The Donors of Color Network (DOCN)—a cross-racial community of donors and movement leaders committed to building the collective power of people of color to achieve racial equity—has announced that the Climate Funders Justice Pledge (CFJP) is increasing its funding baseline for BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and people of color)-led justice groups to $120 million over two years.

According to DOCN, only 1.3 percent of environmental and climate-related philanthropic giving in the United States supports BIPOC-led environmental justice organizations. Launched in February 2021, the pledge challenged climate funders to give at least 30 percent of their U.S. climate funding to BIPOC-led groups by 2023 and to commit to greater transparency by sharing their funding percentages to those groups publicly. Two inaugural pledgers, the Pisces Foundation and Kresge Foundation, currently dedicate more than 30 percent of their climate giving toward BIPOC-led justice solutions (40 percent and 39.1 percent, respectively).

Additional foundations committed to the CFJP include the Schmidt Family, William and Flora Hewlett, John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur, Barr, ClimateWorks, Energy, Heising-Simons, and David and Lucile Packard foundations and the Rockefeller Brothers and Wallace Global funds.

“We’re out of time. Funders must take action and commit to justice as a critical component of building a more effective climate strategy,” said DOCN executive director Isabelle H. Leighton. “The CFJP will continue to make seismic shifts in a field that’s historically resistant to change or transparency. We call on the biggest names in climate philanthropy to put their money where their public statements are. This is more than an equity commitment; it’s how we foster a winning movement.”

(Photo credit: Getty Images/Andrea Migliarini)