Enter West Street Recovery, a Solutions Project grantee partner, who collaborated with other community-based partners to press the city into action. The result: Houston committed $20 million to update and maintain drainage systems that will protect more than 200,000 residents from flooding and toxic pollution.

This success story of relentless organizing underscores the power of those on the ground who are creating bold, practical, and effective climate solutions. It demonstrates our belief that grassroots community leaders have the clearest visions for ground-up transformation and are best positioned to drive change.

Despite frontline communities creating lasting impact, a mere 1.3% of climate philanthropy reaches Black, Indigenous, Latinx, Asian American, Pacific Islander, and other people of color-led grassroots organizations. The lack of financial resources contrasts with the incredible achievements of these communities – securing policy wins, practicing regenerative farming, pioneering clean tech for renewable energy and safe drinking water, orchestrating mutual aid networks, and more. Their solutions are tackling the root causes of the climate crisis, creating models for scaled impact and finding ways out of seemingly impossible situations.

Over the past three years, The Solutions Project directed over $42 million towards climate equity and justice: funding over 300 groups across 45 states in our core grantmaking and through the movement ecosystem funds we administer, with a notable 90% going towards people of color-led and 80% to women or nonbinary-led organizations. The results are undeniable – our grantees achieved 53 policy and campaign wins benefiting over 100 million people, provided direct services for one million individuals, and organized nearly 80,000 members as part of their long-term base building. Our support also helped grantees leverage over $70 million in new funding and fueled movement efforts to win $367.2 billion in public funding for climate justice solutions. 96% of our grantees surveyed by our external evaluator credited The Solutions Project’s partnership as important or very important (70%) for scaling their impact and climate solutions.

At a critical moment for climate we are seeing donors gravitating to one size fits all tech investments, or being overtaken by the doomsday narratives that tell us change is impossible. I instead offer hope and a different view: that people are at the heart of climate solutions, and that they can and will change the trajectory of the climate crisis. That’s why we’ve gone all in on climate justice.

Having grown up and spent most of my career organizing in frontline communities, I witnessed and experienced the severe under-resourcing in our movements, even as they demonstrated an unwavering commitment to achieving transformational impact. I came to The Solutions Project because it offers a vehicle to fundamentally reorient our economy, democracy, and society towards climate justice solutions borne from first-hand experience, ingenuity, and optimism.

The urgency for climate justice has never been more apparent. We are navigating multiple existential and humanitarian crises, domestically and globally, in a volatile U.S. election year. This moment requires us to be in deep solidarity across communities. Our network of grantee partners is ready to lead in climate solutions, focusing on resilience, democracy, and innovating new solutions.

This is not a moment to abandon justice; it’s a call to double down.

Join us in going all in on community led climate solutions!