Use New Funding to Win ‘Hearts and Minds’, Experts Urge Climate Philanthropists

The C$405 million that nine charities and wealthy families will be devoting to climate philanthropy over the next decade should be invested in large part to reach the “hearts and minds” of Canadians, two of the country’s environmental philanthropy leaders are saying this week.

Canada’s largest-ever philanthropic commitment to climate action, announced late last week, includes $150 million from the Trottier Family Foundation, $100 million from the Peter Gilgan Foundation, $18 million from the Ronald S. Roadburg Foundation, and $15 million from the Chisholm Thomson Family Foundation, the Globe and Mail reported.

Carbon capture entrepreneur and geophysicist David Keith and Kirsten Anderson have pledged $10 million, the Vancouver-based Sitka Foundation $6 million, Toronto-based Vohra Miller Foundation $5 million, and longtime climate advocate Allan Shiff $1 million.

All the donors have been previously involved in supporting climate solutions in some capacity.

Eric Campbell, executive director of the Clean Economy Fund, which is set to coordinate the spending, said each of the nine funders will decide its own specific priorities. But the dollars are all to spent on climate change mitigation and spread across five priority areas:

• Clean energy and electrification;

• Industrial sector transition;

• City-level approaches;

• People and democracy, with a focus on “low-income, Indigenous, and youth-centred activities”;

• Policy and finance.

Hearts and Minds

“I see three pathways for philanthropy to achieve system-wide transformations: policy, finance, and culture,” Campbell told The Energy Mix in an email. “Culture-focused initiatives are those that build the popular demand, i.e. buy-in, for these transformations.” So “there is a balance to be struck, and strategically-targeted philanthropy can help strike it.”

On Monday, two environmental philanthropy leaders homed in on the cultural dimensions of the work.

“I don’t think we’ve spent enough money on telling stories,” said Small Change Fund President Burkhard Mausberg. “We’re in a battle for the hearts and minds of Canadians, and that’s the battle that Donald Trump won.” He cited past successes, from the fight against acid rain in the 1980s to the successful effort to turn Ontario farmers from opponents to avid supporters of the Ontario Greenbelt, that involved reaching out and listening beyond the environmental community’s core supporters.

“What’s fascinating about this for me is that these are some of the titans,” he said. “These folks who come forward have a strong and long history as part of corporate Canada. And what that tells me is that the concern about climate change is not just limited to hippie dippies.”

Now, the next step is for funders to commit to climate philanthropy because it supports the other granting priorities they’ve established. “Where are the funders that support health care?” He asked. “Where are the funders that invest in social systems and social change? I hope other funders that have historically not invested in climate change action will start to come out of the woodwork.”

Devika Shah, executive director of Environment Funders Canada, said the people and democracy stream in the funding announcement is an important, relatively recent addition to climate philanthropy that should receive at least half of the new funds. “We can throw lots and lots more money at the problem,” she said, but “it’s important to make sure the money we do have is used as strategically and effectively as possible.” That means moving beyond the way the climate community has traditionally reached out to build a much wider base of support.

“What we need is far more people power, grassroot cultural change, and political activism and engagement to provide the political currency that is required—what gives any politician, even Donald Trump, the licence to do good things for climate,” she told The Mix.

Compared to the continuing effort to build grassroot support for climate solutions, “the dots that need to be connected are not so technical at all,” Shah added. “If you talk to the average Trump supporter here in Canada, they’ll say climate change is too big a problem, there’s nothing we can do about it, and all these solutions people are coming up with like building retrofits and electric vehicle infrastructure are just ways to make rich people richer that don’t actually solve the problem.”

Shifting that sentiment means pivoting “to an understanding of what climate change is going to mean for them and for all of us over the next five to 10 years, and most importantly, to a much better understanding of the big sources of power that are stealing power and resources from everyday people. Because right now, that target is incorrectly pointed at the government,” not at polluting industries and the regulations that enable them.

“That’s really at the heart of why people are dealing with affordability challenges, and why we’re dealing with the increasing threat of climate change.”

Getting More Resources Onboard

One recurring theme of last week’s announcement is the need to bring more funding and more funding sources into climate philanthropy. Canadians gave only $106 million to climate philanthropy in 2022, Campbell wrote in a September blog post, and the 0.9% of Canadian philanthropic giving devoted to climate is “well below the already-low global average of 1.6%.”

Trottier Family Foundation Executive Director Éric St-Pierre said the new funding commitment could unlock far greater funding from multiple sources. “The solutions to solve climate change and ensure a strong, decarbonized economy are largely clear,” he wrote in an email. “Increasing climate philanthropy will only increase wider understanding and buy-in for these climate solutions, including through increased funding. Climate philanthropy can also have a domino effect in that it de-risks projects and can unlock much greater amounts of public and private capital, vastly increasing funding to address climate change.”

While the $405 million “may seem significant,” he wrote on LinkedIn, “we need other high-net-worth families and foundations to join us and help address this challenge. Solving the climate crisis in Canada will inevitably better all Canadians.”

[Disclosure: Energy Mix Productions is grateful and proud to be partly funded by the Trottier Family Foundation, and a partner of Small Change Fund.]

Shah said last week’s announcement will help bring those new supporters onboard by creating the equivalent of the donor walls that hospitals use to acknowledge their biggest contributors. “Coming together and showing that we do have a community and a place where new funders can come and join actually goes a long way in helping funders to be more amenable to supporting our cause,” she said. “So hats off to the Clean Economy Fund for creating that platform.”

Some of that shift will come from generational change, she said. “More and more, we’re seeing younger generations stepping into their families’ philanthropic endeavours. They’re coming with higher levels of concern and pushing their families to go places that might have traditionally felt uncomfortable. Because rather than finding a cure for cancer or fortifying the arts, the work required in climate change is very much about disrupting the status quo—which doesn’t always go hand in hand with the segment of society that has amassed large amounts of wealth.”

But on that score, “the third factor that’s going to increase climate philanthropy is climate change,” she added. “It’s really easy to give up,” but “at this point everyone knows that every 1/10 of a degree matters, so there’s always incentive for us to keep it from getting worse and to work together as a community.”

Campbell said Trottier Family Foundation board member Sylvie Trottier “frequently points out that climate change multiplies and magnifies the harm of almost every other philanthropic cause,” from poverty alleviation to food insecurity. “While we’re seeing more and more philanthropists prioritizing climate change in their charitable giving, I hope we’ll see many others making the same decision as they draw those connections and fully appreciate the importance of philanthropic support for climate solutions.”

The Story So Far

The fund includes $100 million previously announced by the Ivey Foundation, Canada’s sixth-oldest family foundation, which announced in late fall, 2022 that it will spend out its entire endowment and close its doors in 2027.

Ivey had already done a great deal to advance climate action in Canada, helping to launch organizations like the Transition Accelerator, the Canadian Climate Institute, the Institute for Sustainable Finance, Efficiency Canada, Farmers for Climate Solutions, and the Canada Climate Law Initiative.

“We’re not presenting this in a way that we’re trying to be alarmist, but the reality is that we are moving far more slowly than we need to be moving on these issues,” Ivey Foundation President Bruce Lourie told The Energy Mix at the time. “I hear the word ‘ambition’ a lot, but we don’t need to increase our ambition. We need to increase our action. Politicians like to talk about ambition, but we like to talk about getting things done.”

Lourie cited green infrastructure, building retrofits, grid decarbonization, and new transmission lines as areas where the country must move farther and faster.

“We need to do a whole lot of stuff that is very, very easy to understand, very tangible, but we’re just not doing a very good job of it in Canada right now,” he said. “The world’s not doing a great job, but Canada is doing a much poorer job than a lot of our peer countries. So we’re hoping that with our initial resources, we can help accelerate the pace and scale of the transformation we need to make.”