posted on: Friday, February 24, 2012

By Kevin Laskowski

In NCRP’s latest report Cultivating the Grassroots: A Winning Approach for Environment and Climate Funders, author Sarah Hansen contends that environment and climate funders can be more effective and secure more policy wins by investing heavily in grassroots communities that are disproportionately impacted by environment and climate harms.

In making the case for more investment in the grassroots, NCRP had to ask: where do environmental grant dollars go? As in previous reports from our High Impact Strategies in Philanthropy series, we considered: who benefits from foundation grants? Which strategies are being funded?

To answer our questions, we used screens developed by the Environmental Grantmakers Association (EGA) to create a custom dataset from the Foundation Center’s grants sample database, which includes detailed information on more than half of the country’s foundation grantmaking. On average from 2007-2009 (all NCRP data were based on a three-year average), 701 grantmakers gave some 8,137 grants totaling $1.6 billion for the environment. (For more on the methodology, please see the report or email research@ncrp.org.)

Who Benefits?

When it comes to the environment, it seems that everyone may benefit eventually, but in the near-term perhaps some nonprofits and communities more so than others.

NCRP first analyzed grant dollars by intended beneficiary to determine the proportion that were classified as intending to benefit one or more of 11 “marginalized” or “underserved” populations, including but not limited to lower-income communities and communities of color. Collectively, only 15 percent of environmental grant dollars were classified as benefiting marginalized populations.

A report from the Foundation Center and EGA discovered a similar trend examining the reported beneficiaries of environmental grants in 2007. (The executive summary is available here; the full report is available to EGA members only.) Among grantmakers in that sample, 18 percent of environmental grant dollars were intended to benefit the economically disadvantaged, and 3 percent of grant dollars were intended to benefit ethnic or racial minorities. Grants may have intended to benefit one or more of the populations indicated, including the general public. The authors noted that “the vast majority (87.1 percent) of environmental grants awarded in 2007 were either intended to benefit the general public or had no specified beneficiary.” (The latest EGA Tracking the Field report did not examine intended beneficiaries.)

Which Strategies Are Being Funded?

NCRP further analyzed the 701 grantmakers using the Foundation Center’s “social justice” screen to determine, as closely as possible, which environmental grants had policy or systemic change as a goal and, as such, likely included funds for advocacy, community organizing and civic engagement. The Foundation Center defines “social justice philanthropy” as “the granting of philanthropic contributions to nonprofit organizations based in the United States and other countries that work for structural change in order to increase the opportunity of those who are the least well off politically, economically and socially.” Only 11 percent of environmental grant dollars in NCRP’s analysis were coded as having a social justice purpose.

While consistent with trends found in previous reports in other subject areas, these numbers were surprising, considering environmental grantmakers’ well-known interest in shaping public policy to protect the environment. To supplement our analysis, EGA was kind enough to share data from its now just-released third volume of Tracking the Field. Their findings reveal significant funding of advocacy, organizing, movement-building, education and youth organizing and public policy-related strategies. Among their members, more than half of respondents’ environmental grant dollars and nearly three-quarters of climate dollars went to these strategies in 2009.

There are some notable differences between the samples. EGA surveyed the grantmaking of 196 member foundations in 2009, analyzing a dataset of more than 8,800 grants totaling $871 million. Our dataset examined Foundation Center data on those foundations that averaged at least some level of environmental grantmaking from 2007-2009, a dataset comprising some 8,137 grants totaling $1.6 billion. Additionally, there is the difference between the social justice screen, with its focus on systemic change for the least well off, and the strategies analyzed by EGA.

And that’s what concerns us. For Sarah Hansen, the data reflect philanthropy’s tendency to support “large, national, top-down environmental organizations.” Even as larger grantmakers seem to increase funding for national and even global initiatives, field-wide support for the grassroots environmental groups that build constituencies and political will and keep successful efforts intact is lacking.

Despite the presumably high levels of advocacy funding, she notes, “we have not experienced significant policy changes at the federal level in the United States since the 1980s remotely commensurate with the level of funding invested toward these ends.” Hansen writes in the executive summary:

“New environmental initiatives have been stalled and attacked while existing regulations have been rolled back and undermined. At a time when the peril to our planet and the imperative of change should drive unyielding forward momentum, it often seems as if the environmental cause has been pushed back to the starting line.”

She asks:

“Grassroots organizing has been a central strategy of almost every major social and economic transformation in world history. Why, then, is the environmental funding community not supporting grassroots organizing?”

Kevin Laskowski is research and policy associate at the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy.