Keith Madden (ELP 2022) | Manager, Environment Area, Rotary Foundation of Rotary International, United State

A quantitative shift is underway across a broad swath of influential philanthropists, either transformative or incremental depending on perspective. Several new funds to confront climate change are appearing, and large entities previously focused on other issues, like the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, are inching closer to working directly on environmental sustainability. To some extent the shift taking place at my current foundation employer provides a microcosmic view that is representative of the broader shift taking place in society’s seriousness about global environmental challenges like climate change, as we at Rotary have a century-old foundation that only recently launched a new environmental funding area last year.

The arrival of new environmental actors looking to make grants or investments as well as new levels of funding present important opportunities to slow environmental degradation but risks as well. I have gained an appreciation for best practices in the dynamic sector of environmental philanthropy by having the privilege of working in it over the last few years, with the Rotary Foundation and Andes Amazon Fund before that. Many funders do some of their best work through catalytic convening power and such work has allowed me to engage closely with partners ranging from agencies like the Peruvian National Protected Areas Service, Canadian Wildlife Service, and United Nations Environment Programme, to leading foundations like the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation and the Wyss Foundation.

At the beginning of my college years when I started hearing about charitable foundation missions, events, and entry-level roles but had little knowledge of the charitable sector, I naively assumed that only those wielding fortunes or connections to the wealthy would be the ones deciding how to give away private money. Anyone else was unlikely to be involved in such endeavors, I had reasoned. Later I learned that even family foundations routinely hire professional grantmaking staff to manage funds and provide expert advice on making a social and ecological impact.

It goes without saying that responsibility, purpose, and integrity are core principles of working in philanthropic roles. When you are deciding as a staff member how to spend other people’s money it is a bit of a weird experience at first, and nonprofit startups understandably feel awkward having to ask for money, or occasionally frustrated having to compete for it. On the grant-maker side, you know that the decisions you make could affect many people’s livelihoods, so they are made carefully. Many realize the need to respect the time of grantees sending proposals since those on the ground are the ones who truly make things happen when their time is not crowded out with proposal editing. The signals that large foundations send can have ripple effects on the nonprofit world.

In the face of triple crises of climate change, biodiversity loss, and environmental injustice, the role of philanthropy is both complementary and essential. Countries chronically underfund environmental protection in their national budgets, and are often loathe to secure and deploy sufficient tax revenue to meet everything from Paris Agreement Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs), to public environmental quality needs like clean air and healthy forests. External funders can step in to augment, multiply, and guide funding, while at the same using money as a positive motivator. This means convening stakeholders and funding for results, while watching out for dependency—when public institutions get comfortable with steady external funding and shirk their own budgetary and governance responsibilities to citizens and nature.

Private philanthropy also is able to make long-term big bets or take necessary risks in ways that small community-based funds or local institutions cannot afford to. There has also been a lot of talk about profit-seeking finance for nature and blended financial models. Here a quick review of materials from the Conservation Finance Alliance tells us that just because there is a lot of willing impact-investing money available does not mean private finance is the right mechanism for a given environmental problem, but it could be promising in select cases. Ideally though, philanthropy can support allied organizations to work in engagement with the public sector and communities to mainstream environmental priorities into policy, uphold environmental rights, and counter perverse incentives present in dominant economic systems. These are the types of successful approaches I have seen firsthand in the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation’s Andes-Amazon Initiative, for example

For those who follow trends in environmental philanthropy, the last few years have been characterized by near-constant new funding announcements from aid agencies, foundations, and self-made philanthropists. In this last category, we see a green wave from people representing the early 21st century zeitgeist of entrepreneurial economic “success”. (Think Jeff Bezos, Laurene Powell Jobs, Michael Bloomberg). Yet the question in everyone’s mind is whether this is all actually translating to major transformative results on the ground necessary to confront environmental crises and helping local communities most at risk?

For all its achievements and future potential, environmental philanthropy has its grand share of both epistemological and practical challenges. There are some that are well-trodden, so in Part 2 of this blog post, I will highlight a few that I think are particularly compelling topics in the current moment.