March 8, 2024 – Global Greengrants Fund has reached an important grantmaking milestone–since 2015, we have given more than $25 million in grants to grassroots groups working on gender-just climate action.
Global Greengrants Fund is thrilled to share that we’ve reached a significant grantmaking milestone. Since we began intentionally funding at the intersection of gender and the environment in 2015, we have given more than $25 million in grants to grassroots groups working on gender-just climate action, making us a leading funder of grassroots gender-just environmental and climate action. This is an important milestone for two reasons: 1) Less than 1 percent of philanthropic funding is directed to gender-just climate action, and 2) Before 2015, Global Greengrants and most of the environmental justice field paid little attention to the ways that gender and climate intersect.
Over the last nine years, in addition to our grantmaking, through capacity building, shared learning, and strategic partnerships and collaborative efforts, Greengrants and our advisory network have developed the following strategies to foster improved gender-just environmental accompaniment:
Building Feminist Infrastructure
- Recruiting advisors with expertise in women’s rights and experience with feminist movements, providing more culturally relevant leadership to steward gender justice at the grassroots.
- Implementing board-level quotas for allocating resources to women-led initiatives, ensuring sustained financial support for women working in climate justice.
- Establishing partnerships with women’s funds, LGBTQIA+ organizations, and feminist movements, local to our advisory boards, providing crucial support and collaboration opportunities.
- Hiring a full-time Gender and Environment Program Director, ensuring dedicated leadership and direction in addressing gender injustice in environmental initiatives.
Learning and Accompaniment
- Creating a ‘conversations series’ with Greengrants advisors, inviting gender champion advisors to explore feminist approaches to grantmaking and learning, fostering a greater understanding and sensitivity of gender dynamics in funding processes.
- Providing increased trainings on gender justice and women’s rights issues, building a framework of support for women and grassroots climate movements.
- Gathering, translating, and sharing reports and documents related to gender mainstreaming, which can provide useful reference material for women and grassroots climate movements.
- Collecting data on women’s leadership and participation in grants and projects, which can help highlight the contributions and roles of women in grassroots climate movements.
- Developing an African ecofeminist grantmaking toolkit, providing practical guidance for women and grassroots climate movements in Africa, in ways that are locally relevant and culturally appropriate.
At the heart of our mission is the feminist commitment to collaboration, recognizing that we can more effectively address systemic discrimination when we work together. Drawing from our decades of experience and work at the intersection of climate and gender justice, we have prioritized creating collaborations and partnerships with other donors resulting in additional and ongoing support for grassroots, gender-just climate action around the world. For example:
- Global Greengrants has partnered with Prospera International Network of Women’s Funds since 2014 to foster cross-movement collaborations between environmental, climate, and feminist movements. In 2019, Global Greengrants and Prospera launched the Funder Learning Community for Women and the Environment to support others in philanthropy interested in the intersection of women’s rights and environmental justice, cultivate peer-to-peer learning and exchange, and explore how to apply their learning practically to grantmaking strategies. After four years of monthly calls with frontline activists, peers, academics, and more, the funder learning community members expressed interest in turning learning into action, resulting in the development of the Funder Learning and Action Co-Laboratory on gender, environmental, and climate justice (FLAC). The FLAC is a collaboration of funders, intermediaries, and activists, all organizing to move more and better resources to the nexus of gender, environmental, and climate justice.
- Since 2016, Greengrants has been a strategic partner in the Global Alliance for Green and Gender Action (GAGGA) collaboration, which has provided approximately $13 million to women-led community-based organizations. As the GAGGA Africa grantmaker, Global Greengrants has distributed $2.2 million of the total to women’s environmental action across Africa. We also partner with GAGGA in advocacy and fieldbuilding initiatives for funding at the intersection of women’s rights and the environment.
- As a result of our funding and advocacy work for gender-just climate and environmental action, Greengrants was invited to be the philanthropic lead of the UN Women’s Feminist Action for Climate Justice Action Coalition, which was developed to deliver concrete and transformative change for women and girls around the world over the next five years. As funder lead of the Action Coalition, Global Greengrants partnered with GAGGA and the Women’s Environment and Development Organization (WEDO) to build a campaign to mobilize more, and equitable funding to gender-just climate action, prioritizing women, girls, and gender diverse leaders in Global South movements who are leading environmental and climate action. This campaign, titled Roots Rising, aims to mobilize at least $100 million of new funding for gender just climate action by 2026 and set ambitious and justice-oriented mobilization targets by 2030.
Moving forward, we are excited to continue building our grantmaking at this critical nexus of issues. We are also excited to continue contributing to a growing philanthropic field of funders committed to this work. It is only by putting trust and resources into the hands of grassroots women and gender diverse environmental leaders that we will create a just and sustainable future for all.