Can Working Together Triple U.S. Climate Funding? New Group for Advisors Aims High

When Randall Kempner started researching climate philanthropy a few years ago, he was surprised to find that some of the sector’s key players had never met or worked together. 

Then a senior advisor with the Aspen Institute’s Energy and Environment Program, Kempner was busy interviewing staff at more than a dozen philanthropic institutions, including from legacy funders like the Rockefeller Foundation, billionaire outfits such as Lukas Walton’s Builders Initiative and sector-supporting organizations like the National Center for Family Philanthropy.

“We should try to bring these folks together,” Kempner thought. In March 2023, Aspen published his resulting report, “Funding Climate Action: Pathways for Philanthropy,” and that November, he helped organize a gathering at TomKat Ranch, the Pescadero, California, property of billionaire investor Tom Steyer and film producer Kat Taylor. It proved to be a seed.

Last month came the bloom, or at least the bud: the public launch of the Climate Philanthropy Catalyst Coalition, a group of 44 organizations — and counting — that are working to mobilize more funding for the climate emergency by advising donors and foundations. The group now has an active listserv, and plans to soon launch a quarterly public newsletter and a searchable climate resources directory.

It aims to be “intermediary of intermediaries” or a “network of networks,” as Kempner puts it. I.e., its focus, like many of its members, is not on making grants, but on advising those who do — and thereby recruiting more wealthy people to open their wallets to avert further climate catastrophe.

“It’s all credit to Randall Kempner, who saw a failure in the market to bring together wealth advisors… and really exchange ideas around best practice for activating new donors at all levels,” said Steve Toben, a philanthropic veteran and the facilitator of the Climate Action Lab at Forward Global, the coalition’s fiscal sponsor.

Like many in climate philanthropy, Kempner and the coalition’s members are concerned that just 2% of all philanthropic dollars go to climate mitigation, according to ClimateWorks Foundation’s oft-cited figure. Not only is the sector “underfunded,” but “existing funding often misses the mark,” as the group lays out. 

The hope is that by bringing donor advisors together and sharing tips and techniques, they can convince more donors to take the leap into climate giving. Despite the modest size of the coalition’s meetings so far, Kempner has outsized faith in its potential network effect: His aim is for the group to triple U.S. climate philanthropy (approximately $2 billion at the moment) over the next five years.

“There’s not enough climate philanthropy, period — we’ve got to figure out what the heck is going on,” said Kempner, who is now the coalition’s executive director. “How come there’s all this talk about climate philanthropy, but it doesn’t seem to move at the rate that everyone thinks it’s going to, or should?” 

It is a broad coalition. Members include blue-chip consulting shops like Arabella Advisors and the Bridgespan Group, donor organizing efforts such as the billionaire-advising organization Climate Lead and Global-South-oriented Impatience Earth, identity-focused organizations like Founders Pledge and Donors of Color Network, which has a representative on the group’s advisory council, and international spaces like the Global Philanthropy Forum and Forward Global, which is the group’s fiscal sponsor.

That list reflects an explosion in the number of organizations dedicated to, as Kemper puts it, “moving people from being climate-curious to being climate philanthropists,” as well as a push by long-standing advisors to expand and hone their climate offerings as interest in the topic increases and funding follows suit.

There are also several member grantmakers, from small family operations (e.g., the Jacob and Terese Hershey Foundation) to a hedge funder’s charity (VoLo Foundation) to one of the largest private funders on earth (Gates Foundation). The hosts of the coalition’s first meeting, Steyer and Taylor, have also joined via their TomKat Ranch Educational Foundation — a separate entity from their TomKat Foundation.

“The foundations who will join the CPCC are foundations who specifically have in their missions to crowd in other philanthropy,” said Kempner, who has his own direct grantmaking experience as board president of the Galveston, Texas-based Harris and Eliza Kempner Fund, a $52 million foundation established by his family more than 75 years ago. 

If LinkedIn is any measure, the coalition has people excited. Kempner’s announcement post got more than 1,500 likes and 150-plus comments. “I’ve been really positively surprised and a bit overwhelmed by the outreach,” he said. “Clearly, this has struck a chord.”

‘Donors feel really overwhelmed’ — the coalition responds to an emergent need

The Climate Philanthropy Catalyst Coalition is responding to the need for more coordination and knowledge in a funding field that has grown significantly in recent years, despite still not measuring up to what’s required. As Kempner was doing research for his Aspen Institute report, he would learn of an interesting initiative or strategy from one major advisory firm, but bringing it up with another top consultancy would draw a blank stare. That seemed like a missed opportunity to him.

For instance, few people he spoke with, at least at that time, were familiar with WINGS and Philea’s #PhilanthropyforClimate movement and international pledge, which asks grantmakers to sign onto a list of seven commitments. Likely due to its European origin, it was then — and seems to remain today — less well known among American philanthropists.

The coalition aims in part to be a space, like many others, where promising organizations, practices and collaborations can be shared, with a focus on “under-leveraged solutions, historically disadvantaged communities, and high-risk geographies that are facing the worst climate impacts.”

But Kempner also found that groups were simply finding it hard to move donors to action on climate; thus, another focus is on what actually convinces clients. 

“They’re struggling, many of the members of the CPCC, to move the folks they work with,” Kempner said. “We want to share the best practices across networks and advisors, so they — when they are talking to their clients or their partners or their members, depending on who they are — have the best possible toolkit.”

Similar themes emerged in 2023, when TomKat Ranch hosted the inaugural meeting of what became the coalition, said Wendy Millet, director of the TomKat Ranch Educational Foundation and a member of the coalition’s advisory committee. “Donors feel really overwhelmed and they can’t understand where to act and where their money will make a difference,” she said.

Advisors, too, struggle to navigate the space. One client may want to talk about regenerative agriculture funding, while the next is interested in biochar, and the third could want solar geoengineering recommendations. Mastery in all those spheres is a tall order.

“It’s hard to be an advisor,” she said. “There’s all these different solution sets, and then within those solution sets, there’s a gazillion different actors in that space.” 

“If it works for billionaires…”

One guiding light for the field is Climate Lead, an initiative of ClimateWorks to recruit more billionaires to climate philanthropy that was spun off into its own organization in 2019, and whose free advice has helped bring hundreds of millions of dollars to the sector by recruiting donors like the Sobratos and Ballmers.  

Yet such efforts are harder to replicate at smaller scales, i.e., when donors are not bringing quite so much dough to the table; thus, the need to band together.

“A lot of folks view [Climate Lead] with appreciation, because it has clearly activated a lot of big, important new money,” said Toben from Forward Global. “And so if it works for billionaires, why couldn’t [a] version of that work for those who are not giving billions or giving hundreds of millions, but that are equally committed to climate philanthropy?”

The coalition’s main activity to date has been its annual meeting. Held at TomKat Ranch each year, it has been an intimate gathering — “intentionally small,” Kempner said — with around 25 attendees in its first-ever edition in 2023, and 30 last year. The next will be this November. “One of the questions is going to be, how big do we want to be?” he said.

One hope is that by connecting advisors of all sorts via its network, the coalition will create more opportunities to introduce donors to others with similar interests, even if they have vast differences in giving power.

“We just had a commitment of $10 million for a particular cause, and commitment for $10,000 — so 100-times difference — but they’re friends and they’re talking to each other, and that’s all to the good,” said Toben, who is also on the coalition’s advisory committee.

While the coalition does qualify as one more philanthropic infrastructure group in a space that already has almost too many to count, it is a very simple operation. Kempner is the only employee, with some help from contractors on research and communications. The group has raised around $300,000 in a mix of in-kind and monetary support from funders including TomKat and Gates. It currently relies on grants, but may charge dues and events fees in the future.

While its gatherings have been small to date, the “network of networks” hopes its wide-reaching membership will make it a philanthropic value multiplier. 

“I’m absolutely confident that the leveraged value in that work more than pays for the resources that we’re diverting away from the field,” Toben said. “Together, we have this ability to share best practices, share stories, surprises, notions about what flips a switch in the mind of a climate donor such that they start getting involved with time, treasure, talent and ties.”