The Climate Justice Resilience Fund (CJRF) makes grants to support women, youth, and Indigenous Peoples in building and sharing their own solutions for climate resilience. It aims to build voice and power in communities on the frontlines of the climate crisis, working currently in East Africa, South Asia, and the North American Arctic. The Fund also has a small sub-portfolio on global policy and finance.
In mid-2020, CJRF commissioned a review of its strategy and portfolio. The review, conducted by ISET International, found that “CJRF has a compelling and innovative portfolio” and noted “signals of both initial impact and potentially significant contribution towards long-term, sustainable change.” The review also made several recommendations for improving Fund strategy and operations.
CJRF held a webinar on January 28, 2021 to share review highlights with approximately 100 members of its community -- grantees, funders, advisors, board members, and others. After hearing from the evaluators, Fund Director, and discussants, participants worked in small groups to share their reflections on the review and identify lessons for CJRF and other funders. The following five themes arose from these discussions.
Theme 1: Empowering those first hit by the climate crisis holds potential for breakthrough change.
CJRF elevates climate resilience through a justice lens by supporting partners to create and share their own solutions based on first-hand wisdom and experience. Both the review and the discussions highlighted the flexibility that underpins this strategy. Giving partners space and freedom to create and innovate holds promise for fostering novel, practical, and potentially far-reaching solutions, beyond incremental improvements and the common “business-as-usual” approaches.
Theme 2: Joint learning among CJRF partners and the broader global community will strengthen collective understanding, insight, and long-term outcomes.
CJRF partners are taking bold steps, often trying things for the first time. Experimentation—trial, error, adjustment, and iterative improvement cycles—takes time, often years or sometimes longer, especially when addressing entrenched barriers and inequities. Many CJRF partners at the event felt more learning from each other’s insights will strengthen strategies and impact. Ideally, joint learning will also include others aligned in intent, such as national governments, other philanthropies, and other potential allies. Participants were eager to hear more about upcoming CJRF-supported learning opportunities.
Theme 3: To realize lasting, long-term change, funders must consider depth versus breadth of funding support, as well as longevity of commitment.
The longevity and depth of funders’ commitment to strategies, geographies, and constituents were highlighted as critical success factors for supporting meaningful change on equity and resilience. Participants expressed concern, in particular, that progress will be limited, or potentially reversed, in CJRF’s priority geographies without commitment beyond the Fund’s current 2022 funding horizon. Many participants discouraged CJRF from spreading itself thin by expanding its number of geographies. At the same time, participants grappled with the likelihood that any focus on (only) a few geographic areas means limiting impact, given the widespread need in areas across the globe.
With this in mind, collaboration among a range of funders represents one way for a small, focused portfolio to inform broader funding decisions. Further, CJRF can emphasize that enabling the change needed requires long-term commitment and stamina, not expecting structural inequalities and norms to change quickly or for transformational change to be realized in a few years or grant cycles. This is even more the case in an unprecedented global pandemic, when so much work has been delayed, and both social and economic impacts undermine progress on climate justice objectives. Yet participants expressed optimism that this unique moment may also facilitate breakthroughs not thought possible before.
Theme 4: Transformative change requires clarity around the connections between local work and larger-scale systems.
A focus on grassroots, bottom-up approaches would be strengthened with clearer connections to broader systems-level change and global priorities. It is important to ensure that local- and global-level efforts inform and reinforce each other. Of course, retaining locally driven priorities and truth, while also focusing on scaling and systemic change at higher levels, poses a challenging balancing act for funders such as CJRF. Discussion participants encouraged CJRF to take on this challenge as a core element of its learning agenda, and as an aim of its future strategy.
Theme 5: Meeting the depth and urgency of the challenge requires many hands. The current “perfect storm” of global crises underscores the need for capacity support and solidarity.
CJRF has a lean, two-person staff. Many discussion participants flagged that more staff capacity would be not only helpful to realize CJRF’s mandate and potential, but also potentially instrumental in areas for improvement highlighted by the review, such as decision-making transparency, enabling partner co-creation, and realizing local-global linkages. The COVID-19 crisis exacerbates the challenge, including limitations for invaluable in-person collaboration.
CJRF staff and Review Board members will feed this discussion into their management response to the review and their future strategy development.
Visit this page for a summary of the review or the full report.