2024
Annual Report

Global Greengrants is a leading funder at the intersection of gender and the environment, invites other funders to increase gender and climate portfolios, and facilitates philanthropic opportunities for feminist climate and environmental groups. Here’s how we did that in 2024:

$25 Million in Gender-Just Grantmaking

We reached a significant grantmaking milestone—since we began intentionally funding at the intersection of gender and the environment in 2015, we have made more than $25 million in grants to grassroots groups working on gender-just climate action. This is an important milestone for two reasons: First, less than 1% of philanthropic funding is directed towards gender-just climate action. Second, before 2015 most of the environmental justice field had given little attention to the ways that gender and climate intersect. Our significant investment has built credibility and trust with other funders as we amplify the need for more and deeper investment in gender-just climate and environmental action.

Read more on our website.

Seeds for Harvest: Funding Gender, Climate, and Environmental Justice

Global Greengrants, in collaboration with Prospera International Network of Women’s Funds (Prospera), the Global Alliance for Green and Gender Action (GAGGA), and the Human Rights Funder Network (HRFN), launched the Seeds for Harvest: Funding gender, climate, and environmental justice report to showcase the funding landscape for gender, environmental, and climate justice movements. Through data analysis, case studies, and identification of trends and opportunities, the report offers valuable insights for funders, including:

• Gender-just climate action remains deeply underfunded: Only 1.2% of the $4.1B in human rights funding for 2019, and just 5% of nearly 27,000 grants, considered gender, climate, and environment.
• Public foundations are a top gender and climate funding source: Public foundations awarded 91% of human rights grants focused on gender, climate, and environment.
• Global Greengrants is a leading public funder at this intersection: 45% of public foundation grants came from Global Greengrants.
• There is more work to be done: The collaborative ecosystem of feminist, women’s rights, and environmental justice funds is capable and ready to receive at least $100M annually for gender, climate, and environmental justice action.

The report affirmed the importance of continuing our work at the intersection of gender, climate, and environmental justice—both through our grantmaking and through inviting other environmental and climate funders to join us.

Image credit: Arjun Anand Elavally Anandan

Roots Rising: Growing Grassroots Gender-Just Climate Action

In 2024, Global Greengrants, the Global Alliance for Green and Gender Action (GAGGA), and Women’s Environment and Development Organization (WEDO), solidified the Roots Rising campaign, adding Alimentacion Red de Feministas, MENA Fem Movement for Economic, Development and Ecological Justice (MENAFem), and Pesticide Action Network Asia Pacific (PAN) to the steering committee. Roots Rising aims to mobilize at least $100M of new funding for gender-just climate action by 2030.

Roots Rising is a direct response to the brilliance of grassroots feminist climate action, the significant lack of funding, and the increasing need to transform funding commitments into climate action. It goes beyond mere numbers; it nurtures trust, collaboration, and transformation. The Roots Rising campaign, a partnership of institutions with decades of experience funding grassroots gender-just climate work, includes grassroots collectives, regional networks, women’s funds, socio-environmental justice funds, and NGOs. These partners form an archipelago-like structure to promote gender-just climate action at local, national, and international levels within an interconnected, decentralized structure.

Roots Rising provides a first-of-its-kind participatory platform to attract and absorb higher quantities of funding from governments and philanthropy that otherwise do not reach the grassroots. By leveraging existing and established entities, the campaign will ensure that funding flows directly to feminist grassroots movements, eliminating unnecessary hurdles and guaranteeing alignment with gender-just principles. Importantly, Roots Rising isn’t reinventing the wheel; it bridges the gap between existing climate finance and women’s rights funding streams, strategically channeling resources towards the communities that need them most and who hold the most transformative potential for leading us towards healthier people and planet.

Global Greengrants deems this work as crucial to our mission—when funders collaborate, we can amplify our collective potential to resource gender-just climate movements for greater impact.

A New Funder Learning and Action Co-Laboratory

Less than 0.1% of all foundation funding focuses explicitly on women and the environment. Global Greengrants is committed to closing this funding gap, and one way we are achieving this is through supporting funder learning among the climate and human rights philanthropic community.

In 2019, Global Greengrants and Prospera created a Funder Learning Community for Women and the Environment (FLC). Co-hosted by the Ford and MacArthur Foundations, the FLC was the only coordinated space where those in philanthropy interested in the intersection of women’s rights and environmental justice could join peer-to-peer learning about this issue area and share practical grantmaking strategies. Through its work, the FLC collectively mobilized approximately $4M from funder members that were previously not funding at the intersection of gender and the environment.

Based on an extensive evaluation of the FLC, the Learning Community launched a new phase in 2023 by creating The Funder Learning and Action Co-Laboratory for Gender, Environmental, and Climate Justice (FLAC), which merges experimental grantmaking with ongoing learning. In its first phase in 2024, FLAC came together to learn about grassroots experiences at the nexus of gender, environmental, and climate justice initiatives and how to best fund the communities, movements, and activities that work towards these intersectional initiatives.

The FLAC will begin experimenting with how to apply the learnings within a collaborative funding mechanism to begin their first round of grantmaking in 2025.

Essential to funding at these intersections effectively is building relationships, networks, and honing capacities to constructively challenge ourselves as individuals, institutions, and communities of practice. Global Greengrants is proud of the role we play in innovating gender-just solutions and collaborative funding through mechanisms like FLAC.

The CLIMA Fund is a collaboration between Global Greengrants Fund, Grassroots International, Thousand Currents, and Urgent Action Fund for Feminist Activism—a like-minded community funding grassroots movements to cool the planet and build resilience around the globe. Working together, we give influential funders a simple and effective way to invest in grassroots climate movements.

Since it launched, the CLIMA Fund has raised over $35M, supported 1,400 grassroots groups, and produced narrative interventions that have shaped the philanthropic sector. Importantly, together we have created a culture of trust and solidarity, strengthening our respective work. In 2024, the CLIMA Fund moved $5M through 278 grants to movements led by Indigenous Peoples (67%), women (86%), youth (49%), and peasants (54%) in 77 countries. We will continue to work together to uniquely influence and shift philanthropic sector practices towards giving significantly larger and better quality resources to grassroots climate justice movements.

“CLIMA is one of a kind. It is a collaboration of four highly effective organizations that have first-hand knowledge of the realities of climate change impacts on the ground. Based on the decades-long experience of the participating organizations, they are providing solutions and strategies based in agroecology, renewable energy, community resistance to extractive industries, and support for indigenous peoples as guardians of their forests. I highly recommend funders and NGOs to read CLIMA’s Soil to Sky report that provides a detailed analysis and insight into grassroots solutions in addressing climate change.”

– Swift Foundation, CLIMA funder

Global Greengrants supports community approaches led by fisherfolk, Indigenous communities, laborers, and farmers who directly experience the impacts of climate change, and often know the most effective solutions. These communities hold generations of essential environmental knowledge, maintain a majority of the world's remaining biodiversity, and are often the first to experience and respond to climate impacts.

Supporting community-led conservation is essential as we face an unprecedented global loss of biological diversity. Twenty-five percent of Global Greengrants Fund's grantees identify their work as supporting biodiversity and conservation of nature. These grants highlight the effectiveness of Indigenous Peoples and local communities in stewarding biodiversity, and the importance of centering them in all conservation decision-making.

To advocate for this idea at an international level, Global Greengrants supported the launch and dissemination of the "Core Human Rights Principles for Private Conservation Organizations and Funders," which emerged from a collaborative process overseen by the United Nations Environment Programme from 2022-2024 to clarify how existing human rights norms and standards apply to private conservation organizations and funders. The principles were the subject of extensive consultations with rightsholders, including Indigenous Peoples, rights-based organizations, experts, private conservation organizations, and funders. Overall, adherence to these principles fosters a more responsible, rights-based and gender-inclusive approach to conservation, which ultimately benefits all.

Looking ahead, Global Greengrants will continue to promote understanding of the principles and to connect them with ongoing support for Indigenous-led conservation projects demonstrating a rights-based approach to conservation.

Conferences and international climate meetings offer important opportunities for shifting narratives—both about the importance of grassroots environmental solutions, and about the importance of better funding those solutions.

Image credit: Peter Walle/Honnold Foundation

We seize these opportunities in two ways: 1) We partner directly with advisors and grantees to influence funders and climate decision-makers by supporting their attendance, interventions, and actions in a broad range of international spaces, and 2) Key Global Greengrants staff also attend climate and philanthropic conferences to advance funder-to-funder conversations about the importance of shifting power and resources to Global South climate and environmental justice movements.

Image credit: Global Greengrants Fund

Together, these efforts promote the importance of community-led responses as the most effective in curbing carbon emissions and influence the philanthropic field toward deeper investment in grassroots movements.

Image credit: Global Greengrants Fund

In 2024, we supported grantee partners, advisors, and staff to attend influential conferences like:

• At the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues (UNPFII) in April, Global Greengrants proudly supported the active participation of two youth advisors from the Indigenous Peoples Advisory Board. These young leaders engaged in key discussions, workshops, and advocacy spaces within this vital UN mechanism. In addition to supporting their substantive participation, Global Greengrants also helped create valuable networking and outreach opportunities, connecting the youth delegates with global stakeholders, policymakers, and organizations focused on Indigenous issues.
• At the Human Rights Funders Network (HRFN) Funding Futures Festival in April, Global Greengrants staff joined a panel exploring how Global South community funding networks build long-term accountable relationships with communities, grow grassroots philanthropy, and heal the planet. The discussion highlighted how these networks tap into the abundance of community initiatives, creating systems that support local actions with or without external resources, while centering feminist principles and climate justice. Panelists also included representatives from Social-Environmental Funds of the Global South / Alianza Fondos del Sur, Fundo Casa Socioambiental, and the Global Fund for Community Foundations.
• Global Greengrants staff attended the 2024 UN Climate Week in New York City in September, engaging with advisors, donor partners, and allies to strengthen partnerships, share insights, and advance collective strategies for climate justice. As part of the week’s activities, Global Greengrants co-hosted a well-attended event alongside the Honnold Foundation and Thousand Currents, which centered a conversation with movement partners about how trust-based philanthropy can scale movement-driven solutions and catalyze systemic change.
• In October, Global Greengrants CEO Laura García participated in a panel on “Financing Inclusive Climate Action: Investing in and Empowering Communities,” as a part of the White House Wilson Center’s Forum on Advancing Inclusive Climate Action in Foreign Policy and Development. Laura used her platform to remind the room that solving the climate crisis is fundamentally about shifting power imbalances.
• For the first time, Global Greengrants supported staff and advisors to attend the Convention on Biological Diversity’s COP16, held in Cali, Colombia in October. Staff and advisors were inspired by the presence of many members of the Global Greengrants network, as well as the powerful conversations Indigenous communities and grassroots movements pushed. We also worked with partners to advocate for the UNEP Human Rights Principles for Conservation Organizations and Funders, and provided recommendations for a new Forest Tenure Pledge that can have long-lasting impact in the territories of Indigenous Peoples, Local Communities, and Afro-descendant Peoples. Watch a video from Global Greengrants advisors reflecting on their experience.
• In November, COP29 took place in Baku, Azerbaijan. While this year’s climate talks resulted in a $300 billion dollar annual commitment to develop climate adaptations and mitigations, grassroots groups expressed deep disappointment that this number fails to reach the estimated $1 trillion needed annually. Many grantee partners and members of the Global Greengrants advisory network were on the ground in Baku participating in panels, organizing digital campaigns, and pushing for just and sustainable climate solutions.
• In December, Global Greengrants hosted a strategic dialogue on gender and climate justice at the AWID Forum in Bangkok, Thailand, organized by the Association for Women’s Rights in Development (AWID). The dialogue brought together funders and activists to collaborate on strengthening support for gender-just climate action globally, and addressed the critical funding gap for feminist climate organizations, which currently receive only 0.2% of foundation grants despite their essential work. Panelists discussed the power of feminist grassroots climate organizing and the challenges they face in securing resources. Panel participants included members of DIVA for Equality, Women Action Toward Economic Development (WATED), FRIDA Fund, and ALIMENTACCION.