Jared Blumenfeld has more than $3 billion to fight climate change, and he needs to get it out the door before 2035. It’s an unusual mandate in the often slow-moving world of foundations that are designed to make grants for generations.
Blumenfeld is president of the Waverley Street Foundation, which is one of Laurene Powell Jobs’s philanthropic organizations. In late 2021, Powell Jobs, founder and president of the Emerson Collective, pledged $3.5 billion to fight climate change in the United States and internationally, joining other major billionaire-funded efforts to curb climate change, such as the $10 billion Bezos Earth Fund and initiatives from Michael Bloomberg, Steve Ballmer, and others. It awarded more than $500 million from 2021 to 2023 and last year made grants to more than 60 groups, according to the foundation.
Jared Blumenfeld became the organization’s president in August 2022. He has a long history in the environmental movement. He began his career as a lawyer for the Natural Resources Defense Council. Later Blumenfeld led San Francisco’s Environment Department for eight years, focusing on boosting recycling and developing the city’s environmental code. He was a regional administrator for the United States Environmental Protection Agency under President Obama and, starting in 2019, was California’s secretary for environmental protection, serving at a time when the state was reeling from droughts, fires, and floods exacerbated by climate change.
Blumenfeld’s government experience has helped him understand how philanthropy can be a lever to bring federal funds to local communities, particularly through the federal Inflation Reduction Act, which offers tens of billions of dollars for small-scale green-energy projects. He says the need to spend all of the foundation’s money by 2035 imbues everything the foundation does with a sense of urgency — something he says is required to meet the overwhelming challenges presented by climate change.
“I feel like this is my dream job,” he says.
Can you discuss the big-picture priorities for the foundation? Where do you see your ability to affect change?
I started my career in 1992 at the Rio summit. Along the way, the movement lost some direction and connection to everyday people and their lives. Climate change became this abstraction. It’s global. No one really knows how it impacts them.
For us, it’s really about helping people see themselves in the solutions and see that they actually benefit from the solutions — as opposed to things being imposed on them from faraway capitals. This is really a grassroots, community-driven approach. For us, community is sense of place, but also a sense of belonging to a group. Moms are part of a community, along with youth, doctors, nurses, people who grow food, process food, and teachers.
The fundamental guiding principle for us is that is that community-level work is essential to both the reductions in carbon emissions that we need to make at a community scale and for the public to see actual improvements in their daily lives, in their well-being. It’s an essential ingredient to getting the big changes we need at the state, national, and global levels.
For too long, it feels like the groups that got funded are the ones that have the best people to write proposals, the best fundraising team. And now, especially with the Inflation Reduction Act, there’s a real opportunity to get funding in the U.S. to communities that have real needs. From our perspective, they have a lot of innovation, a lot of creativity, a lot of thoughtfulness about what is going to serve that community best. That’s what we’re betting is a part of the solution.
The bulk of philanthropic spending on climate has gone to big green groups that focus on national and international policy solutions. Smaller community-based groups say that strategy has failed and that community groups need to be the focus. Has the strategy taken by big environmental nonprofits failed?
This is an all-hands-on-deck moment. Everyone needs to be at the table. We need the big groups. We need conservatives. We need religious community leaders. This is not a time to reject anyone’s help or support or innovation.
It’s a question of rebalancing. The current system hasn’t been there for the groups that have great ideas, the ability to move their communities, and just lacked resources. I don’t think this is about not funding some groups. For us, it’s just making sure that groups that can really move the needle, that have innovative ideas on how to do community-owned solar or how to do regenerative agriculture in schools, are brought to the table and included.
It can’t just be large groups based in Washington, D.C., that are at the table making decisions. It has to include people who have a stake in the outcome. That could be a rural farmer. That could be a school-teacher who that sees the possibility of a curriculum or a school garden or the magic of what could be done in an art class to help kids think through the changes that are being wrought around us. Our goal is to broaden the tent and not exclude folks from it.
The kind of community-based climate groups we support have been so underfunded that what you see is this cyclical excuse about these groups lacking the capacity that they need, which makes them harder to fund. That excuse, from our experience, has worn thin. There’s a lot of incredible capacity in smaller organizations that are ready to do the work. The missing ingredient has been trust, support, and investment in building that capacity.
What is Waverley Street doing beyond providing funding to help those groups?
Many of our board members, including Anne Marie Burgoyne, managing director of social innovation at the Emerson Collective, and Darren Walker, president of the Ford Foundation, are real champions and have been incredibly supportive.
Darren created the BUILD program at Ford which provides grantees with five-year grants and operational support. Anne Marie has this concept of friction-less philanthropy that informs how we think about our role as a foundation, which is to build and support capacity in these organizations, at their request. They can request services for fundraising, legal, grant writing, all the way through management and media to make them as effective as possible. Building organizational and institutional capacity is incredibly important to us. It’s not an obstacle — but an opportunity to create a stronger movement.
A lot of grant makers might struggle to understand the impact that smaller community groups can have on a big, complicated issue like climate change. Are there any grantees you can highlight?
In the last year in the U.S., most of our support of small groups has been focused on helping them obtain funding from the Inflation Reduction Act. One of those is the Justice40 Accelerator, which provides lots of small groups with technical assistance.
We gave the group $4 million, and it, in turn, helped 25 organizations to get a total of $30 million in federal funding. We gave the Just Transition Fund $4 million, and it secured $63 million in follow-on federal funding for their coalition of groups, many of which are trying to create prosperity for former coal workers and oilfield workers. This is all about people for us. We’re looking for ways we can transform people’s lives while cutting carbon emissions. That’s the holy grail for us.
We’ve done really small grants to Climate Hubs, which pair minority-serving academic institutions with their local communities. Rather than coming in with a program design of our own, we use a consultant and then work with a large group of grantees to help us walk through a learning process to figure out what would be most impactful for them.
Rather than us assuming we know what that grantee configuration should look like, we reached out and brought them all together. From that process, we funded the Deep South Center for Environmental Justice, Florida A&M University, an indigenous resilience center in Arizona, and others.
Our goal is to move from competition to deep collaboration, to learn from each other and be in solidarity with each other.
Waverley Street has a timeline. The foundation will disburse all of its funds by 2035. Why that approach? And how does that change the way you think about your giving?
When I worked in government, I oversaw the cleanup of wildfire and other really, really painful, difficult community impacts from climate change. That informs my work every day because I want to make sure we’re accountable to communities. This is not an abstract notion to them. They are suffering from wildfires, droughts, flooding, and all the horrors of climate change today. The urgency that the spend-down provides us is incredibly helpful.
It sharpens our focus. That sharpens our desire to collaborate and learn — primarily because we can’t afford to go through the motions of building a large foundation that learns everything as if it was the first time. We’re very curious. We’re very excited to engage with other people that have been doing it. It removes the sense of ego in some ways. This isn’t about Waverley. This is about the mission and the communities that we serve.
When I talk to other foundations, they say they wish they were spending down because it really allows you to plan for a 10-year horizon and focus on what’s important. For us, that is building systems, institutions, and communities that are resilient, while bringing down carbon pollution. You also realize you don’t need a lot of bells and whistles. We can be a pretty lean organization.
But there are complex tradeoffs. We want to balance immediate, high-impact results with supporting long-term, systemic change. That is an important dynamic to hold in balance. The people we hire, the focus of the board is all on today, tomorrow, this year, as opposed to a longer time horizon — because we don’t have a longer time horizon on this issue.
What did you learn in government that is helping you in your role at the foundation?
California’s EPA had a staff of 6,200 people and a $14 billion budget. It’s a behemoth. And it does amazing work. It isn’t very nimble. It’s pretty risk-averse. And there’s not a lot of creativity.
I come in with a sense of deep accountability to the communities that we serve. Realizing that we are here to serve and help people is something I take very seriously from government. We have an ability to be nimble, to take risks, to be creative, so that we can push government, which has the big dollars.
When I was in government, it felt like foundations often came in and they were excited to help pass a policy. And then everyone disappeared when it came time to actually make sure those programs were implemented, to make sure that the design was there so that low-income Californians or low-income Americans could actually benefit from those programs.
For example, utility-scale solar and wind is not being built because communities aren’t seeing the benefit to them. In government, you can’t really bring together people to think about community-benefit agreements, but that’s something that we can do. The same with things like permitting. Government is appalling at creating red tape for green projects, and we need to cut that. That is really hard to do from government.
You recently hired a director of communications and have a big vision for that role. Can you explain where communications fits into your strategy?
Climate communication in the last 30 years has been an abject failure. We have confused people. We have condescended to people. We have made it way too complicated, and we have removed it from people’s everyday lives.
That’s no accident. The fossil-fuel industry is spending hundreds of millions of dollars on misinformation. And too often, climate communications is really just the fundraising material for most nonprofits. We’re not actually doing thoughtful, intentional climate communications.
If you don’t have public will and support behind an issue as important to everyday people’s lives as climate change, we’re not going to win any of the policy battles. We’re going to become overly divided. This should not be a political issue that divides. It should be one that unites us.
Communication, for us, is all about lifting up the stories of our grantees, of giving them voice, giving them the tools to be able to effectively communicate their stories and messages.
We surveyed all of our grantees and asked them about their needs — grant writing, managerial, accounting, recruitment. The number-one thing that 93 percent of them wanted was help with communications.
What else is on your mind?
One of the portfolios that we’re creating is called Joy. When we think about climate change, everyone uses fancy big language, like it’s an existential crisis. Why is it a crisis? What does it mean to us as humans on the planet in 2024?
For us, it came down to what it means to experience life. The thing that we love about life the most is joy. There’s a lot of joy in community. There’s a lot of wonder and curiosity and community. We gave a grant to Outdoor Afro and another to Latino Outdoors to get communities into nature who normally don’t have access to nature. That is inspiring.
Why do we do the work? Why is it so important? Because life is a gift. Highlighting that gift is something that we’re really excited to do.
This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
