by On a Friday morning in April, Dan Stein, founder of Giving Green, a climate philanthropy organization, received big news in a surprising email. An anonymous donor gave $10 million to his fund.
“I haven’t quite processed the number of zeros,” Stein said, adding that he was “ticked, awestruck, surprised” by the gift.
Giving Green collects donations and distributes them to a handful of non-profits that it believes can make a significant difference in preventing climate change and reducing greenhouse gas emissions. The $10 million donation is the largest single gift the non-profit has ever received and it basically fell out of the sky without warning.
The mystery gift was given to the Giving Green fund, based at Giving What We Can, an organization inspired by effective altruism that asks people from all over the world to pledge to give away a percentage of their income or wealth each year . The donor is anonymous and the gift is coming from a donor-advised fund at Fidelity Charitable.
“At first, they were also nervous that it was a mistake, and they went back to Fidelity to verify it before they told us,” Stein said of Giving What We Can.
Looking back at their records and talking to organizations they support, Stein and his team estimate that the same donor may have given as much as $17 million more directly to those organizations in the past two years. Because the gifts are anonymous, it’s impossible to confirm, but Stein says the timing of the gifts, which came in two clusters, suggests they may have come from the same person or organization.
Fidelity Charitable said it does not comment on specific grants or donors.
Anonymous donations – even large ones – are not unusual, but such gifts are usually behind-the-scenes relationship building work, said Tory Martin, director of communications and strategic partnerships at the Dorothy A. Johnson Center for Philanthropy.
“Most of the time, if you’re getting millions of dollars, the oversight has happened. It has been exploited,” she said.
In general, anonymous giving is often seen as the highest form of giving, with a donor drawing attention to themselves, Martin said, adding that the donor thinks “I’m doing this to create a greater sense of community and to simple saying this is. money should go towards other uses rather than sitting in my pocket or bank account.”
But for any individual nonprofit, receiving an anonymous gift can involve reputational risks if the donor is ultimately found to be controversial.
Stein has no good leads as to the identity of the mystery donor, although he suspects it is a corporation trying to lock in donations since he would receive no public credit for the gift. He sees the donations as evidence that there are donors who want to give to climate change but do not know where to give. Providing well-researched recommendations is why he started Giving Green.
One advocacy organization, Industrious Labs, advocates decarbonizing heavy industries like aluminum and steel. Evan Gillespie, a partner at the organization, said those industries are often mistakenly thought to be the most difficult to mitigate. Giving Green reached out to them directly because of a long vetting process that ended with Giving Green recommending them two years in a row.
“You have to take this leap of faith, ‘OK, we’re going to open up our most private thoughts about how this is going to work,'” Gillespie said. He credits Giving Green’s proposal with a few million dollars. to provide them with funding, which is unrestricted.
On its website, Giving Green explains why they decided to propose a grant to the Initiative Labs and their other partners and includes detailed information about their campaigns, theory of change and future plans. Giving Green says its methodology is inspired by the principles of effective altruism, a philanthropic social movement that grew out of philosophy departments in the United Kingdom in the 2010s.
Advocates say they seek to maximize the good they can do around the world and give to the charities and interventions they calculate are most effective. Some powerful and wealthy donors, particularly from the technology sector, have embraced effective altruism and poured funding into areas such as mitigating the worst possible consequences of artificial intelligence, pandemic preparedness, global health and animal rights.
Many effective nurses also promise to give away a portion of their income while others argue for the morality of earning as much money as possible to give it away.
“We think the climate problem is an incredible generational issue and we think we, as a society, should do things to stop it,” Stein said. “And that one thing people can do is make donations, and they should want to make those donations in an effective way.”
Charitable giving to climate change issues has increased in recent years, although research from the non-profit ClimateWorks shows that it is still a small part of the total. ClimateWorks has tracked $3.7 billion in philanthropic giving from foundations in 2022 to support reducing or adapting to the impacts of climate change. Large gifts from individuals are likely to account for another $4.2 billion to $9 billion in 2022, although they are harder to track, ClimateWorks reported.
The National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy argues that more funding should go directly to the communities most affected by climate change now, rather than to think tanks or national environmental organizations. They also warn that investing in technologies that will take years to develop are “false solutions”.
“What movement groups are saying is ‘System change, not climate change.’ And often when you’re looking at things that are cost effective, you’re still thinking through things in an abstract mindset. Like trying to protect your bottom line. Save your money for a rainy day. Don’t give as much as is necessary,” said Senowa Mize-Fox, climate justice movement engagement manager at NCRP. “At the end of the day, what we always say is, the rainy day is here. The rainy day is here. The climate crisis is happening right now.”
Stein said Giving Green intends to distribute the vast majority of the $10 million gift as soon as possible, with much of it going to the organizations they recommend. They will also direct smaller amounts to new organizations or programs within organizations that they support but are not ready to include in their top recommendations.
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Associated Press coverage of philanthropy and nonprofits is supported through the AP’s collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from the Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this matter. For all AP philanthropy coverage, visit https://apnews.com/hub/philanthropy.
