As the super-rich bend the knee to MAGA’s demands, the empowerment of local climate and environmental justice struggles will require grassroots funding networks to survive and continue to notch wins for their communities.
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Billionaires didn’t dally in aligning with America’s aspiring autocrat. We saw this in the many Mar-a-Lago meetings between Donald Trump and the wealthiest men in America during the liminal space from election to inauguration. We’ve seen it since in Elon Musk’s free range as an unappointed pseudo-member of Trump’s Cabinet and in Jeff Bezos’s decision to constrain what ideas can be expressed in The Washington Post’s editorials.
We’ve seen capital capitulate with major foundations changing funding priorities in the months since Trump took office. In February, Bill Gates’s Breakthrough Energy cancelled several grants to climate-focused nonprofits like the Breakthrough Institute, a climate tech-focused think tank unrelated to Gates’s foundation, and the American Center for Life Cycle Assessment, a sustainability trade group. A few weeks later, Breakthrough Energy cut staff across the organization. The profit-seeking venture capital arm of Breakthrough Energy was, of course, unaffected.
Some don’t see this as much of a tragedy, given Breakthrough Energy’s focus on techno-fixes that many label false solutions. “It makes more space for the true values-aligned people to show up in a bigger way,” said Ayanna Jolivet Mccloud, executive director of Bayou City Waterkeeper, a Houston-area environmental justice nonprofit. But the action — along with the silence of billionaires who were, only months ago, quite vocal on climate change — signals the willingness of the ultrawealthy to abandon any value that ceases to be politically expedient.
While the ruling class insists that wealth equals wisdom, this sudden about-face shows why we must deprioritize the desires of wealthy, self-anointed climate champions and instead put power directly in the hands of movement leaders who have risen from the grassroots to serve, and be accountable to, their communities.
Senowa Mize-Fox and her colleagues in the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy (NCRP), a nonprofit that seeks to hold funders accountable, have spent years thinking about what it means to resist billionaire climate solutions. Their work is dedicated to building beyond funding models that leave frontline communities without the resources to help their cities and neighborhoods reduce local pollution and contend with the effects of climate change.
Such efforts became particularly important in the early 2020s as billionaires platformed themselves as climate experts and began to influence how other large foundations made funding decisions.
Photo credit: Annie Mulligan / Bayou City Waterkeepers
In February 2020, Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos announced his intention to donate $10 billion over 10 years to advance climate action. Concerned that this would exacerbate already grave funding inequities between large environmental nonprofits and scrappy grassroots efforts, organizers across the environmental justice movement quickly came together to develop a strategy to push Bezos’s team to fund the frontlines at scale. Ultimately, they secured $141 million for movement-centric organizations that would in turn disperse those funds to some of the more than 500 grassroots organizations they represented.
It was a significant, but short-lived, win. “Frontline leaders had to fight tooth and nail to even get that much money,” Mize-Fox said. “And it was never renewed.”
Meanwhile, five different “big greens” — Environmental Defense Fund, Natural Resources Defense Council, The Nature Conservancy, World Resources Institute, and World Wildlife Fund — received a collective $500 million in grants. Environmental organizations like these already hold disproportionately more resources than grassroots groups, yet they’re often less effective at improving the resilience of local communities.
In a report published last December, the Freedom Together Foundation, a philanthropy focused on defending multiracial democracy, reviewed the impact of $1 billion they invested over 11 years to support environmental health, justice, and resilience. They found that investing in Big Greens “did not pay off as hoped.”
As a result, Freedom Together decided to focus on supporting the work of smaller, community-based groups to help them shore up their foundations and expand their work to wider areas.
Linda Saleh, executive director of the BEA Fund, an intermediary between large philanthropies, Big Greens, and place-based community organizations, has seen firsthand why it can be difficult for grassroots groups to solicit funding from deep-pocketed foundations and, on the flipside, the change that they can produce with annual budgets that might be no more than a couple hundred thousand dollars.
“They’re invisible because they are not able to speak to the types of metrics [or] show the type of impact that even allow for the door to be open,” Saleh said. “And even if the door is open to them, would they be able to meet these sort of rigid demands that traditional philanthropy would have?”
After all, such organizations often must first focus on achieving what Saleh, in a new report, called “enabling outcomes”: actions and strategies that build the organization’s and community’s capacity to achieve lasting environmental justice wins. For instance, Redeemer Community Partnerships spent over a decade organizing in Los Angeles County to shutter two sites that were drilling oil in the middle of communities of color. They intend to remediate one of the sites and redevelop it to host affordable housing, green space, and a community center.
In order to build the kind of capacity and people power it takes for frontline communities to achieve major victories like that, organizations need multiyear, general operating grants, Mize-Fox said. Organizations like the BEA Fund aim to provide that kind of support; Fund for Frontline Power (F4FP) is another, which emerged in 2021 in response to the organizing efforts around the Bezos Earth Fund.
F4FP doled out over $6 million to around 70 under-resourced organizations serving communities of color across the country. One of these organizations was Houston-based Bayou City Waterkeeper, which aims to advance policies, nature restoration, and systemic change to reduce flooding and pollution throughout the Lower Galveston Bay. The increased support from F4FP and others helped them grow their annual budget from around $330,000 in 2021 to over $1 million in 2023, which has helped them to elaborate a policy agenda and organize for water justice.
Photo credit: Bayou City Waterkeepers
Getting a more robust budget has helped Bayou City Waterkeeper to bolster what Jolivet Mccloud called the “bookends” of the organization: policy advocacy and community organizing. Long before their budget grew, Waterkeeper had filed and won lawsuits to hold the city of Houston and others accountable for damaging waterways and harming public health. Strong bookends now allow them to deepen that work and expand into new areas of action.
“It’s not enough to do just the legal work,” Jolivet Mccloud said. “The legal work has to be rooted in the needs of the community and the direct experiences of the community.”
In this moment, that community organizing will be crucial. The Clean Water Act, Clean Air Act, and National Environmental Policy Act are under threat. Foreign-born student activists who advocated against the genocidal assault on Gaza are being arrested, detained, and disappeared in an apparent dry run for more severe repressions as the Trump administration cracks down on anything deemed “woke” — that is, anything that advances social or climate justice.
To withstand these assaults, communities exposed to injustice and organizers within them will need to be well resourced, which, Jolivet Mccloud said, will take boldness on the part of philanthropies to stand by those under attack.
So it’s concerning, Saleh said, that many philanthropies are considering using artificial intelligence (AI) to guide decision-making which, due to AI’s inherent biases, could tilt the tables even further, exacerbating issues of resource distribution.
There’s no simple solution to this problem. But it will ultimately have to come from activists, advocates, and intermediaries doing what they do best: organizing. And organizing not just to hold billionaires accountable, but their circles of influence as well.
“Billionaires are only as powerful as the people who are enabling them,” Mize-Fox said. So, by using information, narratives, and power-mapping exercises to guide groups of people to the weak links in a network and applying pressure, a group of motivated individuals can trigger a cascade of changes in institutions and individuals.
This story by Syris Valentine was originally published by Deceleration and is part of Covering Climate Now, a global journalism collaboration strengthening coverage of the climate story. WhoWhatWhy has been a partner in Covering Climate Now since its inception in 2019.
