Venture Philanthropy for the Climate Emergency Movement: Funding Transformative Startups
The movements that can protect humanity are being born.
A new Climate Movement Wave is here. The Climate emergency movement is distinct from the gradualist, institutionalized environmental and climate movement that has been dominant for decades. It tells the truth about the emergency, demands rapid, transformational change, and utilizes a range of tactics, including disruption and high-stakes civil disobedience.
This emerging movement is brand new. Within it, agile and effective non-profit “startups” are growing rapidly. This nascent climate emergency movement has already been vastly more successful at inspiring the public and changing the policy conversation than gradualism, and for a fraction of the cost. The Sunrise Movement, Extinction Rebellion, and school strikes were all less than 2 years old in 2019 when they changed the global conversation.
An Ecosystem of “Startup” Organizations. The climate emergency movement is bursting with innovation and energy. As more people wake up to the climate emergency, more exciting projects and campaigns are popping up. New organizations are launching, taking risks, and scaling up what works. These organizations form an “ecosystem,” in which they play distinct roles that support and amplify each other.
These startups are disrupting the environmental sector, quickly making the incumbents, the “Big Green'' NGOs, obsolete. Big Green organizations are large, institutional, risk-averse, and prone to “moderation.” They prioritize maintaining their political and donor relationships. They have high overhead costs due to reliance on large staff rather than volunteers. They still bring in hundreds of millions of dollars per year in donations. Some ways that Big Green perpetuate gradualism include:
Their support of the goal for the United States achieving zero emissions by 2050, continuing to warm the atmosphere for 3 decades.
Their focus on implementing incentives such as tax abatements and carbon markets, rather than mandatory measures.
Their engagement with their membership of consumers, who should be “calculating your carbon footprint,” and donors, rather than activists, organizers, and volunteers.
Their rejection of mass protest and high stakes civil disobedience as critical tactics. Climate Emergency Fund supports disruptive activism, because it is the fastest way to create transformative change.
It’s time to recognize the failure of gradualism and the bureaucratic, staff-focused “inside game” approach to climate. It’s time to focus on young organizations that understand the immensity of the climate emergency. We must support young organizations with an ultra-ambitious vision and plan to grow rapidly, build power, disrupt business-as-usual and realize the full potential of the climate emergency movement.
Unleashing Volunteer Power. People who face the truth about the climate emergency and dedicate themselves to doing what they can to protect humanity and the living world are a force! Volunteers are already driving the climate emergency movement. They pour a tremendous amount of time and energy into planning and executing disruptive actions, educating, recruiting, and training others, and otherwise building the movement.
But there is also a tremendous reservoir of untapped volunteer power. According to Yale’s Program on Climate Communications (2021), 26% of Americans are alarmed by the climate emergency, but only 4% are currently working on a campaign. 54 million Americans report that they are ready to volunteer their time to a climate organization, and 16 million report being willing to personally engage in civil disobedience! If we can activate even a tenth of these climate-alarmed Americans, we will exert unbearable pressure on our elected representatives. We will force the government to declare a climate emergency and initiate a mobilization at the scale and speed necessary to protect humanity and the living world.
There is no effective way to increase staffing capacity at NGOs to the point that they could achieve anything close to this impact.
“Startup” organizations fueled by volunteer activists face fundamentally different pressures than staff-based organizations and have fundamentally different funding needs. They need to inspire, train, and activate an army of activists. Climate emergency movement organizations need paid staff to plan, organize, and administrate the growth of the movement, but these staff do not make up the movement. Their job is to facilitate and coordinate the impact of volunteers - normal people who have reckoned with reality and dedicated themselves to cancelling the apocalypse and protecting humanity. This is the beating heart of the movement.
Movement Startups Need Funding.
When a visionary founder creates an innovative organization, securing funding presents a huge barrier to success. Most climate emergency organizations are unable to pay for sufficient staff and cover other core expenses. Founders must spend a majority of their time fundraising, distracting from their core work of waking up the public and transforming society and policy. I experienced the frustration of this challenge firsthand, for the 6 years I spent as the founding director of The Climate Mobilization. Lack of available funding creates a barrier of entry for people who cannot afford to volunteer huge amounts of time or provide early seed money themselves or from their own network, greatly limiting the diversity of the movement.
A Critical Gap in Philanthropy. The number of foundations and philanthropists currently operating in the climate emergency venture philanthropy model is growing, but still insignificant - approximately 10-12 foundations and high capacity individuals are currently making grants in this mode. Paul Engler and co-authors from the Ayni Institute describe how critical, and how rare, it is to provide movement organizations with early-stage funding:
“Foundations and large donors are far more likely to focus on the final stages of social transformation — backing the advocates or lawyers who formalize new laws and policy — rather than the movements that make these changes possible to begin with…..Often, there are only a select few funders who have seeded social movements before the movements have reached their zenith. These funders identified opportunities for mobilization early and backed leaders at risky moments. Because of their prescient judgement, they had a disproportionate impact on the development of key movements and saw their support yield historic change.”
- Funding Social Movements: How Mass Protest Makes an Impact (2018)
Enter Venture Philanthropy.
The Stanford Social Innovation Review identified 4 principles from venture capital that should cross over into funding movements:
Look for opportunities on the leading edge of problem-solving.
Take calculated risks by knowing the investment landscape.
Bet on outstanding people.
Amplify impact and sustainability by creating networks.
In other words, venture philanthropy stays on the vanguard of the movement, making early investments on potentially game-changing opportunities. Though not all ventures will succeed, within this group of risk-takers are those that will change the paradigm and the world.
Climate Emergency Fund (CEF). CEF has learned from social movement history, as well as startup management and venture capital approaches. We fund early-stage, cutting edge organizations such as Climate Emergency Unit, The Week, and Extinction Rebellion.
We have a business-savvy board of directors who are committed to climate emergency activism, made up of leading advisors from the movement and from venture philanthropy, and me, an Executive Director with direct experience in building a climate emergency “startup.” I founded The Climate Mobilization, a non-profit advocacy group in 2014 and built it from a small group of passionate volunteers into an adequately staffed organization that leveraged the impact of volunteer organizers for groundbreaking impact.
CEF has tremendous opportunities to both 1) rapidly grow our own fundraising so that we can fund more groups, give larger grants, and give multi-year grants, and 2) help develop a broader ecosystem of venture philanthropists to drive the climate emergency movement. In order to tap into those opportunities and give the climate emergency movement the support it deserves, we need to significantly increase our internal capacity.
Join us.
We are convening a vanguard of like-minded funders to support these efforts. We invite you to join us as we grow our philanthropic network of members, advisors, and collaborators.
If you are interested in taking a venture philanthropy approach to growing the climate emergency movement, please contact me at margaret@cefund.org
Or, make a tax-deductible donation to CEF directly. We will deploy your contribution to support the most promising efforts on the leading edge of the movement, fast.
Climate Emergency Fund is a 501c (3). EIN: 84-2151545
By Margaret Klein Salamon, PhD
Executive Director, Climate Emergency Fund
