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When the Bezos Earth Fund got in touch with the Union of Concerned Scientists in late 2020 about a major grant, it was exciting news for the nonprofit’s nascent campaigns to clean up the nation’s electrical grid and trucks.
But the two-year, $15 million award was also an opportunity for the organization to model how it believed the nation’s largest environmental groups could collaborate with grassroots groups. Like many others, the gift was prompted by 2020’s racial uprisings to accelerate its internal work on equity.
“We realized proactively, ourselves, that this couldn’t be a one-way street of funding, from philanthropy to us as a Big Green,” said Johanna Chao Kreilick, who was named the organization’s president in April 2021, shortly after the grant was made. “We knew from the get-go that we wanted to dedicate a sizable portion of that grant flow to front-line organizations.”
The organization ultimately set aside a quarter of the award — $3.75 million — for front-line groups. That amount included $850,000 for the Fund for Frontline Power, a new intermediary governed by grassroots movement leaders, and established for that very purpose. Created in the aftermath of the Bezos Earth Fund’s initial round of grants, the fund was designed as a conduit for established recipients like the Union of Concerned Scientists to share some of their windfalls with small, ground-level climate justice groups.
The Fund for Frontline Power is the latest effort to remedy funding imbalances that have been around for about as long as the environmental movement, and now it’s looking to grow beyond its initial round of Bezos-prompted contributions. And while it has yet to pick up any big name foundations, the fund has raised and granted nearly $6.4 million to 69 grassroots groups.
The fund’s story offers a case study in movement-led philanthropic practices, in the successful pressure tactics of climate justice organizers, and in the encouraging willingness of some well-known groups like UCS to move climate philanthropy’s growing billionaire bounty to the front lines. With Bezos’ funding to environmental justice regrantors ending last year, the fund also offers a possible bellwether of whether megadonors and others will follow activists’ lead.
How the Fund for Frontline Power came to be
The fund emerged from conversations between three well-known environmental justice movement leaders — Gloria Walton of The Solutions Project (a Bezos Earth Fund grantee), Jacqui Patterson of the Chisholm Legacy Project, and Angela Mahecha, then with Climate Justice Alliance — and consultation with many others.
One spark in those chats? Bezos’ initial round of climate grants, which sent record-breaking funding to several environmental justice regrantors such as The Solutions Project, but still sent the biggest checks and the bulk of its dollars to the nation’s best-funded and historically white environment groups.
“They put their heads together to think about, what is a movement response to this?” said Marion Gee, former co-executive director of the Climate Justice Alliance, in a conversation last year.
The result was the Fund for Frontline Power. With communications and fundraising support from the Climate Justice Alliance and The Solutions Project, and hosted by the latter, it took on a challenge as old as the environmental movement. As generations of activists can attest, grassroots groups have historically received a tiny sliver of the funding pie, typically around 1% of climate or environmental grantmaking, based on past reports from Building Equity and Alignment for Environmental Justice (BEA) and CLIMA Solutions. The new fund was a way to move money to the movement via a participatory process led by activists themselves, starting with funding from organizations that landed huge Bezos grants.
Some recipients joined the fund enthusiastically. But pressure was also part of the process, building on organizing efforts that predated the new fund. Back when the Amazon founder’s environmental fund unveiled its first grants, the CJA released a statement calling it an “unnatural disaster,” criticizing the amount of funding going toward Big Greens.
Even as contributions started to come in, organizers pushed for more meaningful amounts. A strongly worded public letter from the BEA Grassroots Caucus to the Natural Resources Defense Council and UCS criticized the amounts they offered the fund. This was a confrontation among allies, as both groups were already members of the BEA Green Caucus and signatories to several movement statements championed by BEA. UCS later increased its contribution; NRDC did not.
Gee and her colleagues also lobbied Bezos recipients directly. “Their stated values were about equity and justice, but then they were funding solutions that communities didn’t support,” Gee said. “A way we were able to open those conversations was: ‘Your own staff will no longer stand for you saying that you care about this, but not showing that you care about this.’”
She called the contributions by UCS and others “a step in the right direction,” even if she still takes issue with some of the groups’ approaches to climate action. Her organization remains concerned about support for what the alliance and others in the environmental justice movement call “false solutions,” such as creating markets for carbon credits. “I hope they will commit again in the future, and I hope it can be a part of the conversation about the strategy of their work, as well,” she said.
Ultimately, the fund recruited more than a half-dozen Bezos recipients: The Solutions Project and the Hive Fund for Climate and Gender Justice (each gave $1 million of their $43 million awards); Building Equity and Alignment ($760,000 of $15 million); ClimateWorks Foundation ($650,000, of $50 million); NRDC ($500,000 of $100 million), and RMI, the group formerly known as Rocky Mountain Institute ($200,000 of $10 million).
Many other Bezos grantees, including four that received $100 million awards — Environmental Defense Fund, Nature Conservancy, World Resources Institute and the World Wildlife Fund — declined to join the pool. The Energy Foundation ($30 million from Bezos) and Climate and Clean Energy Fund ($43 million) also did not participate.
But the fund has attracted other funders, notably Kataly’s Environmental Justice Resource Collective ($1 million), of which Walton is a member, as well as Seventh Generation Foundation ($500,000), Ceres Trust ($350,000) and Sierra Club Foundation ($200,000).
Not just resources, but decision-making
Just as important as the money is who is in charge. The organizers invited 13 grassroots leaders — some but not all represent organizational members of CJA’s network — to serve on a governing council that leads the fund.
Nominated by their peers, they are now responsible for grantmaking, from reviewing requests to making funding decisions, with support from the People’s Climate Innovation Center. The group includes leaders like Chrishelle Palay of the Houston Organizing Movement for Equity, and Mary “Missy” Crow of the Indigenous Environmental Network and Eastern Cherokee League. Each council member’s organization received a $50,000 grant.
Many grantmakers now namecheck movement concepts like solidarity, decolonizing and just transition, but the flow of money and who has power has hardly changed, which is what the fund is for, said governing council member Antonio Diaz, the organizational director of People Organizing to Demand Environmental & Economic Rights (PODER).
“Fundamentally, the philanthropic dollars don’t go to the grassroots and to community-based organizations that don’t have the resources to have fancy PR,” he said in a conversation last year. “The key shift with the Fund for Frontline Power is that it’s more than just moving the resources, it’s also moving the decision-making to the community.”
“We wanted to set ourselves up for success”
Cutting an initial round of checks was, admittedly, a slow process for the fund. It made its first-ever grant round of $5 million to 48 groups last July, two years after the fund was formed. That was partly due to time spent fundraising. All that lobbying took time. It also reflects the challenges of creating a participatory grantmaking group from scratch, according to participants.
“I don’t think that it’s going to take that long in the future,” Gee said. “But we really wanted to set ourselves up for success and set ourselves up to provide a vehicle that is going to move significant amounts of money, but also be accountable to front-line organizations.”
The group consulted the field on who should sit on the council, and then had to ensure interest and availability, plus navigate logistics like scheduling time for a large group of busy movement leaders. While the selected members were familiar with each other, many did not know each other well, Diaz said. Finding agreement on process, applications and criteria for grantees took additional time.
“There was a lot of initial trust-building: principles of how we would work together, clarity about what we wanted out of the fund,” he said.
The council limited eligibility to the type of groups it most wanted to support: Applicants were required to have budgets of $1.5 million or less; have staff and boards that were majority Black, Indigenous or people of color; identify as BIPOC-led; be grassroots-based; and prioritize serving BIPOC communities, among other criteria. Awards, too, were limited, ranging from $25,000 to $125,000.
Even so, the volume of applications overwhelmed the team and its budget. The fund received more than $60 million in requests from over 400 groups. “Clearly, there is a huge need in the field that is not being filled by philanthropy,” Gee said.
The launch experience echos that of another participatory grassroots environmental justice intermediary I have covered: Mosaic, a regranting initiative for environmental movement infrastructure whose governing council includes a mix of movement leaders, so-called Big Greens, and grantmakers. Angela Mahecha is among them, demonstrating the crossover in these worlds.
Mosaic’s first steps were similarly challenging. The group had to work through tension, historic power dynamics, differences in opinion, and a “finals week” sprint to complete its first funding round. Demand, too, has been overwhelming from the start. Funding doubled in its second round, but applications almost did as well, rising from 450-plus to nearly 700.
No legacy funders yet, but some corporate backers
The Fund for Frontline Power has yet to get a check from any major legacy foundation, but two corporate-related philanthropies have signed on. One recent addition is Avenew, a recently launched collective aimed at connecting the sports industry with grassroots groups working on climate justice solutions.
An early partner was Seventh Generation, the Unilever-owned sustainable home products company known for its progressive grantmaking. Its philanthropic arm, the employee-staffed Seventh Generation Foundation, has been working closely with The Solutions Project since 2018, and saw the fund as a natural next step.
“We’re a company that makes laundry detergent, and we do that fairly well,” said Ashley Orgain, chief impact officer at the Vermont-based company, in a conversation last year. “Philanthropic work has been a learning journey.”
The two-year, $500,000 contribution was the largest single grant the company’s foundation had ever made, and marked its first-ever engagement in a participatory fund. It came as Seventh Generation transitioned from maintaining multiple grant programs to putting 100% of its grantmaking toward climate justice work, specifically to Indigenous front-line organizations to be chosen by a fully Indigenous advisory board.
Orgain credited The Solutions Project for showing it that a “shift in power” is needed and introducing it to the fund. “It was just a brilliant evolution of everything we’re doing,” she said.
“It’s the right thing to do, and it’s the only way to win”
In some ways, Chao Kreilick of Union of Concerned Scientists embodies both the past and possible future of the environmental movement.
As a former senior leader at Open Society Foundations, where she led the launch of a climate program at the tail end of an eight-year stint there, she has the kind of resume and relationships common among the leaders that often move back and forth between philanthropies and major nonprofits.
She is also a woman of color whose passion was palpable as she talked about the importance and challenges (“there were pivots and bumps along the way”) of her organization’s journey toward equity and justice. She has been a vocal and highly visible advocate for Green 2.0’s efforts to bring greater diversity and inclusion to the sector, and her organization is still part of BEA’s Green Caucus. Her organization’s contribution to the fund was also a larger share of their Bezos grant than any of the other participating grantees.
“We are engaging with equity and justice not just because it’s the right thing to do, but it’s the only way to win,” she said.
The question now is whether philanthropy and billionaires will follow the lead of not just Chao Kreilick, but Walton, Mahecha and Patterson, who conceived and pulled together the Fund for Frontline Power — not to mention the generations of activists who preceded them in pushing philanthropy toward supporting environmental justice.
The fund is actively fundraising, and the team has met with both inaugural funders and potential newcomers in recent months. Last month, it issued an additional $700,000 in grants to seven groups on its waitlist. Its grants have reached 22 states and Puerto Rico, with all funds going to BIPOC-led groups, 83% to LGBTQ-led groups, and 83% to women/femme-led groups.
Philanthropy is not the only funding option on the table. The fund hopes to help direct the roughly $4 trillion in federal funding to be approved over the coming years. The team joined CJA’s application to be a national grantmaking partner with the EPA’s Environmental Justice Thriving Communities grantmaking program.
The fund launched at a time when megadonors, as well as legacy funders, are increasingly adopting, in one form or another, a familiar movement slogan: Those closest to the problems are closest to the solutions. The Fund for Frontline Power is an example of actually following that philosophy. Whether it receives enough funding for another round of grants, let alone to expand its grantmaking, seems to offer one more test as to whether major funders are willing to accept grassroots movement leaders’ version of what it means to pursue that vision.
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