Community Solutions to the Climate Crisis
Despite our best efforts to combat the climate crisis – including the exploitative practices and systems that fuel it – the vast majority of our financial resources are actively circulating, supporting, and enabling the extractive economy (the dig, burn, dump economy). Our campaign aims to build economic, community, and political power by restoring land and wealth into the collective hands of communities most impacted by environmental injustices and the climate crisis.
While we need to be shifting trillions of dollars to community-led solutions, the Reinvest Campaign calls on philanthropy to divest $100 million from the extractive economy, and reinvest it into regenerative economy projects led, developed, owned, and governed by Indigenous Peoples, Black, Latinx, Asian Pacific Islander, and poor white communities who share legacies of racial and economic oppression and social justice organizing.
Will you join us in moving $10 million to bring to life four regenerative economy projects in 2023?
To learn more information about our projects, please contact our Reinvest Campaign Organizer at jolene@climatejusticealliance.org.
Trust the Frontlines and Invest in Communities
Of the roughly $93 trillion flowing throughout global financial markets in 2020, nearly $1.2 trillion of that came from U.S. based philanthropic investments. During that year, those same foundations gave out $88.6 billion in grants. This means that philanthropic institutions in the U.S contributed over 13 times the amount of money to extractive global stock markets as they did to all of their focus areas, of which solutions to the climate crisis are consistently one of the least funded issues.
What ways can you give to this campaign?
The Reinvest campaign will work with each foundation to determine the best way their support can benefit our member projects, but generally we are looking for:
1) Unrestricted grants to be used as integrated capital to ensure the long-term success of regenerative projects.
2) Direct investments with non-extractive terms, which centers the needs of regenerative projects over those of the investors.
If you’re interested in learning more about the campaign, collaborating with us to promote it within your networks, and/or if you would like our support organizing your peers/family to move money to this campaign, please contact our Reinvest Campaign Organizer, Jolene Mafnas, at jolene@climatejusticealliance.org.
Our campaign aims to build economic, community, and political power by restoring land and wealth into the collective hands of communities most impacted by environmental injustices and the climate crisis. These community-led models and climate justice solutions are central to building the new local, regenerative, vibrant economies we need to address the root causes of climate change and racial injustice.
The rise of socially responsible investing has started a conversation and moved some investments away from the worst actors, but the scale of the crises we face requires bold shifts and systemic changes. It requires us to take control of large amounts of capital that was extracted from our communities and put it to use supporting community-led and -governed solutions to the interwoven climate, economic, and racial catastrophes we are facing.