Post summary (feel free to suggest edits!): The Founders Pledge Climate Fund has run for 2 years and distributed over $10M USD.
Because the climate-space has ~$1T per year committed globally, the team believes the best use of marginal donations is to correct existing biases of overall climate philanthropy, fill blindspots and leverage existing attention on climate. The Fund can achieve this more effectively than individual donations because it can make large grants to allow grantees to start new programs, quickly respond to time-sensitive opportunities, and make catalytic grants to early-stage organizations who don’t yet have track records.
Examples include substantial increase in growth of grantee Clean Air Task Force, and significant investments into emerging economies that get less from other funders.
Future work will look at where best to focus policy efforts, and the impact of the Russo-Ukrainian war on possible policy windows.
(If you’d like to see more summaries of top EA and LW forum posts, check out the Weekly Summaries series.)
I think this is mostly right, three suggestions for minor edits: 1. The CATF example is more of an example of this mechanism (shifting the trajectory of organizations), not itself the major result of the Climate Fund (as the trajectory of CATF was shifted before, in 2018, through FP highlighting before the Fund existed). The primary organizations we are replicating this with the fund so far are TerraPraxis and Future Cleantech Architects, both of which we were the initial philanthropic investors and that have since gone on to grow quite significantly.
2. “Future work will look at where best to focus policy efforts, and the impact of the Russo-Ukrainian war on possible policy windows.” > ”...advocacy efforts given major changes in policy windows in the US and globally as well as profound changes in energy through the Russo-Ukrainian war”—or similar, I think mostly avoiding a formulation that suggests we are just opportunistically exploiting policy windows from the war, it is more about updating the landscaping analysis given massive changes.
This is all quite in the weeds, so if those edits don’t make sense, feel free to ignore them! Thanks again for including the post.
Post summary (feel free to suggest edits!):
The Founders Pledge Climate Fund has run for 2 years and distributed over $10M USD.
Because the climate-space has ~$1T per year committed globally, the team believes the best use of marginal donations is to correct existing biases of overall climate philanthropy, fill blindspots and leverage existing attention on climate. The Fund can achieve this more effectively than individual donations because it can make large grants to allow grantees to start new programs, quickly respond to time-sensitive opportunities, and make catalytic grants to early-stage organizations who don’t yet have track records.
Examples include substantial increase in growth of grantee Clean Air Task Force, and significant investments into emerging economies that get less from other funders.
Future work will look at where best to focus policy efforts, and the impact of the Russo-Ukrainian war on possible policy windows.
(If you’d like to see more summaries of top EA and LW forum posts, check out the Weekly Summaries series.)
Thanks for doing this!
I think this is mostly right, three suggestions for minor edits:
1. The CATF example is more of an example of this mechanism (shifting the trajectory of organizations), not itself the major result of the Climate Fund (as the trajectory of CATF was shifted before, in 2018, through FP highlighting before the Fund existed). The primary organizations we are replicating this with the fund so far are TerraPraxis and Future Cleantech Architects, both of which we were the initial philanthropic investors and that have since gone on to grow quite significantly.
2. “Future work will look at where best to focus policy efforts, and the impact of the Russo-Ukrainian war on possible policy windows.” > ”...advocacy efforts given major changes in policy windows in the US and globally as well as profound changes in energy through the Russo-Ukrainian war”—or similar, I think mostly avoiding a formulation that suggests we are just opportunistically exploiting policy windows from the war, it is more about updating the landscaping analysis given massive changes.
This is all quite in the weeds, so if those edits don’t make sense, feel free to ignore them! Thanks again for including the post.