The Climate Justice Resilience Fund (CJRF) provides grants to organizations that support women, youth, and Indigenous Peoples to create and share their own solutions for climate resilience. CJRF puts people, their rights, and their lived experience directly at the centre of climate action. Since 2016, CJRF has been led by a board comprised of foundation representatives, but in late 2022, they recruited a new governing board comprised of activists and practitioners from around the globe.

Climate change is accelerating, and it raises challenging questions about power and privilege – especially in philanthropy. For example, who should decide how a Bangladeshi woman rebuilds after a cyclone ravages the place where her children sleep? Should it be a set of rich, white Europeans on the board of a foundation? What about the choices a Maasai family faces when their herds die in the Horn of Africa’s drought? Should an American program officer decide whether that family gets money to regroup and restock, or to reskill and find a job in the city?

In other words, climate change raises the question of ‘Who decides?’ The Climate Justice Resilience Fund (CJRF) believes it makes sense for people on the frontlines of the climate crisis to hold the decision-making power over climate action. This approach is only fair – since it’s their lives and livelihoods at stake. Even more important, people who’ve experienced a particular cyclone or drought understand how local culture and politics mediate the outcomes of the event, so they are well-placed to take the lead in creating solutions that can really work for their community.

For the past six years, CJRF’s goal has been to support people on the frontlines to build voice and power, so they can decide what to do about climate change. Our grantmaking supports a range of organizations and activities through which communities implement, share, advocate for, and scale their own solutions. For example, two grants totalling USD $921,000 over five years have supported COAST Foundation’s work in southeast Bangladesh to address the links between climate shocks, education, domestic violence, and child marriage. COAST was founded in coastal Bangladesh and employs and organizes local people. Their leadership reports to a board that includes members of the communities where they work. COAST’s on-the-ground insights and understanding make them well-equipped for success, both with project implementation and policy advocacy.

CJRF’s investment in groups like COAST is practical and effective in that it supports the implementation of well-designed climate initiatives and development of local and national climate movements. Over time, as our grant partners’ success grows, our investment also shifts power within a larger organizational ecosystem that has long been dominated by international NGOs and Northern consultants. We believe this kind of power shift is needed to deconstruct unjust colonial, racial, and patriarchal systems – and it is critical to large-scale success in the climate fight.

In 2021, CJRF’s board decided we should also begin shifting power dynamics through how we do our grant decision-making, not just what we fund. November 2022 saw a major step in our transformation, with the appointment of a new board. By handing off power from a funder-led board to a board comprised of activists and practitioners, we aim to bring our own grantmaking processes in line with our belief that people facing the problems and doing the work should be calling the shots. The funders on our former board have relinquished traditional positional power, and those with lived experience of fighting the climate crisis are now our guides. 

Our search for our new governing board members began with an open call for applications in August 2022. We received more than 100 qualified applicants, most doing amazing things to advocate for climate justice. We formed a selection committee comprised of CJRF grant partners, board members, and advisors, who worked with staff to develop evaluation criteria and assess candidates. The aim was to formulate a board with a balance of skills, experiences, and perspectives, including broad geographic diversity and representation from CJRF’s core constituencies: women, youth, and Indigenous Peoples.

Our new nine-person board hails from eight countries across 20 time zones, with lived experience from the grassroots of the Congo Basin to the halls of the UN Green Climate Fund. They now hold responsibility for oversight of CJRF strategy, staff, and operations, and have full authority to decide how we should live up to our mission and values. Their insights will guide the fund’s future, and we expect them to correct areas where our early efforts may have missed the mark. Our new board aims to award its first grants in the coming months.  

Meaningful climate action requires power shifts in economic systems, women’s empowerment, inter-generational equity, and long-standing racial and colonial injustices. The Climate Justice Resilience Fund has spent years learning to fund these systems changes; now we are coming to embody such change, as an organization. 2023 will see powerful shifts in how we make decisions, who holds us to account, and what lessons we can offer to philanthropy and other climate funders.

Heather McGray is Director of the Climate Justice Resilience Fund.