Starting in 2014, what has been called the “worst example of environmental injustice in recent United States history” occurred in Flint, Michigan, a predominantly Black community that is home to about 100,000 residents. The high lead levels in the city’s drinking water caused severe health effects, including a suspected Legionnaires’ disease outbreak. Nearly a decade later, it remains one of the most visible and notorious examples of environmental injustice this century. The water crisis caused the children of Flint, who suffered the greatest risk of irreversible health outcomes, to lose teeth and score low in reading tests due to lead’s neurotoxins. High lead levels pose a lingering threat to the brain and nervous system, including stunted growth and development, learning and behavioral problems, hearing and speech challenges, and the increased possibility of developing Alzheimer’s disease.

Environmental justice and civil rights advocates maintain that policy makers, government leaders, and other high-level decision makers failed Flint by their actions before the crisis and inaction afterward. Advocates argue that implicit bias and systemic racism in Flint created the environment for prolonging the crisis. Though there were charges against government officials deemed responsible, including former Michigan governor Rick Snyder, there was only one minor conviction, and all other charges were dismissed or dropped. It took several years to excavate water service lines and replace 10,059 lead pipes. Overall, the Flint water crisis claimed the lives of at least 12 people and sickened dozens more.

The crisis in Flint is just one of many incidences of environmental racism affecting BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and people of color) communities, and injustices like these and the Standing Rock Sioux and other tribes’ fight against the Dakota Access Pipeline existed long before the current environmental justice movement began.

Today, the fight continues with environmental justice organizations and BIPOC communities working to secure passage of the Environmental Justice for All Act, which would allow more intensive community input into the siting of fossil fuel projects, advocacy for more green jobs designed for clean energy-related employment, and engagement in land-use disputes due to the concerns environmental justice and Indigenous activists have about what the surge in clean energy development means for their communities.

Since the burden of environmental disasters and climate change disproportionately affects low-income communities of color—from extreme weather damage that creates funding gaps in low-income communities to their locations being closer to pollution and underrepresentation in elected office—nonprofit officials grapple with how philanthropy should work to dismantle structural racism in environmental causes.

Root causes of environmental injustice

According to the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation, the environmental justice movement began in earnest in the 1980s to counter discriminatory environmental practices such as toxic dumping, municipal waste facility siting, and land use decisions that impacted communities of color negatively. However, its origins can be traced to the Civil Rights and environmental movements of the 1960s. Activists fought against environmental attacks on their civil rights, citing threats from hazardous waste amid other toxic chemicals in low-income communities of color.

“[I]t was not the government that connected the dots on environmental justice in 1980,” said Rural Beacon Initiatives founder and CEO William Barber III. “It was citizen science through the United Church of Christ and the Toxic Waste and Race study that, for the first time, used data collected by citizen scientists to link disproportionate exposures to polluting facilities and racial demographics, showing these disparate trends. And if we honor that, we must recognize and listen to communities in the same way, even in the modern day.”

In the 1979 lawsuit Bean v. Southwestern Waste Management Corporation, African American homeowners and community members in Houston sought to keep the Whispering Pines Sanitary Landfill from being placed within 1,500 feet of a school. They lost, but it was the first lawsuit in U.S. history to allege environmental discrimination in waste facility siting under civil rights laws. In April 1983, a nonviolent sit-in protest against a polychlorinated biphenyl (PCB) landfill in Warren County, North Carolina, resulted in the arrests of more than 500 environmentalists and civil rights activists who sought to halt construction of the landfill. The activists contended that the location was selected because of the impoverished minority population living there. This event, which captured national attention, has been cited as the catalyst of the environmental justice movement.

Earlier this month, the U.S. Department of Justice announced that the Alabama Department of Public Health in Lowndes County had agreed to take significant steps to address a sanitation crisis that had plagued the predominantly Black, low-income communities in the county for generations. It was the first time the justice department had secured a resolution agreement in an environmental justice investigation under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. “And while this may be the first, it certainly won’t be our last,” said Kristen Clarke, assistant attorney general, civil rights division, said during a press conference.

“The environmental movement is not new,” said Barber, “and social justice activism is intertwined with the fight for environmental justice....James Farmer, Jr., who was the founder of the Congress on Racial Equality, said, ‘At the height of the Civil Rights Movement, whatever we hoped to accomplish in the movement for civil rights would be for nothing if we did not save the environment, because we would all know the equality of extinction’. His quote encapsulates a critical reality: this climate movement intersects with every social justice issue [we] are concerned about. When you talk about the impacts of the climate crisis, it intersects and compounds issues of racial injustice. It intersects and compounds issues of economic justice. It intersects and compounds issues of gender equality and democratic access. When we talk about this crisis, it is directly intertwined with every social issue.”

In 1983, Robert Bullard conducted a pioneering study, Solid Waste Sites and the Black Houston Community, which documented the location of Houston’s municipal waste disposal facilities and was the first comprehensive account of environmental racism in the U.S. It concluded that unequal social, economic, and political power relationships made low-income communities and communities of color—including Latinos, African Americans, Asian Americans, and Native Americans—disproportionately more vulnerable to health and environmental threats than their white counterparts. Subsequent studies confirmed what environmental justice advocates knew from experience to be true—that race and ethnicity were determining factors in deciding where to place waste facilities, landfills, and other environmental hazards.

Now known as the “Father of Environmental Justice,” Bullard currently at Texas Southern University and serves on the White House Environmental Justice Advisory Council. In an essay for the recently released State of Black America report from the National Urban League, he wrote that “America is segregated, and so is pollution.”

“In 46 states, people of color live with more air pollution than whites. African Americans are exposed to 1.54 times more fine particulate matter than whites. Hispanics are exposed to 1.2 times,”  he wrote. “Residents in racially segregated neighborhoods breathe in air that’s three times more toxic than residents living in communities with a low degree of racial housing segregation. People of color households breathe in more pollution than they cause. Black Americans and Latinos breathe in 56 percent and 63 percent, respectively, more pollution than they cause—while White Americans breathe 17 percent less air pollution than they cause.”

But preparation is not so easy for impoverished communities. “When we look at these outcomes and these disproportionate exposures, the environmental and climate movement, more generally, must acknowledge that these communities did not become disproportionately exposed just by happenstance,” said Barber. “It is not because communities of color and poor communities are destined to be impacted or are destined to live in impacted areas. It is because of deep forms of social disparity that we as a society have unfortunately perfected over the course of history, and we have to talk about it, not be bound by it.”

In 2022, Candid released Centering equity and justice in climate philanthropy (87 pages, PDF), which details how incorporating a climate justice lens is vital to addressing climate change. The report includes a definition of environmental justice as a movement that “focuses on the root causes of the climate crisis through an intersectional lens of racism, classism, economic injustice, and environmental harm.” Environmental justice—of which climate justice is a subset that calls attention to the impacts of climate change on vulnerable populations—is intended to make systemic changes that address unequal burdens to communities and realign the economy with natural systems. To that end, environmental justice means all people “have the right to access and obtain the resources needed to have an equal chance of survival and freedom from discrimination.” Advocates work from the grassroots up to create solutions that ensure the “right of all people to live, learn, work, play, and pray in safe, healthy, and clean environments.” 

According to the report, the frontline communities in the U.S. that experience the most immediate and worst impacts of climate change include Black and Latinx communities, Indigenous peoples, immigrants, migrants fleeing climate disasters, people with disabilities, people living in poverty, rural communities, women and girls, and youth. Racial Disparities in Climate Change-Related Health Effects in the United States, a 2022 report from the National Institute of Health’s National Library of Medicine, discussed “multiple studies of heat, extreme cold, hurricanes, flooding, and wildfires as evidence that people of color, including Black, Latinx, Native American, Pacific Islander, and Asian communities were at higher risk of climate-related health impacts than Whites,” and “that studies of adults found evidence of racial disparities related to climatic changes with respect to mortality, respiratory and cardiovascular disease, mental health, and heat-related illness.” Children were the most vulnerable to the health impacts of climate change, with infants and children of color experiencing “adverse perinatal outcomes, occupational heat stress, and increases in emergency department visits associated with extreme weather.”

“This disparity is significant, particularly now when faced with the threats of extreme weather events, when you think about the legacy of our communities and our communities having to deal for generations with extraction, with policing, with ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] raids, underemployment, with the kind of racism that has impacted every aspect of our lives, including our health and health disparities,” said UPROSE executive director Elizabeth Yeampierre, who also serves as board co-chair of the Climate Justice Alliance. “[T]he solutions to address climate change, whether it’s climate adaptation mitigation, whether it’s food sovereignty, renewable energy, whether it’s passing legislation, those solutions are being led by frontline communities, by the very people least responsible for creating climate change, those who have had to endure a legacy of extraction and human rights abuses. These are the people who are leading and who are transforming the landscape. So, it begs the question: Why aren’t we being funded in the way that we deserve? And why is all the funding going to white-led organizations that have not been as impactful as our organizations have despite years of receiving millions of dollars and having the capacity we don’t have on the ground?”

Grassroots efforts expand

Long before environmental justice became a topic for academic research, however, grassroots organizations were motivated to address what they saw on the ground in communities. In 1988, the West Harlem Environmental Action or WE ACT organization was founded. It was New York’s first environmental justice organization created to improve environmental and health quality in communities of color. In 1990, the Indigenous Environmental Network was formed by grassroots Indigenous individuals to address environmental and economic justice issues by working to build economically sustainable communities. The Southwest Network for Environmental and Economic Justice, founded in 1990, is a regional organization of African Americans, Latinos, Native Americans, and Asian Americans/Pacific Islanders that works to strengthen local organizations and empower communities and workers to impact local, state, regional, national, and international policy on environmental and economic justice issues. The movement has only grown since then.

“In terms of impact, BIPOC-led power-building groups are the driving force behind some of the most expansive climate policies and wins in the country,” said Abdul Dosunmu, campaign manager of Donors of Color Network’s (DOCN) Climate Funders Justice Pledge (CFJP). “Think of the New Jersey and California environmental justice laws that preceded [president] Biden’s Justice40 initiative or the work led by movement organizations to stop the Dakota Access Pipeline. Imagine the possibilities if we funded that work at scale.”

In “There Is No Climate Justice Without Racial Justice,” an op-ed for Time magazine, David Lammy, a member of the Labour Party and parliamentary representative for Tottenham in North London, and Manish Bapna, president and CEO of the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), discuss how climate justice and racial justice must be inextricably linked for the efforts to succeed. They argue that, too often, Black and brown communities end up suffering the worst since people of color are often in the lowest-paid jobs and thereby forced into the cheapest housing in communities closest to pollution and hazardous waste sites, as detailed in Toxic Waste and Race, In the United States, a 1987 report from the Commission for Racial Justice on the matter.

Lammy and Bapna implore racial justice and climate communities to come together. To do that, they argue, there should be active support for boosting the visibility and empowerment of people of color, especially in boardrooms and cabinets, multilateral institutions, and the media discussing these issues. They agree that remaining “color blind” in response to the climate crisis enables the same systems that began the crisis to continue unabated. In their view, the first step is acknowledging that climate change may be colonialism’s natural conclusion, but that means taking steps toward meaningful action on racial equity and climate change.

“You cannot talk about climate change without talking about race,” said Yeampierre. “People who want to silo climate are the same ones who want to drive solutions that the fossil fuel industry is pushing....And so for them, because they’re not thinking, they’re not centering humanity in the solutions; they are centering profits. They are centering expediency and moving quickly and quick fixes, techno-fixes, and geoengineering. That process is the same process that got us to where we are right now. Everything from where highways were built to where there are power plants and waste transfer stations was expediency that served other people. That was the same process they’re using now, and that will not get us to where we need to go.”

DOCN, a cross-racial community of donors and movement leaders committed to building the collective power of people of color to achieve racial equity, recently announced that the CFJP is increasing its funding baseline for BIPOC-led justice groups to $120 million over two years. According to a ClimateWorks Foundation report, only 1.3 percent of environmental and climate-related philanthropic giving in the U.S. supports BIPOC-led environmental justice organizations.

Indeed, the scale of other environmental justice initiatives remains relatively small. For example, other recent partnerships include the New York City Environmental Justice Alliance (NYC-EJA) working with the City University of New York (CUNY) to accelerate climate solutions led by those on the front lines of climate breakdown with a $4 million gift from the Waverley Street Foundation, and the Weingart Foundation has provided support for environmental justice among its racial equity funding to the OC Environmental Justice Fund and People’s Collective for Environmental Justice.

According to Candid data, “Most philanthropic climate change mitigation funding stays in the Global North promoting top-down approaches.” In addition, based on data collected by Candid as of this reporting, since FY 2019, approximately 1,700 U.S.-based organizations have received around $1.3 billion in funding for environmental justice. However, we expect these numbers to increase; due to time lags in reporting, data collection for more recent years is ongoing and incomplete. Funding for climate change as a singular issue totals $5.2 billion to more than 2,500 U.S.-based recipients. The top non-governmental funders for environmental justice are the Bezos Earth Fund, Foundation for the Carolinas, MacKenzie Scott, Bloomberg Philanthropies, and the JPB, John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur, William and Flora Hewlett, Kresge, Libra, and Kataly foundations.

As noted in the Centering equity and justice in climate philanthropy report, climate funding has historically supported the “Big Greens” (e.g.,Greenpeace, the Environmental Defense Fund, the Nature Conservancy, and the Sierra Club) based in the Global North with white-dominant leadership and staff that are disconnected from frontline communities and their demands. In addition, philanthropy’s standard operating practices—include “burdensome application processes, minimum requirements for organizational budgets, unequal access by groups that are not part of the funders’ socioeconomic networks, language barriers, and implicit biases”—often leave grassroots organizations, whether they are in the U.S. or the Global South, missing from grantmaking dockets and further undermine justice and equity-focused efforts.

“Think about the role that philanthropy must play,” said Barber, “and understand that these funding gaps have existed and have persisted in even what we deem ‘fundable projects’ and ‘fundable organizations.’...[B]ecause of the trends of disparate funding, too often, solutions for communities by communities have not received the same level of support because they don’t necessarily align with the existing metrics of impact.”

To that point, grassroots solutions to the climate crisis by those on the ground are often dismissed for being too slow to address the problem’s urgency or lacking scale. Funders are often looking for a “silver bullet” approach, which directs focus on short-term interventions that ultimately do little to mitigate permanent effects and can have adverse impacts on communities that are not part of the planning process. These are referred to as “false solutions” that address the symptoms of the climate crisis instead of its root causes.

“The gross inequity in who receives funding represents the unfortunate reality that philanthropy does not yet fully believe that resourcing BIPOC-led justice groups is a winning climate strategy. That’s an egregious error, and they are dead wrong. We know that those closest to the problems are often closest to the solutions, and communities of color have long been at the frontlines of the climate crisis,” said Dosunmu.

“Less than 2 percent of all environmental and climate funding goes to environmental justice and BIPOC-led organizations. These groups have been holding the line on the front lines of climate and environmental impact but are, historically, not just underfunded but non-funded,” said Barber. “We’re talking about a trickle here, and yet they still have been doing incredible work of nationwide significance simply on the strength of their commitment to the cause. So, there’s a reparative nature that philanthropy must first embrace. How do they understand their role in making the advocacy of community-based frontline organizations harder under the guise of perceived support when they could have been doing more? That’s a question I think philanthropy has to wrestle with.”

Misalignments in funding for environmental justice

In the 2020 report Environmental Justice and Philanthropy: Challenges and Opportunities for Alignment(42 pages, PDF) from Building Equity and Alignment for Impact and the Tishman Environment and Design Center at the New School, leaders in environmental justice and the philanthropic sector discuss areas of funding misalignment. Environmental justice organizations cited access to information, processes, and guidelines, as well as limited transparency in the philanthropic sector, as elements leading to limited decision-making power and trust building.

“You can’t improve what you can’t measure,” said DOCN’s Dosunmu. “Transparency ensures you can measure funding progress to hold foundations accountable. For too long, philanthropy has made grant decisions behind closed doors, and it’s a massive reason why foundations have been able to get away with such inequitable funding. Our [Climate Funders Justice Pledge] $100 million-plus funding baseline is proof that sunlight is the best disinfectant.”

Environmental Justice and Philanthropy also identified capacity at environmental justice organizations as a barrier to funding, since philanthropy perceives “limited staffing capacity for establishing trusting relationships with many dispersed environmental justice organizations.”

Yeampierre argues that philanthropic funders don’t quite trust BIPOC-led grassroots organizations. “The standards and the processes they put in place make it challenging for us to access the resources,” she said. “Often, some of these resources are only available to organizations with the capacity to have a developer, a human relations team, etc. The kind of organizational systems to manage those dollars have never given us an opportunity to build that capacity.”

“Philanthropic organizations must look in the mirror and hold themselves more accountable for the outcomes they seek to create,” said Dosunmu. “They must make a genuine effort to ensure the perspective of BIPOC-led groups has a real influence on their grantmaking process and decisions. If every foundation worked to dismantle its own internal structures of bias and racism, we would be making more progress than we have to date.”

Barber suggests that funders should improve their internal structures, leadership, and staff with more diverse leaders and include more community participation. “Those who know best are on the ground. It’s about leaning into the fact that communities have the expertise and know how to get projects done, and they know who exists in these areas and who and what networks to tap into. They know the needs of communities,” he said.

How funders apply justice in their work

In 2019, the McKnight Foundation, a Minnesota-based family foundation, chose to focus on the climate crisis and racial equity as two of society’s most urgent challenges. “We doubled the funding for our Midwest Climate and Energy program from $16 million to $32 million a year and added a Vibrant and Equitable Communities program with $32 million a year focused on building shared power, prosperity, and participation,” said Sarah Christiansen, director of the foundation’s Midwest Climate & Energy Program. “The climate program also recently announced a refined goal and sharpened strategic pathways to more fully reflect our commitment to equity.”

In 2022, the foundation announced a series of changes to grantmaking across its programs to reduce the administrative and financial burden on grantseekers so they can more fully focus on their mission-driven work.

According to Christiansen, McKnight is working to change its grantmaking by creating a more equitable, streamlined, and flexible process for its grantees. “In this context, ‘equitable’ means making our grantmaking process more inclusive and accessible to all existing and prospective partners, particularly those with outsized potential for impact, so that every organization has a fair, consistent experience when applying for a grant and interacting with McKnight,” she said.

“We instituted rolling deadlines, one-step and simpler applications, and a three-month turnaround for grant decisions. This expanded on our common practices of providing general operating funds where appropriate and building long-term partnerships. In the case of the Midwest Climate and Energy program, we also recently opened up our grantmaking in Minnesota, Iowa, and Wisconsin to provide added transparency. We know that equity in grantmaking is ultimately a matter of respect and trust. How a funder designs its grantmaking processes and systems is one way to redefine the power balance and forge a true partnership.”

Christiansen said that for too long climate funders have perpetuated a narrative of choosing between moving fast to address the climate crisis on one hand and supporting the leadership of impacted communities on the other hand. “The result is that many climate funders focused solely on technocratic fixes and greenhouse gas reductions [that] miss supporting Black, Indigenous, and people of color-led environmental justice groups and other emerging leaders who are doing incredible work in our communities. McKnight and the Midwest Climate and Energy Program are committed to disrupting that narrative.”

With climate change and racial equity serving as throughlines in all the foundation does, McKnight is focusing on increasing support for environmental and climate justice movement leaders while widening the community of stakeholders interested in fighting climate change—and doing so with respect. “We seek to create new opportunities for communities while honoring their existing needs,” said Christiansen. “And by doing so, we are tackling the climate challenge while also building our democracy, strengthening civic engagement, and making space for conversations around equity.”

For example, in 2019 McKnight joined the Minneapolis Foundation and the City of Minneapolis in creating the Climate Action and Racial Equity Fund to drive local action on climate change in diverse communities. “This partnership allows our place-based foundations to be even more proximate to community-driven initiatives at the intersection of climate and equity,” she said. “Five years in, the fund has been an incredible way for us to invest in the leadership and creativity of local environmental justice leaders, learn alongside them, and adapt to evolving community needs.”

In addition, McKnight is working with grassroots and frontline organizations such as COPAL, Unidos MN, MN350, Community Power, Sabathani Community Center, Hmong American Farmers Association, Black Appalachian Coalition, Community Action Network, Community Members for Environmental Justice, Midwest Environmental Justice Network, and Center for Earth, Energy & Democracy, as well as partners like the Minneapolis Climate Action and Racial Equity Fund and the Climate & Clean Energy Equity Fund. “What do these groups have in common? They are making progress and ideating in creative ways, and they align with our belief that the narrative of a ‘choice’ between addressing the climate crisis and advancing equity and justice is a false one,” said Christiansen. “We can create an equitable clean energy economy by thinking holistically, working systemically, and building power among communities throughout the Midwest.”

In 2012, less than 10 percent of the Kresge Foundation’s climate change grants went to BIPOC-led organizations. By 2021, it reported that a third of its 2019-20 climate change funding met the criteria of the DOCN’s’s CFJP, which requires that the majority of both an organization’s board members and its senior staff be people of color to qualify as pledge eligible, and that the organization be committed to building power in communities of color. In 2022, it reported that 39 percent of the foundation’s 2021 climate change funding went to pledge-eligible organizations. Moreover, that figure does not tell the whole story of the foundation’s climate justice efforts, as several grantees that are not pledge-eligible still center equity and work to implement equitable climate change interventions.

Lois R. DeBacker, managing director of Kresge’s Environment program, said that since 2014, the foundation has emphasized elevating the voices and perspectives of people of color and people with low wealth in its climate change policy making and program implementation, and a key attribute of that effort is supporting their leadership, influence, and power. Rather than environmental justice, Kresge focuses on climate change and climate justice and the impacts of climate change that disproportionately burden communities of color and low-wealth communities. “Our current goal is to help cities combat and adapt to climate change while advancing racial and economic justice,” she said. “Two of our major grantmaking initiatives since that time (the now-ended Climate Resilience and Urban Opportunity initiative and the current Climate Change, Health, and Equity initiative) have been guided by advisory committees that include climate- and environmental-justice leaders. We aim to listen carefully to the insights and needs our grantee partners identify and learn from them.” Some of those partners include the Climate Justice Alliance, U.S. Climate Action Network, and National Black Environmental Justice Network.

Boosting future climate leaders

“McKnight’s president, Tonya Allen, often says that her definition of power is the ability to rewrite the rules,” Christiansen said. “Too often, the ‘rules’ have been written at the expense of certain communities, whether intentionally or not. Those decisions—whether the siting of fossil fuel infrastructure, lack of investments in quality housing, or the construction of our roads and highways—have had lasting effects that persist to this day. This is our moment to rewrite the rules by investing in leaders and innovators across the climate and clean energy ecosystem to bring about change....We have an opportunity to put people at the center of the solutions, providing justice and equity for those communities who have disproportionately borne the brunt of climate impacts and environmental injustice, and whose hard work and sacrifice across generations built our fossil fuel economy,” she said.

“There is an immense amount of talent and expertise within the climate justice movement, and many of the leaders are well connected with policy makers, well networked, and in the habit of learning from one another,” Kresge’s DeBacker said. “As Audre Lorde said, ‘there is no such thing as a single-issue struggle, because we do not live single-issue lives.’ We have learned that we must expand our concept of what is considered a climate-change issue. Centering people and justice in climate work requires an analysis of the problem that includes—but goes beyond—addressing the sources of greenhouse gas emissions. We have also learned—or already knew—that current problems faced by communities of color must be viewed in the context of historical racial inequities and ongoing racist practices. We know that people who live closest to problems have great insights into actions that should be taken to solve them. We know that organizing and power building are prerequisites to success at policy and program implementation tables.”

While investing in new leaders of color is certainly necessary, it will take more than that to dismantle structural racism in environmental causes. “Giving folks a seat at the table is an important start, but it can’t end there. Their voices must be included in whatever decisions are being made, and they must ultimately see the benefits,” said Christiansen.

She added that philanthropic funders need to look toward solutions that explicitly address the root causes of injustice, which might also require that they explore solutions beyond their typical grantmaking efforts to employ other levels of power. “[McKnight is] investing in innovative models to close racial wealth gaps and increase access to long-term, low-interest financing for under-resourced communities while increasing climate resiliency, like the recently formed GroundBreak Coalition in Minnesota and the expansion of green banks. We will also continue to partner with McKnight’s investment team as we pursue a net zero endowment by 2050.”

In addition, it will require philanthropists to be more collaborative. “McKnight spends a considerable amount of energy organizing other funders and intermediaries to share information and knowledge and invest more strategically and deeply in climate solutions with a justice lens,” Christiansen said. “What does it look like for philanthropy and the movement we’re funding to be truly collaborative? In 2021, Illinois enacted the most equitable climate bill in the country, committing to transition to 100 percent clean energy by 2050 and making significant investments in clean energy access and workforce development for historically disinvested communities. A diverse coalition of over 200 organizations from every corner of the state pushing for climate action made it possible, and voices commonly left out of climate conversations were essential in shaping the law and assembling the political will to get it across the finish line.”

The question remains: Will the groups working to address the needs in their communities have the resources and the capacity to do so. “Powerful vested interests resist change,” said DeBacker. “We must cut greenhouse gas emissions in half by 2030, which means we have six years and six months to do so. We must build stronger political will to transform how we power our economy, and a broad cross-section of the American public must see how they will benefit from that transition. We need a diverse climate movement—a movement that encompasses people of diverse races, ethnicities, and income levels and works on behalf of all.”

But justice-oriented climate groups are under-resourced compared to their White-led counterparts. “Climate change isn’t just an environmental issue,” she added. “It’s an ‘everything’ issue. It’s a housing issue, a displacement issue, a health issue, a mental health issue, a food-security issue, an economic-security issue, a national security issue. Funders need to recognize those intersections and act on them. We need more philanthropic dollars directed toward reducing the pollution that causes climate change and toward preparing for the impact of climate change on our cities and rural areas that are now unavoidable. We also need a greater share of that funding to go to BIPOC-led organizations.”

While DeBacker was optimistic that the once-in-a-lifetime influx of federal funding through the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act and the Inflation Reduction Act will create opportunities to address climate change and that philanthropy should be engaged in helping ensure those funds are spent well, it will require more than the few climate funders that are currently engaged.

“We work in close partnership with other justice-oriented funders and are eager to do what we can to help more funders see the relevance of climate change and climate justice to their fields of interest,” she said. “There’s plenty of work to go around.”

(Photo credit: Shutterstock/Steve Sanchez Photos)