By Heather McGray, CJRF Director
“[CJRF] is an incredible institution who have been very bold in putting their money and their structures where their mouth is in terms of shifting power to the South. It’s not an easy thing to do.”
–Funder representative interviewed by the ISET evaluation team
Climbing a mountain can be slow, hard, and tedious. It requires careful charting of challenges ahead, may entail cutbacks to move forward, and benefits from careful reflection of past treks. The Climate Justice Resilience Fund is taking a similar approach as we review insights from the recent evaluation of our first six years of grantmaking. We know that our path ahead is not linear, and as the quote above suggests: this work is challenging. It’s important that we celebrate our successes and recognize the progress we’re making, but also use the insights we’ve gained to keep climbing and growing.
Lessons to Build On
In the spring of 2023. we commissioned ISET International to review our portfolio of grants from CJRF Phase 1 (2017-22) and make recommendations for improvement in our second phase of grantmaking. We asked them to focus on the outcomes of our work in several areas that have been under discussion as we design our new strategy: systems transformation, movement-building, and ‘capacity bridging.’ Over seven months, they undertook interviews, convened focus groups, made site visits, read grant reports, and reviewed other CJRF materials to evaluate the portfolio of grants we supported. Through an outcomes harvesting approach, they identified and analyzed 88 noteworthy changes in the world to which our 50 grants contributed.
Overall, the evaluation gave CJRF high marks. The evaluators found that CJRF is recognized as a thought leader in philanthropy and offers a leading example of how to fund climate justice. They found “notable progress” on systems change, movement-building, and capacity bridging, and offered recommendations on how to build upon that success. The final evaluation report also includes reviews of CJRF’s geographic focus and our learning program.
In October 2023, CJRF’s board examined the evaluation findings through a series of small-group conversations among board members. We also hosted a webinar to share the results of the evaluation and gather feedback from our grantee partners, funders, and others in our community. The outcomes of that webinar have been incredibly rich. We invite you to watch the recording and read through the notes from the breakout groups. Below, we highlight three important insights from our evaluation process and feedback sessions that the CJRF team is now working to address and implement.
1. Strengthening Support for Shifting Systems
The evaluation made several recommendations about how CJRF could better support transformative changes in the social, political, cultural and economic systems that undermine climate justice. It encouraged us to fund a more cohesive portfolio around a smaller, more precisely defined set of systems, and to tighten our theory of change around how local and national action can drive shifts in broader global systems.
The idea of strengthening our approach to systems change resonated deeply with both board members and our broader community, but many questions remain around how to do this while taking an inclusive, community-led approach. CJRF does not want to become top-down either in defining specific systems or prescribing how our partners should shift them. Instead, we aim to create grantmaking processes that enable partners to bring their own experience and expertise to the process of prioritizing which systems need change, identifying points of leverage, and bringing in collaborators or other resources.
2. Movement Building Beyond Advocacy
CJRF believes that social movements are among the most powerful ways to shift oppressive systems and build a climate-just world. The evaluation identified ways in which CJRF has successfully supported movements, including examples of impactful resource mobilization, narrative shift, and the creation and strengthening of networks. However, our board is challenging us to do better. They have observed that our Phase I portfolio was heavily weighted toward policy advocacy and resilient livelihood initiatives, and that important avenues of movement-driven change were neglected.
We are now beginning to develop a framework for supporting movement-building that recognizes a broad spectrum of ways that movements become more powerful. Emerging priorities include a more rigorous use of intersectionality to support expansion and diversification of movements, as well as investment in the creation of open, caring spaces where movements can grow organically.
3. Bridging for Greater Impact
‘Capacity bridging’ is a relatively new term increasingly used by social movements to replace the terms ‘capacity building’ and ‘capacity development’. Many have argued that the concepts that underpin capacity building efforts are unjust in that they often value the capacities of those in power over those of local communities and practitioners. For example, funders may host “capacity building” activities for grassroots organizations around program design, evaluation, or reporting, but what really is being taught is how to accommodate Global North funders and how they operate. In contrast, capacity bridging recognizes and values the diversity of strengths that groups bring to the proverbial table. It explores how different organizations can work together to ‘bridge’ their respective capacities for mutual benefit, with the expectation that all groups will evolve, even funders and others that are already powerful.
ISET International’s evaluation found examples of capacity bridging in CJRF’s portfolio, including cases where partners accessed new decision-making spaces or developed empowering new relationships. It cited our board transition as an example of capacity bridging and identified specific ways that CJRF could further evolve our own systems to better bridge to groups with different capacities to ours. Implementation of some of these measures is already underway (see below); meanwhile, our staff and board are working to deepen our understanding of what capacity bridging means for what we fund, how we fund, and what else we do beyond funding. For example, we are exploring how we can develop communications and outreach work that more effectively challenges global funders to offer more (and more effective) support to grassroots and national-level organizations.
What Now?
CJRF has already been innovating in response to this portfolio review and our 2020 midterm review. In particular, we have made changes to our grantmaking processes that help us ‘bridge’ to the organizations and communities we support.
For example, we've been moving toward more flexible grants. In our first rounds of funding, we supported project grants with very specific expected results and budget. Our most recent round of grants included some that offered general operating support and some that funded broadly defined programs, rather than short-term projects. We have instituted a flexible budget template and asked partners to define their own grant timeframes, anywhere from two to four years.
Our staff also took on a large burden of the grant process by drafting concept notes for renewal grants that partners reviewed and approved. This stands in contrast to our old application process where partners put in the bulk of the work and CJRF undertook multiple rounds of review and approval. This approach was straightforward with these grants because we’ve developed deep relationships with our established partners, but several elements of the new process will also be relevant to new grant relationships. We will not return to multiple rounds of proposal review.
Finally, we have shifted reporting requirements to be more flexible. This was a request during our midterm review and is consistent with organizations’ requests across philanthropy. Partners now have the option to report verbally in a phone call or through a short, written report.
What Next?
To address the many findings and recommendations in our evaluation, CJRF is now working on two fronts.
First, our board is continuing deliberations on key strategic topics, including those described above. At our upcoming board retreat, we’ll be working to more precisely define systems change, movement-building and capacity bridging, and further clarify how CJRF can strengthen its support for these and other climate justice priorities. The board is also exploring ways to make our work more accountable to local people in the places where we fund, and to engage the philanthropic community more deeply.
Second, we are developing an implementation plan for a program of participatory grantmaking pilots, which will deploy up to $4 million of CJRF’s core pool of funding over the coming eighteen months. We plan to involve our grantee partners and others in testing at least four different approaches to inclusive grant decision-making. These “learning by doing” initiatives will give us practical experience facilitating participatory philanthropy and will create new avenues for diverse input to CJRF’s overall strategy.
We’ll share more information on both these lines of work in the New Year, as CJRF rounds the next bend in our climate justice climb.