Drawing on the fortunes of some of the world’s wealthiest people, the billionaire funding collaborative known as The Audacious Project can easily transform the fates of its awardees. Take Canopy, a Vancouver-based nonprofit that works to make supply chains for products like paper more sustainable.
Canopy had a roughly $4 million budget last fiscal year. The largest grant it had ever received was a five-year, $5 million grant from Laudes Foundation. But this April, Audacious donors announced they would to give the operation $60 million over the next six years.
“It’s a game changer for us. Canopy’s always prided ourselves on punching above our weight,” said Nicole Rycroft, the organization’s founder and executive director. “But this certainly moves us up a weight division, or maybe even two.”
With what is still a mid-level budget and low name recognition, Canopy is hardly one of the “big greens” — the well-resourced donor favorites that have historically drawn the bulk of environmental funding, to the exclusion of others. Its Cinderella story resembles what we’ve heard from the many once-small outfits who’ve received similarly “game-changing” funding from MacKenzie Scott, who is also an Audacious donor. If we’re to preserve a habitable planet, we’ll need a lot of Canopy-like groups to succeed.
At the same time, Canopy fits the typical profile that the Forbes-level donors mobilized by Audacious have long favored over all others: an environmental mission pursued via market and technological interventions by organizations headquartered in North America or Europe.
That is no knock on Canopy, nor its fellow recipients. Its work to stop deforestation is critical to the wickedly complex task of decarbonization, and other Audacious grantees are pursuing similarly vital goals. The question is, what will it mean for the future of the climate movement — and more importantly, our chances of averting the worst impacts of climate change — if some of the world’s biggest funders continue to put nearly all their climate dollars into that type of change?
Audacious, a megadonor giving platform launched by the talks group TED, is an influential force in billionaire philanthropy whose environmental giving, by my math, would have ranked among the top five green grantmakers in 2021. Here’s what I think its funding so far suggests.
What does Audacious fund on climate?
Audacious is not specifically focused on climate change, nor on any single issue, for that matter. Yet in recent years, its giving for climate and environmental causes outweighs all others. By my count, such awardees accounted for five of the 10 recipients announced this May and four of nine in the last Audacious cohort. (Audacious itself labels 26% of its past projects “climate solutions,” with some of those I’ve included falling into other categories, such as “breakthrough science” or “tech for change.”)
Nor does Audacious prefer any particular strategy, just a big dream backed by a solid track record. But within its climate and environmental funding, most of its winners focus on technological and market-based approaches. My tally is that four out of five projects this year and three of four of the prior cohort fall into such a group, whether the topic is gene editing, satellite monitoring, electric vehicles or mobile finance.
This binary — tech and market-based versus movement and grassroots mobilization — is, of course, an oversimplification, and many groups do not fit neatly under one label or the other, and sometimes include forms of community participation. For instance, there are recipients that exemplify the power of technology to empower communities, like MyAgro, which uses mobile technology to let smallholder farmers purchase seeds and other needs on layaway.
Many of the Audacious climate and environment recipients also follow an established pattern in this field: multi-year, multimillion-dollar flexible support overwhelmingly goes to a small cohort of well-known groups. Examples include the Woodwell Climate Research Center (a 2022 recipient), the Nature Conservancy (2019) and the Environmental Defense Fund (2018). Such “big green” groups employ brilliant people doing invaluable work, yet they also came to their present prominence in an era when historic inequities limited who had access to funding to an even greater degree than today, and tend to focus on the types of change I’ve outlined.
Other mega-grantmakers have relied on regrantors to reach the kinds of small organizations that are not suited for big bet-sized awards, and Audacious has also sent major checks to intermediaries. Yet Audacious’ choices to date suggest there are limits to the types of funds that can win their nod.
For instance, one 2023 awardee is the European Climate Foundation (amount not disclosed) for its ReNew2030 coalition, a new campaign that aims to build out national campaigns around the world to accelerate the power sector’s shift to renewable energy. The choice marked the second consecutive Audacious cohort in which one of the constellation of national and international climate regrantors that were launched in the early years of ClimateWorks Foundation received support for a recently formalized campaign. In 2021, Audacious donors made a five-year, $300 million commitment to the ClimateWorks-hosted Drive Electric campaign.
By Audacious’ own account, its most grassroots-oriented climate award of 2023 is an effort to accelerate the well-respected and locally led African Forest Landscape Restoration Initiative, known as AFR100, which aims to restore 100 million acres by 2030. However, the money will go to the Washington, D.C.-based funder-favorite World Resources Institute ($100 million over four years), to launch a campaign called Restore Local to expand locally led projects.
“I really don’t think that that’s what drives this community”
It seems predictable that a group of donors whose billions have sprung from pioneering technologies and playing the markets — as I covered in my recent profile of Audacious — would be drawn to technological and market-based solutions, particularly in addressing climate change. However, Audacious Executive Director Anna Verghese does not consider such factors a dominating concern for the project and its donors.
“There’s definitely appreciation for how technology can influence and support social change, but I really don’t think that that’s what drives this community at this point,” she said. “We really do determine those goals, what we want to focus on. It’s incredibly important for us to have a real mix.”
Yet Verghese acknowledges the techie factor has at least some influence. “Breakthrough science always is really important — maybe that’s actually something that is kind of influenced by the tech community,” she said.
Eshanthi Ranasinghe, managing director of discovery and insight at Audacious, acknowledged that it’s “just natural” for donors’ backgrounds to influence their choices. But she emphasized that her team is not just looking around for the hottest, most apparently scalable technology when choosing organizations.
“We actually look at it as, ‘What has impact? And how does it impact communities in particular, first?’” said Ranasinghe, who oversees the selection process. The team sees technology as a powerful tool, but one to be balanced with other considerations, particularly equity. “If you go tool-first in funding, it’s very easy to actually completely ignore all of the other parts of that problem and opportunity,” she said.
To some in the field, it’s a matter of roles. Heather Grady, who leads environment and climate change work at Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors, praised Audacious’ funding choices, mentioning Canopy and past recipients like the Tenure Facility, an Indigenous land rights organization.
Echoing a long-running point in the environmental movement, she believes more philanthropic dollars should go to front-line and grassroots groups. She suggested other groups can play that role, such as Global Greengrants Fund and her own organization.
“‘Big bets’ funding almost inevitably goes to big organizations, and I think generally smaller, local organizations need and deserve a bigger proportion of climate funding,” Grady said via email. “It’s a different but equally important approach.”
Poised for change?
Audacious has built a remarkable machine for bringing together megadonors around exciting and ambitious ideas. Yet if the billionaires who write the checks, and the team that selects the groups from which they choose, do not widen their aperture, the dollars they command seem likely to reinforce an environmental movement status quo shaped by historical disparities.
Market-based and technocratic approaches have long held a funding advantage over local and movement-oriented groups, which not only perpetuates historical racial inequities, but has repeatedly been called a strategic blunder that has limited the climate movement’s popular power. In short, there’s a risk that Audacious and its donors will contribute to a future when the landscape of nonprofit power in the climate field is all but unchanged from the present, to the detriment of the cause.
Yet Audacious’ track record — giving multi-year, general support, backing founders with lived experience — suggests it could help lead that shift among megadonors. And change may already be in the air.
“Our selection criteria is evolving in concert with our growth as an organization and more nuanced understanding of the issues,” said Ranasinghe in a follow-up email. “With each cohort, we refine our approach and anticipate this will be an ongoing process as we strive to uplift solutions with the maximum potential for systems change.”
Over at Canopy, Rycroft has high praise for Audacious and its model of presenting deep-pocketed donors with clear choices between well-vetted organizations. “We need more of it,” she said. But asked about Audacious’ role in larger funding trends in climate, she stressed that both philanthropists and environmental nonprofit leaders like herself need to grapple with the gaping difference in support for larger organizations versus frontline organizations, particularly in the corners of the world where such investments have rarely reached.
As Rycroft has grown Canopy from a $50,000 operation into an Audacious award winner, she has seen many major grant announcements from across the climate philanthropy space to “huge international NGOs” that leave her with a recurring sense of incredulity.
“Why was that the investment made?” she said. “They’re not better positioned to do that work than us, or 15 other organizations that I could name off the top of my head, including local ones.”
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