Now More Than Ever, Philanthropy Must Back the Groups Fighting Corporate Power

Amazon wanted to build 250 diesel generators in a working-class Minnesota community and skip an environmental review that would have scrutinized emissions and pollution. A local organization decided to fight anyway, banded together with others, and won.

That organization was CURE, a grantee of the Climate and Clean Energy Equity Fund, and last year's fight was about more than a data center. It was about whether Amazon could run 250 diesel generators next to a retiring coal plant in Becker, Minnesota without answering for what it meant for the air and water in a community already in the middle of an energy transition.

Those generators would have produced 600 megawatts of backup power, without the environmental review that would have examined their emissions impact. The community had no interest in absorbing the pollution costs of Amazon's AI ambitions.

I have spent 25 years in this work, first as an organizer and now as someone who helps fund it. What happened in Becker does not surprise me. CURE did not win because it got lucky. It won because someone had invested in that organization years before Amazon showed up, building the staff, the community relationships, and the knowledge of how a state utilities commission actually works. That is how organizing operates. The results are visible. The groundwork is not. And right now, that groundwork is being torn up on purpose. Philanthropy helped build it. Now it needs to decide whether it will defend it.

For many of the organizations we fund at the Climate and Clean Energy Equity Fund, ours is the first climate grant they have ever received. That is not a boast. It is an indictment of how philanthropy has allocated its resources.

I saw what patient investment makes possible in the early 2000s, when I was part of an immigrant women's organization in San Francisco called Mujeres Unidas y Activas. We had four staff members and a big dream. Over the next decade MUA grew to 40 people and became one of the founding members of the National Domestic Workers Alliance, which we built alongside a dozen other domestic worker groups who came together in Atlanta and decided to act as one.

The alliance went on to help win legal protections for the nannies, housekeepers, and home aides that federal labor law had excluded since the New Deal. None of that came from a single breakthrough. It came from funders who stayed in it long enough to see something grow.

That infrastructure is being dismantled right now, and the attacks are not accidental. When voter registration drives signed up new voters by the thousands, lawmakers in several states moved to criminalize the groups behind them.

Nick Tilsen founded the NDN Collective to defend Indigenous rights and land sovereignty in the Dakotas, and that work made him a target. He faced aggravated assault charges and the prospect of more than 25 years in prison for monitoring a police encounter in Rapid City before a jury deadlocked and all charges were dropped earlier this year. The Southern Poverty Law Center, which has tracked hate groups for more than 50 years, was federally indicted on fraud charges in April. You do not need to ban organizing if you can make it too expensive and too frightening to sustain.

What disappears when this work gets defunded does not make the front page. A permit gets quietly approved. A workplace complaint never gets filed. A hearing happens and no one is there to speak. Black, Latinx, Indigenous, and working-class communities have always been powerful. What they have not always had is the sustained investment they deserve.

For many of the organizations we fund at the Climate and Clean Energy Equity Fund, ours is the first climate grant they have ever received. That is not a boast. It is an indictment of how philanthropy has allocated its resources, and it has to change. We call on donors to fund grassroots organizations now.

Fund them for years, not grant cycles. Do not pull back because the political moment got harder. That is precisely when this work needs you most.

Republicans hold complete control of state government in 23 states today, Democrats in 16. That map does not change through advertising. It changes through patient, ground-level organizing in the places the political class has written off, on a timeline of years, not election cycles. Cutting that work now is not fiscal discipline. It is a strategic concession.

Climate, democracy, and economic justice are not separate fights. They are the same fight, and the communities on the frontlines of all three have been saying so for years. “Affordability,” the latest political buzzword, is not new or distinct from these ongoing fights. In Becker, what was at stake was clean air, democratic accountability, and a community's right to shape its own energy future. CURE understood that. The question is whether the people and institutions with the resources to back that kind of work will understand it too, and soon enough to matter.

I still think about those four staff members at MUA, and what became possible because someone believed in the work long before there were results to show for it. Frontline communities are not waiting to be rescued. They are building, organizing, and winning. The question is whether philanthropy will stop watching and start investing.