How funders can move from awareness and understanding to climate action
By Aditi Shah, Director of Climate Philanthropy at Impatience Earth
Anxiety, awareness, and action
Action is the most important response that the climate change crisis demands, and growing a nuanced, deep, and critical understanding of the way the climate crisis is felt across the world – the drivers and systems that have created and continue to support the degradation of our natural environment – is an extremely important first step to action.
Feeling overwhelmed and uncomfortable is a good place from which to start – good things can come once you turn these anxieties into agency and action.
There are a wide range of options available for funders to translate climate awareness and understanding into climate action. Three possible options are:
- Take an intersectional approach: Just because you want to start funding in the climate space does not mean that you must stop funding in your current focus areas. Remember that the drivers and impacts of climate change touch upon everything, from health to education to rural livelihoods. This approach involves thinking about funding at the intersection of climate and your current focus areas instead of starting from scratch.
- Unlearn and relearn: It can be useful for prospective climate funders to be exposed to learning opportunities where they get an opportunity to connect, listen, and develop relationships with a variety of experts working on climate solutions. The development of such relationships better positions funders to act due to improved understanding of the ecosystem of change in relation to their focus areas and the points of intervention where their philanthropic capital can have a powerful impact. A big part of moving to action is the growing of confidence and our processes do this well.
- Acknowledge your power in this space and build your strategy on foundations of trust and collaboration: Learning journeys provide time for reflection and learning about the ways in which philanthropy can be transformational in a truly systems change manner. This includes highlighting the need to shift power and resources through democratic grant giving processes such as participatory grant making, in addition to instilling a strong commitment to resourcing those with lived experience or with a greater proximity to the issue areas.
Consulting services can help funders to be agile and leverage their impact
When funders want to explore options on how to take climate action, working with credible and experienced consulting services could be like having an external, ‘critical friend’ who can really help with bringing in new perspectives, asking challenging questions, nudging into the desired direction, or being a sounding board. Consulting services can be transformative when it assists power and wealth holders to think critically and honestly about the ways in which they may be complicit in practices that continue to feed the climate crisis and harm the environment.
Consulting services can also play a role in facilitating learning within and across stakeholder groups. By bringing together power and wealth holders, experts, and those with lived experience, and by centering voices from the Global South, consultants can provide opportunities for funders to reflect on their practices and core assumptions about how change occurs.
Valuing the knowledge and experiences of frontline voices, which are often missed in such conversations about resource allocation in funding, is a fundamental step in deconstructing traditional funder power dynamics in which those positioned closest to wealth may regard themselves as best in deciding how to solve issues.
Multi-stakeholder engagements can build the understanding that while money is needed to, and can create change, people and communities are equally important. Opening up of networks and building relationships combined with funding can be a powerful response.
Connection, relationships, and engagement
Humans are moved into action by connection to others, and by stories of action and change to which they can relate. While an initiative such as IPASA’s Climate Crisis Toolkit and Resource Pack for Funders is important and necessary, it is not enough to address human anxieties and insecurities when it comes to funding in a new space.
To fast-track change, it is necessary to grow funders’ climate-funding confidence by learning and listening to people directly working on climate issues, to create opportunities for collaboration and information sharing about what works and what does not work in this space, and to think collectively about how we address the systemic issues that underpin the climate crisis.
A starting point for using consulting services
A firm commitment to change funding and investment practices is a good starting point that can enable consulting services, such as Impatience Earth, to curate learning journeys for funders to help them unlearn and relearn about the various intersections of climate change they are interested in. It also allows them to reflect upon and digest these learnings, so that they can feed into new and adjusted philanthropic strategies.
This work is not linear, it is often imperfect, and requires progressive change over time. It is therefore no surprise that the term “climate journey” is often used. The stories of a family foundation and a corporate foundation’s journeys in the text boxes below, illustrate how consulting services can assist funders to move from awareness and understanding to action. It is important to know that invaluable learning is derived from action. That is why getting started is the best strategy and using the help of consultants can provide the guidance and assistance funders need on their climate journeys.
A FAMILY FOUNDATION’S JOURNEY
A private family foundation was connected to Impatience Earth through one of our partners. They had never funded in the climate space before and had historically focused on young people, education, and nutrition. The Chair of their Board attended one of our group workshops that covers the basics of climate change, the intersection of climate change and social change, and provides an overview of the climate philanthropy ecosystem.
On the back of the workshop, this family foundation became a client, who benefited from a three-month process which took them from an initial understanding and interest in climate action, to identifying the specific issue areas they were interested in funding. Through a series of meetings with experts and other funders in the space, the client identified peatland restoration, freshwater, and ocean conservation as their strategic focus areas. The client decided to make several grants to organisations working on peatland restoration projects. They have since become a signatory of the Funders’ Commitment on Climate Change.
A CORPORATE FOUNDATION’S JOURNEY
The foundation arm of a UK supermarket wanted to launch a fund that focused on removing carbon from food and farming supply chains. As part of their learning journey, Impatience Earth connected this foundation to experts who assisted them in understanding the biggest drivers of carbon emissions in the food value chain from seed to table, and then helped them to whittle down key focus areas within those drivers and guide them on what lenses to apply.
For example, this fund’s ʻNorthstarʼ was carbon reduction in food and farming, one of the ʻdriversʼ was land use, and through conversations with experts, it was decided to use the lens of community and diversity. As a result, when they were assessing applications, they could, for example, be looking at whether a project is:
- focusing on improving how land is used; and/or
- reducing carbon emissions; and/or
- providing potential access to land to marginalised communities or providing food at an affordable price point to low-income communities or improving access to healthy foods.
This foundation started their journey feeling a little overwhelmed about the size of the problem and saw technology as one of the key forms of innovation. Through the conversations with experts and other funders in the space, they were able to step back and really narrow down on their focus areas, to bring in a justice angle to their assessment criteria, and get an insight into the sheer number of great ideas that go unfunded or underfunded in this space.