Skip to content Skip to search

Republish This Story

* Please read before republishing *

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free under an Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives Creative Commons license as long as you follow our republishing guidelines, which require that you credit The 19th and retain our pixel. See our full guidelines for more information.

To republish, simply copy the HTML at right, which includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to The 19th. Have questions? Please email [email protected].

— The Editors

Loading...

Modal Gallery

/
Sign up for our newsletter

Menu

  • Our Mission
  • Our Team
  • Latest Stories
  • Search
  • Upcoming Events
  • Contact Us
  • Newsletter
  • Donate
  • Work With Us
  • Fellowships
    • From the Collection

      Changing Child Care

      Illustration of a woman feeding a baby a bottle
      • 1 in 4 parents report being fired for work interruptions due to child care breakdowns

        Chabeli Carrazana · February 2
      • Washington, D.C., offers financial relief to local child care workers

        Orion Rummler · September 20
      • As climate change worsens hurricane season in Louisiana, doulas are ensuring parents can safely feed their babies

        Jessica Kutz · May 5
    • From the Collection

      Next-Gen GOP

      Illustration of a woman riding an elephant
      • Mayra Flores’ victory set a record for women in Congress. It also reflects the growing visibility of Republican Latinas

        Candice Norwood · June 21
      • A banner year for Republican women

        Amanda Becker · November 11
      • Republican women could double representation in the U.S. House

        Amanda Becker · November 4
    • From the Collection

      On The Rise

      Illustration of three women marching
      • Can Cheri Beasley build a winning coalition in North Carolina?

        Candice Norwood · October 11
      • Los Angeles has never elected a woman mayor. Karen Bass hopes to change that.

        Nadra Nittle · September 8
      • Judge J. Michelle Childs is confirmed to D.C. appeals court

        Candice Norwood · July 20
    • From the Collection

      Pandemic Within a Pandemic

      Illustration of four people marching for Black Lives Matter with coronavirus as the backdrop
      • Some LGBTQ+ people worry that the COVID-19 vaccine will affect HIV medication. It won’t.

        Orion Rummler · November 23
      • Why are more men dying from COVID? It’s a complicated story of nature vs. nurture, researchers say

        Mariel Padilla · September 22
      • Few incarcerated women were released during COVID. The ones who remain have struggled.

        Candice Norwood · August 17
    • From the Collection

      Portraits of a Pandemic

      Illustration of a woman wearing a mask and holding up the coronavirus
      • For family caregivers, COVID is a mental health crisis in the making

        Shefali Luthra · October 8
      • A new database tracks COVID-19’s effects on sex and gender

        Shefali Luthra · September 15
      • Pregnant in a pandemic: The 'perfect storm for a crisis'

        Shefali Luthra · August 25
    • From the Collection

      The 19th Explains

      People walking from many articles to one article where they can get the context they need on an issue.
      • The 19th Explains: What we know about Brittney Griner’s case and what it took to get her home

        Candice Norwood, Katherine Gilyard · December 8
      • The 19th Explains: Why the Respect for Marriage Act doesn’t codify same-sex marriage rights

        Kate Sosin · December 8
      • The 19th Explains: Why baby formula is still hard to find months after the shortage

        Mariel Padilla · December 1
    • From the Collection

      The Electability Myth

      Illustration of three women speaking at podiums
      • Mayra Flores’ victory set a record for women in Congress. It also reflects the growing visibility of Republican Latinas

        Candice Norwood · June 21
      • Stepping in after tragedy: How political wives became widow lawmakers

        Mariel Padilla · May 24
      • Do term limits help women candidates? New York could be a new testing ground

        Barbara Rodriguez · January 11
    • From the Collection

      The Impact of Aging

      A number of older people walking down a path of information.
      • From ballroom dancing to bloodshed, the older AAPI community grapples with gun control

        Nadra Nittle, Mariel Padilla · January 27
      • 'I'm planning on working until the day I die': Older women voters are worried about the future

        Mariel Padilla · June 3
      • Climate change is forcing care workers to act as first responders

        Jessica Kutz · May 31
    • From the Collection

      Voting Rights

      A series of hands reaching for ballots.
      • Connecticut voters approved early voting. Here’s how their new secretary of state wants to make it happen.

        Barbara Rodriguez · February 13
      • Women lawmakers in Minnesota are in the vanguard of the democracy movement

        Barbara Rodriguez · February 3
      • Election workers believe in our system — and want everyone else to, too

        Barbara Rodriguez, Jennifer Gerson · November 8

    View all collections

  • Explore by Topic

    • 19th Polling
    • Abortion
    • Business & Economy
    • Caregiving
    • Coronavirus
    • Education
    • Election 2020
    • Election 2022
    • Election 2024
    • Environment & Climate
    • Health
    • Immigration
    • Inside The 19th
    • Justice
    • LGBTQ+
    • Military
    • Politics
    • Press Release
    • Race
    • Sports
    • Technology

    View All Topics

Home
  • Our Mission
  • Our Team
  • Latest Stories
  • Search
  • Upcoming Events
  • Contact Us
  • Newsletter
  • Donate
  • Work With Us
  • Fellowships

We’re an independent, nonprofit newsroom reporting on gender, politics and policy. Read our story.

The 19th Represents Summit

Don’t miss our biggest event of 2023!

Register Today

Become a member

The 19th thanks our sponsors. Become one.

A demonstrator shouts slogans through a megaphone as she marches.
A demonstrator shouts slogans during the Climate Justice March in New York City in November 2021. (KENA BETANCUR/AFP/Getty Images)

Environment & Climate

Women of color are leading climate justice work. They’re also struggling to find funding.

With huge race and gender gaps in funding for environmental work, a group of grant-makers are trying to change the status quo by directing philanthropy toward community-led climate solutions.

Jessica Kutz

Gender, climate and sustainability reporter

Published

2022-02-25 14:41
2:41
February 25, 2022
pm

Share

  • Twitter
  • Facebook
  • Email

When winter storm Uri hit Houston last February, widespread power outages resulted in residents going days without heat and electricity. Almost half of Texans lost access to clean drinking water. 

In the neighborhood of Pleasantville, that meant families needed bottled water – and lots of it.

“Because we are in an older community, a lot of people, including myself, experienced pipe damage,” said Bridgette Murray, a community advocate. “Some folks had to turn off water in their homes.” 

The 19th thanks our sponsors. Become one.

Murray’s organization, Achieving Community Tasks Successfully (ACTS), purchased a truckload of water to distribute in her neighborhood and surrounding communities in the days after the storm.  

Pleasantville, where Murray lives, has a long and proud history of community organizing. In the 1950s it was one of the few places where Black Americans were allowed to purchase homes in the city. Like many other communities of color, it also became the place where policymakers allowed the permitting of a disproportionate amount of industrial uses, including chemical storage facilities.

In an effort to understand how those acts of environmental racism impact the health of residents, ACTS facilitated a community-led air monitoring program over the last three years to measure the amount of dangerous pollutants in the neighborhood. 

Stories by experienced reporters you can trust and relate to.

Delivered directly to your inbox every weekday.

Please check your email to confirm your subscription!

Submitting…

Uh-oh! Something went wrong. Please try again later.

The work that Murray does is directly related to climate justice — a critical component of addressing the disproportionate impacts climate change has on communities of color. But it can be hard for organizations like hers to secure grant funding through traditional foundations. In recent years, some organizations are making pledges to fund this on-the-ground climate work, specifically centering groups led by women of color. 

In a report released in 2021 by Green 2.0, a nonprofit that tracks diversity in the environmental movement, foundations that responded to the report funded White-led environmental organizations at nearly double the rate of those led by people of color. And, in an analysis completed by The New School, of the $1.34 billion dollars distributed by national environmental grant makers between 2016-2017, only 1.3 percent was awarded to environmental justice organizations. The disparity is also gendered: Between 70 to 80 percent of philanthropic funding goes to organizations run by men. 

In recent years, grant-making organizations like The Solutions Project and The Hive Fund for Climate & Gender Justice are working to direct philanthropy dollars to grassroots work led specifically by women of color. As the climate crisis worsens, and funding for climate action grows, they believe that addressing both gender and climate justice together will strengthen solutions being implemented on the ground by those already in frontline communities. 

“Women of color are super underfunded, but are doing so much of this work. Let’s commit to them,” said Sekita Grant, vice president of programs with the Solutions Project.

A woman carries shopping bags as she walks by homes destroyed by a tornato.
A woman carries clothes and groceries while walking home after a tornado hit Mayfield, Kentucky in December 2021. (Brandon Bell/Getty Images)

The work the Solutions Project funds is wide ranging, focused on community-led renewable energy projects, regenerative land work and addressing longstanding environmental injustices like polluted air and contaminated water. Grant said the decision to focus on women’s leadership was made after realizing that, by nature of their positions in their communities, they were already leading many of these grassroots efforts. “(When the) solutions project pivoted, to be more in relationship and collaborative with grassroots organizing, and the climate justice movement,it was a lot of looking around like, ‘Wow, like this is really being led and carried by women of color,’” Grant said. 

The reasons for the current funding gap are multifaceted. From the perspective of organizers like Murray, just having access to either grant writers or developing a skill set in grant writing is expensive. The applications themselves are complicated, lengthy and time consuming to complete for both private and federal grants. In an oversight hearing held in February by the the House Committee on Natural Resources on diversity equity and inclusion in grant giving and the environmental movement, Keya Chatterjee, executive director of the US Climate Action Network, provided written testimony describing the process of securing a federal grant as “demoralizing and characterized by a lengthy application process (100 pages long in one instance) with very technical jargon that is difficult to understand.” 

On the philanthropy side of things, there is also an inherent bias in what projects, or organizations foundations deem worthy of funding. 

  • More from The 19th
    IPCC vice chairs Thelma Krug and Ko Barrett attend a session at the United Nations.
  • More women than ever are contributing to the next IPCC climate report
  • Proposed bill would cover breastfeeding support for families fleeing natural disasters
  • ‘You leave everything behind’: As bases end housing, Afghan women detail life as refugees in the United States

“There is a lack of understanding in philanthropy around what change and transformation truly look like,” Grant said. “There is a very narrow sense, in my view that’s recreating the same mess that got us into these problems, where you have this very technical top down approach.” 

For these reasons it is also difficult to get funding for advocacy work, said Zelalem Adefris, who works with two Miami-based organizations that received grants from the Solutions Project. Since 1997, one of the nonprofits she works with has sent community members to Tallahassee, Florida’s capital, to advocate for their position on various pieces of legislation. Over the years they were able to cobble together community donations for the bus trips, but it wasn’t until 2020 when they were able to secure a grant for the work. This year they testified in support of the creation of an energy equity task force and against a law that would disincentivize rooftop solar panels.

”When it comes to systems transformation, and the long, hard slog it takes to change policy and to change culture, it is a challenge to get everyone in philanthropy to understand and to support that,” Adefris said. 

There are ways to make grant giving more equitable. The Solutions Project — which acts as an intermediary between large grant funders and grassroots organizations — has a simple application process, few reporting requirements and has committed to investing 95 percent of its resources to leaders of color, with at least 80 percent going to organizations led by women. 

They also distribute multi-year operational grants, which allows grassroots leaders to be more responsive to the needs in their communities and to plan for growth within their organization. 

Bridgette Murray smiles as her and two community residents sit at a table.
Bridgette Murray (right) participates in a local school’s STEM night with two community residents. (Courtesy of Bridgette Murray)

“Not having to worry about funding as often definitely creates an environment where organizations are able to actually focus on the work and less on keeping the doors open,” said Adriane Alicea, Green 2.0 deputy director.

When Murray received a multi-year grant from the Hive Fund, she was able to secure an office space and is planning to nearly double her small staff. “Generally, grants have to be very targeted to different programs and projects. So it becomes a big assistance to organizations like ours to be able to have some flexibility in how those dollars are used,”  Murray said.

But there is a huge disparity in who receives these grants. According to the Green 2.0 transparency report card, on average, organizations led by people of color received less than 1 percent of the multiyear operational budget grants doled out in 2021. 

Grant hopes that foundations will come to understand that funding grassroots organizing is central to addressing climate change.

“You’re going to get very rich and high-quality solutions from individuals that are historically, currently, and in the future, committed to that community,” she said. “We can really see the high value and efficacy of this climate justice work.”

Back in Pleasantville, Murray is already working on her next set of grant applications. This year, she hopes to purchase air monitors that can better detect cancer-causing pollutants, which are used by the local government in other parts of the county. 

“When you are a smaller organization you are using these low-cost sensors, and that data has to be matched by a regulated monitor so that it can be actionable,” Murray said. “When we are all working from the same type of equipment it strengthens that working relationship [with officials] and gives our program a greater voice.”

Disclosure: The Hive Fund for Climate & Gender Justice has been a financial supporter of The 19th.

Share

  • Twitter
  • Facebook
  • Email

The 19th Represents Summit

Don’t miss our biggest event of 2023!

Register Today

Become a member

Up Next

IPCC vice chairs Thelma Krug and Ko Barrett attend a session at the United Nations.

Environment & Climate

More women than ever are contributing to the next IPCC climate report

Ahead of the release of the next installment, a survey gives insight into the challenges of being a woman author for the highly anticipated report.

Read the Story

The 19th
The 19th is a 501(c)(3) tax-exempt organization. Our stories are free to republish in accordance with these guidelines.

  • Donate
  • Newsletter
  • Events
  • Search
  • Jobs
  • Fellowships
  • Contact Us
  • About Us
  • Community Guidelines
  • Membership
  • Membership FAQ
  • Major Gifts
  • Sponsorship
  • Privacy
  • Twitter
  • Facebook
  • Instagram