A New Collaborative: Announcing Launch of the Grassroots Climate Solutions Fund

Indigenous Peoples, women, youth, and diverse grassroots groups around the world have the solutions to our global climate crisis. The Grassroots Climate Solutions Fund finances and amplifies these solutions—to ensure a brighter future for us all.

“We are thrilled to join with sister foundations and move more funding and support to grassroots solutions to climate change,” says Chung-Wha Hong, Executive Director of Grassroots International. “Together our complementary strengths and common resolve can have a greater impact by supporting powerful, community-led and globally minded solutions.”

The Need for Grassroots Solutions

History shows that powerful grassroots organizing has been a vital lever of major social change—from decolonization to civil rights to the environmental movements. Yet today, grassroots efforts often remain underfunded and overlooked.

This missed opportunity is tremendous: Effective grassroots organizations and movements around the world inspire and enable local action to protect communities’ rights to water, soil, air, seeds, food, forests, livestock, and land.

Grassroots solutions to climate change come from working directly with families and communities as they cope with climate chaos. As a result, these solutions embody an approach that addresses environmental, economic, and social issues simultaneously, recognizing the wholeness of people’s lives.

Thus, grassroots solutions also address the root causes of climate change, including loss of land, territory, and resource rights, as well as the expansion of industrial agricultural systems, mega-dams, and fossil fuel extraction. When movements are born of organizing strategies that include people across borders and boundaries, they can spark broad, comprehensive social change powerful enough to address the greatest challenge of our age—climate change.

A New Collaborative: Grassroots Climate Solutions Fund

Who We Are: Together, International Development Exchange (IDEX), Global Greengrants Fund, Grassroots International and Urgent Action Fund for Women’s Human Rights are launching a unique collaborative fund that will reach grassroots organizations and social movements in Africa, the Americas, Asia, the Middle East, Caribbean, and Pacific Islands that are working at the intersection of climate resilience and human rights. This global reach is possible thanks to the unique approach and long-term relationships with grassroots groups developed by each of the collaborative fund members.

How We Work: For three decades, our four organizations’ grantmaking practices have relied on the wisdom and strength of local people and movements to tackle injustices. We invest in long-term solutions that are not imported, but rather are developed in response to listening to people on the ground. These grassroots solutions can be scaled appropriately to meet the needs of people who are most directly affected by climate change.

What We Will Achieve: The Grassroots Climate Solutions Fund provides an unprecedented continuum of support to people fighting climate change—from awarding a security grant in as little as 12 hours to an activist whose life or family has been threatened, to providing a promising grassroots movement with its first infusion of outside resources, to sustaining established organizations with multi-year support and capacity-building through proven long-term partnership models.

The Grassroots Climate Solutions Fund will transform large amounts of grant capital into strategic investments in effective grassroots climate solutions being led by our partners in more than 100 countries.

The global climate movement can learn from and respond to solutions being developed by the very people whose daily lives are impacted by climate change.  Investing in the Grassroots Climate Solutions Fund means creating an unprecedented and urgent scale of support to advance global grassroots leadership for climate resilience.