climate-change focus. For example, a nonprofit could qualify by ensuring that the contractor that installs solar panels on its roof trains local residents as part of the process. The Department of Energy could fund a solar installation. And grants for adapting to the impact of climate change are available through the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

Another potential source of funding: Most cities produce disaster-mitigation plans every five or so years, and local funding may come with those plans.

The National Endowment for the Humanities runs the Climate Smart Humanities Organizations program, which provides matching grants of up to $300,000 to help museums, libraries, archives, historic sites, and similar groups develop plans to either adapt to climate risks or reduce their carbon emissions.

Big-Project Challenges

While the number of funding sources available to nonprofits for climate projects has grown, that doesn’t mean that money is no longer an issue. The Strawbery Banke Museum won grants from both NEH and the state to help pay the $750,000 cost to rebuild the foundation and undertake other renovations at the Penhallow building. But those grants covered only about a quarter of the cost — the museum raised the rest from foundations, individuals, and businesses.

The Strawberry Banke Museum

Foundations haven’t exactly been lining up to help the Sabathani Community Center replace Thelma and Louise.

The nonprofit desperately wants to stop spending huge sums of money on the polluting gas boilers, which produce more than 1,000 metric tons of carbon a year.

It used a grant from McKnight to identify the best solution to its energy needs — a geothermal system, which would provide heating in the winter and cooling in the summer. It would be large enough to heat and cool the entire campus, including the soon-to-be-completed 72-unit housing complex, and neighbors could buy into the system, which would help keep their energy bills and pollution down as well. The organization wants to train people to work on geothermal projects by working with the contractor to install this one.

The problem is the price tag: $13.5 million. While in theory many sources of funding are available for renewable-energy projects, the group has yet to raise the money it needs. Brown points out that many grants — like the one from McKnight — are just to plan projects, not to carry them out. Others are for tiny sums that don’t put a dent in multimillion-dollar price tags.
The funding shortfall is even more dire for nonprofits trying to cope with extreme weather events, like hurricanes, wildfires, and flooding, which are exacerbated by climate change. Improving nonprofits’ climate resilience “is still very much an underfunded area,” says Arturo Garcia-Costas, program officer for New York Community Trust’s environmental grant-making program. Less than 2 percent of global philanthropy goes toward climate-related causes, only a fraction of which includes climate-resilient infrastructure, with grant makers focusing instead on activism or research, he says.

“We have to really shift our approach to climate philanthropy” by prioritizing grant making for nonprofits that operate in the areas most directly affected by climate change, he says. “This is a cross-cutting issue that we need to fund robustly.”

Climate-Change Resources for Nonprofits

Climate Resilient Resources for Cultural Heritage
This project is working to create interactive maps to help nonprofits assess potential climate risks. It will also help groups better understand how they can respond to potential risks and how climate-driven changes may impact their communities.

The Climate Toolkit
A platform where more than 100 museums, botanic gardens, and zoos publicly track their progress on nine environmental goals including energy, waste, water, and food service.

Earth Economics
This nonprofit consults with other charities, universities, and local governments on climate risks and green infrastructure. It also provide pro bono technical assistance to community-based nonprofits on building resilience to climate change.

Environment and Culture Partners
This nonprofit consults with museums, zoos, and botanic gardens on climate risk and curbing greenhouse-gas emissions. It was co-founded by Sarah Sutton, who co-authored The Green Museum: A Primer on Environmental Practice a decade ago.

Forward
A for-profit consultancy that works with nonprofits and local governments to obtain federal grants and tax credits. It has compiled information about federal grants.

Interfaith Power & Light
A nonprofit network with 40 state affiliates that have organized thousands of houses of worship on green energy, climate resilience, and environmental justice. The organization also provides webinars, worship and educational resources, and funding tips.

And when grants do come through, it can be years before the dollars show up in the bank. Brown says that Minnesota U.S. Rep. Ilhan Omar helped the group get funding to replace its roof from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. Brown applied for the grant in April 2021; it was awarded that fall. But the community center is still waiting for the $500,000 to replace the roof — a project whose price tag has risen to more $800,000.

Applying for federal grants for the geothermal project has been daunting. Many of the grant applications are up to 90 pages long and can take up to 60 hours to prepare — and the funds are sometimes doled out over many years. Other grants are so small that they are hardly worth the effort. One grant she’s applying for is for $400,000 — such a small portion of what’s needed that it’s hard to imagine how it will help.

“It’s unbelievable how much time and effort it takes,” Brown says.

McKnight is trying to help the community center find potential philanthropic supporters and lenders to cover the cost of the project. But it will only cover the planning, not the actual cost of the geothermal system.

“We’re never going to have all the capital to help these groups, but we can help provide initial funding that helps them leverage state and other funding to be able to achieve what they want to do,” says Sarah Christiansen, McKnight’s Midwest climate and energy program director.

Brown is forging ahead, looking for funding, trying to find ways to build the system piece by piece as money comes in. But there’s no simple solution.

Nonprofits might be better served by steering clear of complex and expensive renewable-energy projects, says Dan Stein, chief economist at IDinsight and the founder of Giving Green, a project that advises donors on environmental philanthropy. Low-cost projects with high rates of return like switching to LED light bulbs or some solar installations or changing out a vehicle fleet to electric might make sense.

He says that for donors and grant makers, the most effective way to fight climate change is to support systemic changes, in part by supporting groups that are doing the best job fighting climate change, not necessarily putting a lot of money into individual green-energy projects.

“Is the most effective way to allocate money towards decarbonization to buy solar panels for all of your grantees?” he asks. “You would be better served allocating money towards a highly effective climate nonprofit.”

More Engaged Donors

As nonprofits embark on climate projects, it’s usually to protect the organization from risks like flooding or wildfires, cut sky-high energy bills, or protect the environment. Along the way, however, they’ve realized there are unexpected benefits: Climate projects are often good for fundraising and community relations, and they can help organizations build relationships with other like-minded groups.

More than a decade ago, the Madison Children’s Museum in Wisconsin moved into an older building that required extensive renovations. Rather than close its doors to work on the building, the museum invited its neighbors to come help. More than 13,000 children made tiles and artwork for the building. Residents donated objects like an old airplane that could be reused in the renovation. Since the 1990s, it has had all of its exhibits built locally from environmentally friendly materials, which helped to develop and support a network of local businesses. The result of that work is a stronger pool of support for the museum and more engaged donors

“This is really a local museum. People care about it,” says Brenda Baker, vice president of exhibits, facilities, and strategic initiatives. “Supporting our community through the way that we work is really, really important to funders.”

The museum shares what it’s learning through Greenexhibits.org. It’s also working with nine other children’s museums in an effort funded by the Institute of Museum and Library Services to reduce their carbon emissions.

Madison Children’s Museum

Other institutions are coming together to share what they’re learning as well. The American Alliance of Museums, along with several other organizations, including the Phipps Conservatory, created the Climate Toolkit for museums, botanic gardens, and zoos. About 100 institutions have signed on and are publicly tracking their progress across nine areas, including energy, waste, water, and food service.

“We don’t see ourselves in competition with each other,” says Richard Piacentini, CEO of Phipps Conservatory. “We come together trying to help each other.”

The Strawbery Banke Museum’s early successes responding to climate risks are, in part, the result of finding key partners and being open about the problems it faces. The museum’s public discussion of its groundwater flooding issues helped Portsmouth better understand the problems it faces throughout the city. Now it’s incorporating the issue into its own planning, and museum representatives sit on city committees examining groundwater flooding. Portsmouth has shared outreach funding from the Environmental Protection Agency with the museum to help support an exhibit on water at the museum.

Partners at the University of New Hampshire help the museum monitor ground water.

“We’re getting a pretty good response from donors when we talk about this,” says Grim, the museum’s CEO. After all, preservation is the museum’s mission. Grim says a donor who was very interested in decorative arts shifted her giving to help the museum pay for adaptation to sea-level rise after learning about the challenges the museum faces.

The more the museum publicizes those problems, the more others are willing to help, says Rowland, the museum’s director of environmental sustainability.

“It’s really important to educate people on what we’re finding out. But it’s also equally important to find partners in the community that could help us solve these problems,” he says. “We couldn’t do it alone.”