August 1, 2022
The application period for our new governing board is now closed.
The Climate Justice Resilience Fund (CJRF) is embarking on an exciting transformation from a donor-led fund to a fully participatory, movement-facing and constituent-led fund. As a key step in this change process, our current Review Board (comprised of funders) has decided to hand off leadership to a new governing Board comprised of activists, practitioners, thinkers, and others. We are now recruiting 7-9 members for this new governing Board, which will oversee and support the second six-year phase of the CJRF.
Watch the information session recording, review the FAQs, or keep reading for more information.
Building on our previous five years of work, the new Board will shape the strategic directions of the CJRF’s second phase, including its geographic scope, grantmaking priorities, and decision-making processes. Beginning in the fourth quarter of 2022, the Board will develop and implement a new, more participatory process for CJRF grantmaking. It also will develop a strategy to expand CJRF’s support for movement-building and organizational strengthening in the climate justice field. Board membership represents an opportunity for activists, practitioners, and thinkers to apply their lived experience and expertise to an important governance transition, and to guide the deployment of significant sums of funding for climate justice.
This document provides background information and application instructions for prospective new Board members. Please submit applications between Aug. 1 and Sept. 5, 2022. A selection committee comprised of CJRF funders, partners, advisors and allies will choose between seven and nine Board members in October 2022.
About CJRF
CJRF is a grantmaking initiative that supports women, youth, and Indigenous Peoples to create and share their own solutions for climate resilience. We put people, their rights, and their lived experience directly at the center of climate action.
CJRF works by pooling funds from private foundations. Since our launch in 2016, we have deployed over US$20 million through 43 major grant partnerships, primarily in East Africa, the North American Arctic, and the Bay of Bengal. We are one of the first major philanthropic initiatives framed explicitly around climate justice, and one of few that works internationally on climate resilience. We also have hosted several initiatives to promote funder learning and collaboration on climate justice, and launched a unique re-granting partnership on climate-induced loss and damage in 2021.
Learn more about our work at www.cjrfund.org .
CJRF Vision and Values
We believe action on climate change offers powerful opportunities to address structural inequities. Climate justice fundamentally means transforming unjust systems that have caused climate change and people’s differential vulnerability to the crisis. As CJRF envisions its second phase, we want both to fund work on this transformation process and to undergo transformation within our own decision-making systems. The aim is to shift decision-making power from our staff and funders into the hands of activists and practitioners. To that end, we seek to build a new CJRF Board and grantmaking system that embody the following values:
People Power. Our decision-making will put people, their rights, and their lived experiences at the heart of the climate action we support. Movement building will be a central focus.
Intersectionality. Our strategy and processes will recognize that people carry multiple identities, and these identities intersect to shape their priorities, agency, and vulnerability in the climate crisis.
Diversity. CJRF’s grantmaking centers women, youth, and Indigenous Peoples, so it is a priority to constitute a diverse Board. We welcome Board members from all genders, ages, races, nationalities, and ethnic identities.
Inclusion. Our Board will develop participatory decision-making practices that move at the speed of trust and enable CJRF to listen to wisdom from many voices. We will ensure that marginalized groups have opportunities and capacities to participate meaningfully in our work.
Transparency. We will make information about all aspects of CJRF’s grantmaking processes and decisions clear and widely accessible.
Iterative Learning. We will work in a spirit of iterative learning, including learning from mistakes. We know we won’t set everything up right from the outset, but we won’t let perfection become the enemy of progress. We will revisit and adjust our new grantmaking systems within two years.
Local-to-Global Change. We believe that igniting large-scale systems change can—and should—start with community-level action. Our strategy, priorities, and processes will reflect this belief.
Board Functions
In alignment with the above vision and values, the Board will shepherd CJRF’s transition from its current, donor-led configuration to a new, more participatory, movement-facing and constituent-led structure. By the end of March 2023, we aim to commence CJRF’s new phase of grantmaking, for which the Board will provide ongoing guidance and oversight. Major Board functions are as follows:
Transition Functions (2022-23)
Finalize the CJRF Phase 2 governance structure
Establish grantmaking policies and procedures
Establish operations strategy, including staffing
Ongoing Functions (2023 onward)
Oversight of grantmaking
Oversight of annual planning and budgeting
Engagement with CJRF funders and prospective funders
Supervision of CJRF staff
The Board will be supported by current CJRF staff, and by a transition coordinator (to be recruited).
Board Member Qualifications and Expectations
CJRF is seeking Board members who have a spirit of creativity, collaboration, flexibility, and learning for a new model of leadership and accountability for CJRF. We make grants increasingly at the intersections of various climate, Indigenous, youth, human rights, and women’s movements, and we welcome applicants with interest and experience working in one or more of them. Board members are expected to bring a commitment to climate justice and a track record of related work.
Board members will be joining CJRF on an exciting journey that has many unknowns, and which make some Board activities and responsibilities difficult to name at this moment. Current expectations of members include:
Meeting Attendance: Board meetings will take place primarily via Zoom. Meetings will occur monthly through May of 2023. They are likely to decrease in frequency once new systems are established. Meetings will be held in English through October 2023; we plan to expand our working languages in Year 2.
Between-meeting Work: Board members are expected to volunteer for specific tasks, to serve on ad hoc committees, and to engage with staff and consultants in a timely manner outside of Board meetings. Between-meeting work will likely require 3-6 hours of time per month through May 2023 and will decrease thereafter.
Public Events: Board members are invited (but not required) to attend public events sponsored by CJRF, and will on occasion be asked to represent CJRF publicly at non-CJRF events.
Team Spirit: Applicants should have a demonstrated capacity for effective teamwork. They also must be willing to live with some uncertainty as CJRF’s new decision making systems get built.
Term of Service: CJRF is recruiting applications for both one- and two-year terms. One-year terms will run Nov. 1, 2022- Oct. 31, 2023; two-year terms will run Nov. 1, 2022 - Oct. 31, 2024.
Board Member Compensation
CJRF will pay each Board member a stipend of $5,000 USD per year as an acknowledgement of their time commitment. This may be made as a direct personal payment or as a grant to their organization, to be agreed individually with each member. CJRF will reimburse all travel expenses for in-person meetings and will assist Board members in accessing any technology needed to ensure participation in virtual meetings.
Eligibility
We are looking for a diverse set of candidates, including: elders and youth; women, men and nonbinary; those who work at local, regional, national and global levels; those who bring lived experience with climate justice to the collective work; and those who have experience through education and studies. We welcome Board members of all genders, ages, races, nationalities, and ethnic identities, and encourage those who identify as women, youth, and Indigenous to apply. We especially encourage applications by people from places in the world where the climate crisis is most destructive and where communities are hit hardest. We expect that some, but not all, of our Board members will have past experience in grantmaking. Applicants do not need to have previous or current engagement with the Climate Justice Resilience Fund.
Employees and project participants of current and former CJRF grantee organizations are eligible to apply. Non-funder members of CJRF’s Council of Advisors and employees or board members of grantmaking intermediaries are also eligible. Note that the Board will develop a conflict of interest policy, which will limit Board members’ ability to advocate for grants to their own organizations.
Because we are seeking to create a space for governance that is not directly controlled by the funder community, we respectfully ask individual philanthropists, UN employees, government-based funders, and employees or trustees of foundations not to apply for Board membership. There will be other meaningful ways for funders to engage.
Application Instructions
To apply for a Board seat, please provide the following information, including a purpose statement in English (written or by video), between Aug. 1 and Sept. 5, 2022 to hilary.heath@cjrfund.org. The purpose statement should include the following information.
Applicant Information (written):
Name of Applicant:
Contact email:
Nationality(ies):
Current place of residence:
Indicate if you prefer a one or two-year term:
One sentence summary of your interest in the position:
Purpose Statement (written or by video):
Tell us about yourself and your interest in serving on the CJRF Board. Consider including:
Your community and elders/ancestors
How your past and/or current experience can help CJRF on its journey to become more inclusive and constituent-driven. This can be a story about how you work with your community, a team, your elders, or how you engage with systems of power.
An example that describes how you work collaboratively with people who are different from you.
Your experience with, and relationship to, climate justice and/or resilience.
Your experience with, and relationship to, civil society, advocacy, and/or movements.
Your experience with, and relationship to, CJRF’s current core constituencies (women, youth, and Indigenous Peoples) and/or our current geographies (Bay of Bengal, East Africa, and Arctic regions).
Your past experience making and/or receiving grants.
How you believe you would benefit by serving on the CJRF Board.
Any other information you would like to share about what you would bring to the Board and how you would contribute to it.
Written purpose statements must be 1000 words or less; videos must be six minutes or shorter. CJRF will disqualify all applications that exceed these limits.
For More Information
CJRF held an information session for prospective Board members via Zoom on August 17 and 18, 2022 to answer questions about the application process. We encourage prospective applicants to watch the session recording.
Based on questions submitted for the information session, we also created FAQs. If you are not able to find the answers to your questions through the recording or FAQs, email hilary.heath@cjrfund.org.
To learn more about CJRF, please see our website at www.cjrfund.org.
CJRF is a fiscally sponsored project of the New Venture Fund, a 501(c)3 charity registered in the United States. Our current core funders are Oak Foundation, The Kendeda Fund, the Robert Bosch Foundation, and independent philanthropist MacKenzie Scott.