What is a grassroots climate solution?
Grassroots means coming from, led by, and accountable to the people most impacted by a problem. These community-led solutions are essential to achieving a low-carbon, equitable world. Grassroots solutions require working at a local scale that has often been considered out of reach for large, international philanthropies.
The evidence shows that these approaches ultimately yield significant climate and social outcomes aligned with the goals of global climate philanthropy. They reduce emissions, protect ecosystems, secure human rights, improve public health, and support community resilience in a changing world. These approaches often produce durable change because they strengthen democratic participation and long-term stewardship of ecosystems and resources.
How does the CLIMA Fund function fiscally?
Thousand Currents, the fiscal sponsor of the CLIMA Fund, receives and manages donations that are made in support of the CLIMA Fund on behalf of the member organizations. The CLIMA Fund is managed as a separate fund within Thousand Currents’ financial system. Thousand Currents and CLIMA Fund have agreed on a fiscal sponsor fee of 5% on grants received by the CLIMA Fund.
All funds raised for grantmaking minus the fiscal sponsor fee are divided into five equal parts. Thousand Currents disburses these monies evenly to the five CLIMA Fund members, which make grants to grassroots groups ranging from $2,000-$100,000. Each of the CLIMA Fund members may spend up to 20% of the money received on project management costs, which includes ongoing learning and evaluation; developing communications collateral (videos, blogs, etc.); accompaniment of movement partners at convenings; technical assistance; and in-person program visits, among other support.
Why did CLIMA members launch this Fund?
Recent IPCC reporting underscores the accelerating pace and escalating risks of climate change, and all the human and ecological devastation that entails. The impacts of the climate crisis have been visible for decades, from rising sea levels and eroding coastlines to the loss of ecosystems and livelihoods. These impacts are being felt first and worst by Indigenous Peoples, women, peasants, and youth, primarily in Global South countries. Philanthropies have dedicated billions of dollars to address climate change through policy and technological strategies, but emissions continue to rise.
In parallel, effective grassroots organizations and movements around the world are already advancing grassroots climate solutions, such as promoting agroecology; defending Indigenous land, water, and territories; recognizing women’s leadership and advancing gender equity; and ensuring local governance over energy systems. Less than 1% of international funding to grassroots organizations is unrestricted, highlighting how grantmaking practices continue to undermine communities’ sovereignty and self-determination.
The CLIMA Fund is our best effort to provide a strategic and efficient way for large funders to make significant investments in grassroots climate justice movements globally. We aim to continually scale our fundraising and grantmaking towards some of the most effective and impactful climate solutions that are under-resourced within climate philanthropy.
Why would I support the CLIMA Fund as a collaboration?
As five public foundations with a reach of 168 countries and 130+ years of collective experience resourcing this work, the CLIMA Fund was created to be a trusted platform for funders seeking to make transformative investments in grassroots climate justice movements. We provide an ecosystem of support to climate justice movements through our complementary grantmaking models. CLIMA Fund members provide a combination of long-term core funding, project-specific support, seed funding, and rapid-response grants to movements. Members also make grants to support leadership development, technical capacity, and movement convenings.
Through a diversity of power-sharing mechanisms, we create funding infrastructure that is accountable to movements. We support movement ecosystems advancing the most innovative and ambitious climate solutions, from Indigenous sovereignty to agroecology and community-controlled renewable energy. Our members fund complementary parts of movement infrastructure by anchoring social movements, providing seed funding for local or start-up community groups, and making rapid response grants for security or advocacy opportunities, while also implementing collaborative initiatives that open new philanthropic pathways in underfunded areas. Our program teams collaborate to connect partner organizations and strengthen our respective grantmaking models.
Together, we offer funders extensive due diligence, trusted relationships, global reach, and strategic learning infrastructure.
What’s an example of how CLIMA supports grassroots climate justice movement ecosystems?
Movement ecosystems are webs of grassroots actors working across geographies, building power and advancing systemic change. Rather than funding isolated projects, we provide long-term core support to movements that create change over decades in 168 countries. Each CLIMA member specializes in supporting and accompanying essential elements of movement ecosystems: global movement infrastructure, anchor social movements, alliances and coalitions, grassroots think tanks, seed funding for local or start-up community groups, rapid response grants for security or advocacy opportunities, and narrative and cultural organizing.
For example, in the Zambezi watershed spanning eight countries and supporting over 30 million people, we support a diversity of actors within the region to protect and restore the waterway. Our grassroots partner Justiça Ambiental (JA!) works with transboundary movement groups to resist mining and harmful dam projects such as Mphanda Nkuwa. JA! is strengthening collective governance over land and water, protecting biodiversity, and advancing sustainable livelihoods. Different actors within the movement ecosystem play complementary roles: community groups lead restoration and stewardship; grassroots networks coordinate organizing and advocacy; movement lawyers pursue strategic litigation and policy change; researchers and storytellers document ecological and cultural impacts of ecosystem restoration; and regional networks and alliances strengthen collective power across borders.
What has the CLIMA Fund achieved?
We have raised $40M+ to re-grant to grassroots movements globally and leveraged further investment from global philanthropies. Through the 25,000+ grants we have given in our collective history, we are helping nurture a more connected, empowered, and vibrant ecosystem of grassroots actors. In addition, we have produced innovative and compelling videos, webinars, workshops, convenings, and online spaces for funder dialogue (such as our Underpinning Stories dialogue series). We produced the report Soil to Sky: Climate Solutions That Work, which is used globally and across sectors as the evidence base for how grassroots climate movements mitigate emissions at scale. We also produced Soil to Sky: Climate Solutions That Transform, which provides further evidence of how grassroots movements are best positioned to drive the transitions necessary for large-scale emissions reductions.
How do you share or shift power to your grantee partners?
Each CLIMA Fund member regrants using distinct strategies to embed accountability and democracy in their grantmaking processes. For example, Global Greengrants Fund and Urgent Action Fund for Feminist Activism use networks of activist advisors to inform their grant decisions. Grassroots International and Thousand Currents employ program officers who build long-term relationships with movements. The Youth Climate Justice Fund uses a combination of open calls and advisors to make grants.
All CLIMA Fund members provide flexible funding, minimize reporting requirements, and are nimble in responding to grantee partners’ needs and requests. Our feedback structures ensure that our individual and collective work is guided by grantee partners experiencing the climate crisis first and worst. We recognize the importance of respecting the autonomy and self-determination of our grantee partners, and we strive to be thoughtful of the power differentials inherent in philanthropy that hinder transparency, trust, and accountability.
What is your fundraising goal and what will be possible if the CLIMA Fund achieves that goal?
Our goal is to raise another $35 million by 2030 to resource grassroots movements around the world advancing just, effective solutions to the climate crisis. We envision a world in which grassroots communities bolstering climate resilience and addressing the root causes of climate change have the resources they need. If climate movements have the resources they need to affect change, we will see a rapid drawdown in greenhouse gas emissions and political and social transformation towards more just and livable communities and economies.
Does the CLIMA Fund accept restricted funding?
The CLIMA Fund prefers unrestricted funding so that we can be responsive to the needs of climate justice movements globally and remain flexible in where or how we move money. We accept restricted funding above $50,000 on a case-by-case basis.
The CLIMA Fund will accept gifts or grants of cash or publicly-traded securities from individuals and foundations. In-kind gifts of benefit to the CLIMA Fund, such as the use of conference space or design services, may also be accepted. The CLIMA Fund will not accept planned gifts (bequests) or gifts of non-cash assets such as property. Learn more here.
Does the CLIMA Fund take a percentage of each grant or gift?
Our goal is to build an efficient mechanism to dramatically increase funding for climate justice movements globally. Towards that end, we take 20% to cover administration and operations. Our aim is to leverage investments in this collaborative to attract, absorb, and distribute much larger grants than any one of the CLIMA members would otherwise receive.
How do you evaluate your work?
The CLIMA Fund sees its long-term impact in the money that we mobilize from the philanthropic sector to directly resource movement organizations addressing climate change with holistic, grassroots strategies. Our Learning & Evaluation approach is informed by our collaborative’s mission and core values, including lifting up grassroots leadership. We recognize that evaluation is inherently political and not external to processes of social change.
We believe that our grassroots partners are best positioned to define what constitutes their impact. We use a mixed-methods approach, which is both results-oriented and reflexive, to evaluate ourselves against our objectives and learn from movement outcomes. Our results-oriented approach guides us to identify the extent to which we are shifting the field of philanthropy and the system as a whole, including our role within it. We recognize that climate and social change are complex and nonlinear, and therefore, we focus less on attributing outcomes to a single intervention and more on understanding how movements, networks, and philanthropy contribute to long-term systemic change.
Our reflexive approach helps us examine the assumptions, norms, and power dynamics that shape philanthropy and evaluation (i.e., definitions of success, development of indicators, and the way impact is understood). The meta questions linking all of our learning questions are: How can the CLIMA Fund improve its capacity to deliver its mission? In what ways, and with what efficacy, does the CLIMA Fund meaningfully value and support grassroots climate justice movements with their diverse, contextual needs?
How does the CLIMA Fund impact the philanthropic sector?
The CLIMA Fund expands the field of climate philanthropy by making grassroots climate justice visible, credible, and fundable at scale. Through research, convenings, and narrative strategy, we help major funders recognize movement-led approaches as essential climate solutions. We have produced evidence-based research through our communications and narrative change work that connects the dots between stories of social change and their scaled impact on climate outcomes. Our dialogue series have uplifted movement narratives and resulted in millions of dollars in funding from participants inspired to invest in grassroots climate justice solutions. Additionally, our philanthropic advocacy brings attention to power imbalances that shape philanthropy, including how to expand the definitions of success to include grassroots perspectives.
Is the CLIMA Fund a 501(c)(3)?
The CLIMA Fund is fiscally sponsored by Thousand Currents, which is a 501(c)(3) headquartered in the United States (EIN: 77-0071852).
