Foundations Shouldn’t Shrink From Supporting Marches to Curb Climate Change

“Easy” is a word rarely used to describe street protests. But as such things go, last month’s march in New York City, which attracted some 400,000 people to promote policies that curb climate change, was just that.

Unlike civil-rights protests, which required real physical and moral courage, or issues of fierce contention like war, that daylong walk was about as uncontroversial as a walk to cure cancer.

Oddly, this wasn’t obvious to one important group: philanthropists.

Despite the large number of foundations now dedicated to solving climate change, and a growing consensus that we need people in the street to move politicians, foundations big and small provided only about $600,000 toward the $3-million it cost to organize what became the largest climate march in U.S. history. And of 82 foundation staff members who attended a webinar in advance of the event hosted by Avaaz.org, a global community of activists, only one came forward to support it.

How can this be?

At a time when billionaires regularly make news with major new philanthropic projects, people seeking a more stable climate couldn’t find much urgent organizing money, even though many private donors understand that Congress failed to act precisely because it saw so little public attention on the issue.

“Climate legislation failed in Congress in 2010 because members of the Senate saw no public clamor for action—even as lobbyists stormed the Capitol to argue against it,” says Reid Detchon, vice president for energy and climate at the United Nations Foundation. “Corporate money is a powerful persuader on issues that lack popular engagement, but a truly aroused and organized public will get its way 10 times out of 10.”

Ricken Patel, head of Avaaz.org, says, “Everyone recognizes that addressing climate change is in large part a problem of political will. But foundations are famously risk-averse. And their general skittishness around advocacy and mobilization is now one of the greatest barriers we face in addressing climate change.” (Avaaz.org itself recently raised donations from 58,000 people for its climate campaign from one email blast and paid for much of the climate march from its own coffers.)

But Mr. Patel argues that, in fact, big foundations don’t understand the crucial role of public mobilization.

“We have found many foundations in the climate area to be, in general, risk-averse to the point of incompetence, lacking basic understanding of the crucial role of public mobilization in addressing climate change, and sometimes obsessed with navel-gazing process to the point of doing harm to their grantees. They need to up their game.”

Why don’t they?

At least one reason is just like that of business, which has been relatively silent: Speaking out on the desperate need for climate action is just too “political,” they fear. “I think most companies avoid alienating partners and customers—and count the fossil-fuel industry among them,” says Mr. Detchon.

Foundations, which can be policy-focused and politically averse, are often similarly staid. This is not surprising, because even though marching on climate may be easy for a person, there’s risk involved when a low-profile foundation supports demonstrations in the street. Looking back to the women’s-suffrage or the civil-rights movements, it hasn’t been a part of their historical DNA.

But is it really controversial to tell public leaders to protect our kids from more extreme weather like floods, fires, droughts, and superstorms? Should it be risky to challenge the political power of the highly profitable fossil-fuel industry?

In their defense, one foundation executive noted that tampering with nascent social movements might even hurt: “Nobody can wreck a movement like foundations,” the grant maker noted.

Mr. Detchon notes that “to be fair, I think some foundations fail to pony up because they aren’t sure it’s a good investment—that there will be a tangible effect. We won’t know, of course, unless we try it.”

Other risks foundations want to avoid include media criticism, possible alienation from the club of fellow grant makers, or the chance that conservative board members will put staff members on a short leash when they hear about involvement in a public protest they don’t like.

Iain Keith, a senior campaigner at Avaaz.org, notes that one of the key challenges in raising money to mobilize people to participate in marches and similar efforts is that the results can be hard to measure and therefore the investment harder to justify.

It’s for all these reasons that it’s easier and less controversial to support policy experts, public-opinion surveys, and new ways to communicate climate science.

And indeed, these are useful tools. But they are also conventional tools. And conventional means haven’t gotten us very close to reversing climate change, which is not a normal kind of problem. Fixing it is going to take more than just new ways of thinking. It’s going to take a complete change in how we approach things.

The truth of the matter is that climate change is technologically solvable, if only we can show leaders that it is good politics to solve it.

This is much easier if there are people in the street.

Already the march has been mentioned as a key moment at the U.N. climate summit held by Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon (who marched as well) and by Jim Yong Kim, president of the World Bank, Secretary of State John Kerry, and President Obama, all of whom seemed newly invigorated as a result of the huge display of public support.

Let’s hope foundations and corporations concerned about climate change were equally inspired.