You may have heard that a few things happened in New York two weeks ago.
“Climate Week” may still exist as a branded phrase — The Climate Group organizes the lion’s share of events under its Climate Week NYC banner — but it increasingly seems like the seven-plus days are the climate movement’s everything festival, with attractions including dull (or worse) corporate panels to the eco-drag queen Pattie Gonia to alternative events like the People’s Climate Week. There is also what feels like a year’s worth of philanthropic announcements.
I covered most of the biggest numbers last week, but those were only a few drops from the firehose of press releases. It’s such a busy week that some pledges that might get people talking at any other point in the year go practically under the radar.
For instance, Steve and Connie Ballmer, who will soon celebrate their one-year anniversary as climate funders, committed $175 million to Cincinnati-based economic mobility nonprofit StriveTogether through their Ballmer Group LLC. Strive Together calls it the largest investment in the organization’s history. Could the couple, or their son, who runs Ballmer Group’s climate initiative, also send some money to the dozen-plus funds also working at the intersection between climate and economic empowerment?
Here’s what else caught my attention over the past few weeks.
Community foundations getting together to talk climate
While covering the launch of the BuildUS Fund last week, which wants to help steer federal investments in a worker- and climate-friendly direction, I heard plenty of skepticism about major philanthropies starting yet another funder group, echoing the confusion and sense of overload many grantees have shared with me. But there are certain networks that still seem dearly needed, such as the newly launched Community Foundation Climate Collaborative.
Forty community foundations from across the country — from the $2.9 billion New York Community Trust (which provided seed funding) to the Spokane, Washington-based Innovia Foundation — officially announced the collaborative ahead of Climate Week. In an era of ever-more-frequent climate catastrophes, community foundations see the damages firsthand. As I’ve covered in the past, hurricanes, fires and other disasters have led many of them to establish climate-related programs. The Greater New Orleans Community Foundation (another member of the new collaobrative) even created a network, When Waters Rise, that feels like a precursor to this one.
This new collaborative can be a force multiplier for these foundations. Many community foundations do not have the budget for a climate officer, and if they do, it’s often a solo job. Now they can share tips specific to their work. It also comes, as everything does these days, amid a once-in-a-generation gusher of federal funding available to communities across the country. Hopefully, this group will help the communities represented pull in some of that money.
A $100 million Indigenous fund to “repair our relationship with the Earth”
As with the community foundation collaborative, the launch of one more fund makes my head spin a bit, but there’s still every reason to root for the Indigenous Climate and Just Transition Fund. Launched during Climate Week, it’s the brainchild of the South Dakota-based NDN Collective, which has won support of philanthropies small and large — for instance, a $12 million commitment from the Bezos Earth Fund.
The new fund aspires to raise and distribute $100 million for Indigenous frontline organizations, which would — numerically or morally — be just a first step toward closing a profound funding gap. Native communities get only 0.4% of philanthropic funding from large U.S. foundations, according to a study by Native Americans in Philanthropy and Candid.
Native Americans in Philanthropy, by the way, has launched its own regranting efforts around federal legislation. But with trillions in public and private funding expected to be unleashed thanks to the Inflation Reduction Act and other federal bills, successful leverage by this new fund and its peers could help Indigenous advocates take a few more steps toward equity.
Major philanthropies issue “first of its kind” call for climate resilience
Late last week, the White House released its first-ever National Climate Resilience Framework. Four well-known climate philanthropies — the Kresge Foundation, the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, the David and Lucile Packard Foundation and the Walton Family Foundation — followed with what they called a “first of its kind” philanthropic pledge to support climate resilience.
Strangely, for a group of multibillion-dollar institutions that exist to give away money, there’s hardly a dollar sign in the announcement. There’s a pledge to “map” what is already happening and to mobilize “new philanthropic commitments to address funding gaps.” But how much and when? The only commitment in the piece is in a quote from Roger Kim, president of the regrantor Climate and Clean Energy Equity Fund, near the bottom of the announcement, about his group’s $30 million Equitable Federal Implementation Fund. The funders, however, don’t have a figure to share, at least not yet. “Much of this work will be integrated into ongoing initiatives, such as the Equity Fund,” said a spokesperson in a statement. “It is too soon to speculate on specific investments that this initiative will yield.”
It nevertheless seems worth paying attention to what happens next. A flood of recent disasters has made ever more apparent the need for resilience (or, as some still call it, adaptation). Back at the dawn of modern climate philanthropy, Packard and others chose to focus scarce resources on mitigation, rather than also funding resilience, in part to avoid implicitly reinforcing the “we just need to live with it” denialism coming from oil companies and some politicians. Yet pledgers like Kresge and others like Rockefeller have long been funding in this area. Others tried to jump-start government-funded loss-and-damage funds a couple years ago. Maybe this will spark more support?
Will they put lipstick on the Mona Lisa?
I wonder if anyone at L’Oréal, the cosmetics giant, did a Google search before last week’s launch of their new 15-million-euro Climate Emergency Fund. There is already a regrantor by that name, whose relaunch I covered in 2021, and which scarcely goes a few days without its activists and director, Margaret Klein Salamon, landing in the news. That’s what happens when you, for instance, throw tomato soup on Van Gogh’s Sunflowers. Not the type of outfit you’d think a $210 billion company would want to risk being confused with.
Then again, maybe that’s better than being associated with greenwashing. L’Oréal was slapped with that label back in 2015, when it sponsored the landmark Paris Climate Summit. Flash forward to today, and it’s listed by Greenwash.com for “misleading branding.” Yet it’s one of about 330 companies rated triple A — on climate, forests and water security — by CDP, formerly the Carbon Disclosure Project. It has also signed onto a commitment to a circular economy led by the U.K.-based Ellen MacArthur Foundation, along with the United Nations, though a 2021 report shows L’Oréal is still a long way from the 2025 targets set by that pledge. Take your own measure.
This is not the company’s first venture into climate philanthropy. Based on its own tally, it has committed 200 million euros via funds focused on “nature regeneration,” “circular innovation” and women. Its latest fund has kicked off with grants to the Solutions Project, one of the largest grassroots regrantors in the U.S., and Start Network, a global network of more than 80 humanitarian nonprofits. No word yet on whether L’Oréal will be supporting the original Climate Emergency Fund.
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