We’re living at a time when the climate crisis is accelerating alongside political volatility, democratic backsliding, and attacks on social justice advocates. Together, these pressures make it harder for people to influence the decisions that shape their lives and futures, and make it harder for community-led climate change initiatives to flourish.

Large-scale climate funding is increasing, creating an opportunity to strengthen community-led climate justice initiatives. Yet these resources remain largely inaccessible to communities affected by the climate crisis, especially those communities whose exposure to climate impacts is shaped by longstanding structural inequalities. Funding practices that prioritize mitigation and technical solutions over local leadership reinforce those same inequalities. To effectively respond to climate change and sustain new ways forward, we need to change how and where climate funding flows.

The Climate Justice Resilience Fund and its partners are making this shift, and we’re ready to support more climate funders in doing so, too.

Over the past decade, CJRF has learned from our partners what happens when people have the resources, flexibility and power to lead their own responses to the climate crisis – creative solutions emerge, action builds momentum, and communities flourish. We took stock of what we learned from our first six years of grantmaking in 2023; then, in 2024, we launched a two-year program of participatory grantmaking pilots that helped us learn to do our funding work in new ways. In mid-2025, we began a systematic process to refresh our strategy, under the leadership of our practitioner board.

Our new five-year strategic framework, Meeting the Moment, aims to ensure that resources, power, and decision-making flow to communities who are on the front lines of the climate crisis and who are generating the solutions needed to confront it. We expect the new strategy to strengthen CJRF’s impact by taking a systems approach to change, by better using our unique position and leverage, and by consolidating our work around a clear set of outcomes. It also deepens our commitment to participatory grantmaking methods, so that our work follows the leadership of those who best know the challenges of the climate crisis – and the solutions.

Explore our illustrated strategy here:

CJRF’s Theory of Change illustrates how shifting resources, power, and decision-making to communities can strengthen climate justice and contribute to broader systems change. Click on the image to enlarge it.

Community-led initiatives draw on lived experience and ancestral knowledge to develop locally grounded responses. CJRF provides funding that allows this work to take root and grow.

Our grants support initiatives led by Indigenous Peoples, women, and youth, and are focused in the Arctic, Bay of Bengal, and East Africa. These are places where we have spent years building relationships and contextual knowledge, and where we see opportunities for additional resources to contribute to transformative change regionally and globally.

Our grantmaking approach improves the funding process for the people leading this work by providing:

• Larger, longer and more flexible grants that give community-led initiatives stability while allowing them to respond to changing circumstances.
• Opportunities for non-grant support and accompaniment across the full lifecycle of a grant partnership.
• Participatory governance and decision-making that gives people affected by the climate crisis meaningful influence over funding decisions.
• Support for different kinds of change, from policies and practices to relationships, power and challenging deeply held assumptions.
• Resources for an ecosystem of change, recognizing that community-led organizations, networks, NGOs, funders and other partners each have a role to play.

CJRF resources help communities adapt to climate change, strengthen resilience, and recover from and respond to the losses and damage they identify as significant. This includes creating pathways to repair and reparations, so communities can reduce harm, protect wellbeing, and retain dignity in the face of accelerating climate impacts.

Communities are also creating, recovering, and sustaining alternatives to the systems and ways of living that have created the climate crisis. Indigenous Peoples, women, and youth are generating and reclaiming ways of organizing community life that are grounded in equity, care, and collective wellbeing. These efforts can include strengthening relationships with land and water, revitalizing cultural practices, developing different economic models, or creating new ways of making decisions and sharing power.

CJRF supports communities to sustain and build on these approaches, not only as practical solutions to challenges today, but as pathways toward deeper systemic change. Over time, with sustained resources, these community-led alternatives can become embedded in the policies, practices, and institutions that shape how societies function. In this way, climate action becomes transformative.

To appropriately support this potential, CJRF brings community experience and expertise into conversations with funders and institutions that shape climate finance.

Through this bridging role, we share learning, demonstrate more accessible and justice-centered approaches to funding, and connect funders and partners working toward shared goals. Over time, this shifts more resources and decision-making power toward the people most affected by climate change.

The climate crisis requires action now. CJRF’s approach strengthens community-led climate action today while helping shift funding systems to expand what is possible tomorrow. If we succeed, we’ll have a climate change funding ecosystem capable of resourcing both immediate action and long-term transformation. We’ll also have communities reclaiming ways of living, challenging extractive systems, and repairing relationships with land, water, culture, and one another.

We look forward to collaborating with existing and new partners on this ongoing journey, and to sharing more about how we’re putting this strategy into practice, including our approach to grantmaking and our role as a bridge across the climate justice ecosystem.

Explore CJRF’s Strategic Framework for 2026-2030 here