The following article was published in Inside Philanthropy in July 2024. You can read the original here.
For an example of how climate philanthropy’s newest billionaire donors can supercharge veteran organizations with just a couple of checks, consider the Agroecology Fund.
Founded in 2012, the Boston-based regrantor awarded a total of $10.5 million during its first decade — an average of just $1 million a year. Growth picked up in 2022, with a fundraising campaign, new regional initiatives and organic growth helping the fund to nearly double its all-time grantmaking over the following two years.
Then came the tech billionaires.
Laurene Powell Jobs’ climate outfit, Waverley Street Foundation, announced last November a four-year, $10 million grant to the fund. Then, this April, the Ballmer Group, Steve and Connie Ballmer’s grantmaking LLC, made an unrestricted, three-year, $9 million gift.
The Agroecology Fund is now on track to give out about as much money in the next several years as it did in the last dozen — a sign that philanthropic interest in this space has spiked as the climate crisis pushes more funders, and particularly billionaire donors, to put money toward food system transformation.
These new backers are a boon for agroecology, a term with many definitions that most broadly refers to agricultural approaches seeking sustainable coexistence of people and planet. Advocates and practitioners of agroecology — which has its roots in Indigenous food systems — have seen a funding swell over the last few years as donors look for equitable ways to decarbonize our food system, which by some measures accounts for a third of all greenhouse gas emissions.
The Agroecology Fund not only serves as a barometer of this new interest; it embodies many of the major trends in climate philanthropy: funders’ wide range of focus areas, billionaire donors’ preference for regrantors, burgeoning support for localized grantmaking, nonprofit interest in government funding, and uncertainty about the future of the current billionaire funding boom.
“More donor understanding of the importance of food systems”
The surging support for agroecology reflects a long-building swell of funder interest in movements within the food and agriculture space, largely driven by climate-focused funders, with increased resources flowing to related if distinct topics like regenerative agriculture — an area with a fast-growing new affinity group — and food system transformation. It adds up to an increasingly varied landscape of what we at IP sometimes call sustainable agriculture funders.
“You’re seeing more donors understanding of the importance of food systems to solve the climate crisis,” said Daniel Moss, who has been with the fund since its second year and now serves as codirector, sharing leadership with Angela Cordeiro.
Other billionaire philanthropies backing agroecology include the Walton Family Foundation and Lukas Walton’s Builders Initiative. Eric and Wendy Schmidt have also supported such work through their foundation and its 11th Hour Project (which is a fund member), and Wendy Schmidt wrote a 2022 op-ed for IP arguing that “philanthropy can seed agroecology.” Legacy foundations, like Rockefeller and McKnight (another fund member), have also been agroecology backers.
For the Waverley Street Foundation, the Agroecology Fund’s attention not just to land and ecosystems, but to people, was a key draw, said Kai Carter, head of international programs.
“To achieve lasting climate solutions, we must adopt multifaceted strategies that prioritize both people and the planet, ensuring that equity is at the core of our efforts,” Carter said in a statement.
Waverley’s grant will support research and advocacy by farmers, scientists, consumer groups and policymakers. The aim is to develop policies and public support to “scale up” agroecology as a climate solution. The fund is expected to secure another $6 million in matching funds.
Many reasons to fund agroecology, and climate generally
The Agroecology Fund traces its origins to 2012, when four colleagues from four foundations — the Christensen Fund, Swift Foundation, V. Kann Rasmussen Foundation and New Field Foundation — came together to form a collaborative grantmaking vehicle at a time when such outfits were less common. (Today, the fund remains a fiscally sponsored project of Global Greengrants.)
Those founding members’ various focuses foreshadowed the fund’s appeal to a broad swath of philanthropy, and also mirrors the wide-ranging reasons that can pull foundations into climate philanthropy. Those focus areas spanned Indigenous communities, women’s empowerment, movement building and human rights — topics that are forefront in today’s climate conversation.
“That’s part of the beauty of agroecology,” Moss said. “There aren’t that many funders that are what you might describe as dyed-in-the-wool agroecology funders, but they see the intersectionality.”
The fund now has more than 50 donors, and they’re a diverse bunch. Members span foundations in the U.S. and abroad, multibillion-dollar institutions and unendowed regrantors, legacy funders and billionaire-backed operations. Some family foundation members make $20,000 grants to the fund, while a few big backers award millions of dollars, like Waverley and Ballmer.
Billionaires love regrantors
One of the most notable climate philanthropy trends in the past few years has been new billionaire donors’ reliance on regrantors, with megadonors like Jeff Bezos, MacKenzie Scott and C. Frederick Taylor, the hedge funder who is the donor behind Sequoia Climate Foundation, as just a few examples.
The Agroecology Fund’s billionaire patrons — Powell Jobs and the Ballmers — have also taken this well-traveled path, including in their food and agriculture funding.
Waverley Street Foundation chose several such groups in its initial grantmaking, and it took the same approach in backing the Farm Bill, sending dollars to grantmaking intermediaries like the Regenerative Agriculture Foundation, as well as the new Platform for Agriculture and Climate Transformation and Farm Bill Grassroots Capacity Fund.
Intermediaries are also playing a starring role in Ballmer’s climate portfolio. Awards include a $118 million grant to the Climate and Land Use Alliance, which works in similar regions and shares at least one grantee with the Agroecology Fund. Ballmer also made a four-year, $45 million grant to the One Acre Fund, which, while not exactly a regrantor, supports farmers in sub-Saharan Africa to address poverty and climate change.
Whether it’s the Agroecology Fund or other intermediaries, there are many reasons why billionaires are cutting substantial checks to such operations. Some of these new megadonors are still scaling up their operations and lack the capacity to make lots of grants; others want to get significant funding out the door quickly. They might also choose to fund through regrantors while building their strategy, or appreciate the trust-based practices and network impact of regrantors.
“Localized, decentralized, trust-based philanthropy”
Another big reason that billionaires favor regrantors? It allows them to get funding to small groups in communities around the world. Few funders, particularly newcomers, have the relationships to build their own grantee portfolios far from offices typically located in the U.S.
The Agroecology Fund is a prime example of this: It started its first regional fund, Fondo Agroecológico para la Península de Yucatán, in 2020 with support from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation. Next came the Bharat Agroecology Fund in India, which attracted support from the IKEA Foundation.
Now, the fund is setting up regional funds in Eastern and Western Africa through a partnership with TrustAfrica that also allows donors to send grant dollars directly to the continent.
“There’s been a really important trend in philanthropy… toward more localized, decentralized, trust-based philanthropy — and these regional funds made a lot of sense to” grantmakers, Moss said. While the fund had always accepted restricted funding, these regional funds also helped it attract support from grantmakers with particular geographic interests.
The Agroecology Fund’s fiscal sponsor, Global Greengrants, was one of the first and most widely regarded intermediaries to develop a network of grantees around the globe, including several branches that have since spun off into independent entities, such as Fundo Casa Socioambiental.
“Philanthropy is a bit player”
Funding from billionaires has reshaped the environmental funding landscape in recent years, but many nonprofits see the larger prize as securing government dollars.
For some, that means applying for a slice of the hundreds of billions of dollars in funding flowing from the Inflation Reduction Act, while others are targeting financing from bilateral organizations like the Green Climate Fund. The Agroecology Fund is no exception.
“Philanthropy often forgets it’s really a bit player,” Moss said. “The biggest single donor for agroecology in the world should be and is governments.”
While the fund does not advocate with governments, its grantees do. The fund is also part of the Agroecology Coalition, a group composed of dozens of governments, nonprofits, research institutions, philanthropies and multilateral institutions like the United Nations Development Programme and International Fund for Agricultural Development.
In June, the Swiss Agency for Cooperation and Development joined as the Agroecology Fund’s first bilateral development agency donor, with a four-year $1.5 million grant to support the new regional funds in West and Eastern Africa, as well as to explore the feasibility of an additional fund in Southeast Asia.
Like most regrantors, Moss sees plenty of potential to put more dollars to good use. “It’s not like there’s all this money chasing very few opportunities,” he said. “We are overwhelmed with many more fantastic opportunities.”
But will it all last?
Back in 2016, Moss was worried the fund’s growth was over. “We’ve hit the ceiling,” he kept thinking. He needn’t have worried: The organization has since more than tripled its budget.
Yet like a lot of environmental organizations that have grown rapidly as billionaires jump into the field with massive commitments, Moss and the fund’s team are concerned about whether the good times will last.
Moss said the fund has tried to both be “totally bullish” — its public mission, after all, is to “move massive amounts of money” into agroecology — but realistic, including making financial plans for both growth and retraction.
“A lot of times, following boom periods is a bust period, and it would be irresponsible if we grew too much without thinking ahead,” he said.
Read more about Agroecology Fund’s plea to climate philanthropists to invest in grassroots agroecology movements in our op-ed for Alliance Magazine.