A digital rendering of a chain of links with one of the links covered in grasses and flowers, symbolizing closed access to climate philanthropy.
Image Credit: Imkara Visual For Unsplash+

Every few months I sit in a workshop, sometimes as a participant, more often now as a facilitator, where young climate organizers are taught how to raise money. How to craft a value proposition. How to align their work with a funder’s priorities. How to write a proposal that is, in the words of one recent UN session I attended, both technically sound and emotionally compelling.

I understand why these spaces exist. They mean well, and the skills they teach are real. But I have started to notice what we are actually teaching. We are coaching the people the system excludes to perform more fluently for that system. We are treating a problem of power as if it were a problem of talent.

The gap between who lives with the crisis and who is trusted to direct money toward it is not a detail. It is the shape of the field.

The numbers make the mismatch hard to ignore. Between 2022 and 2024, youth-led climate justice initiatives received 0.96 percent of grants from the largest climate foundations, according to the 2025 Youth Climate Funding Study by the Youth Climate Justice Fund and ClimateWorks Foundation. That is a slight improvement on the 0.76 percent recorded for 2019 to 2021, and the dollars nearly doubled, to $85.9 million. But 41 of the biggest climate funders made only 307 youth grants over three years, and 29 of them made five or fewer. This is not a pipeline. It is a rounding error that occasionally rounds up.

There are 1.2 billion of us aged 15 to 24, roughly 16 percent of the world’s population, and those under 30 will carry the longest and heaviest share of climate impacts. The gap between who lives with the crisis and who is trusted to direct money toward it shapes the architecture of climate philanthropy.

So why doesn’t coaching close the gap?

Because the real bottleneck is not skill. It is access, and in philanthropy access runs on relationships. That has always been true, but the share of households that give has slid from two-thirds in 2000 to about half now. More money is moving through fewer hands.

In the United States, charitable giving hit a record $592.5 billion in 2024, yet the number of donors fell for the fifth year in a row. Roughly three percent of donors now account for 78 percent of all charitable dollars.

Relationships with the few remaining decision-makers are a scarce resource—one large institutions already own. A legacy organization walks into the meeting because it has been in the room for 20 years. Its president gets the call back.

Meanwhile, groups such as youth collective in Suva, or a women-led network in my own city of Delhi, are not competing on the quality of their work. They are competing on proximity to people it will most likely never meet. Proximity becomes a form of capital, which is why youth-led groups based in the United States receive roughly 16 times the global average in funding. Closing that gap for youth-led groups everywhere else would take an estimated $381 million a year.

Moving resources toward the Global South, and toward the people already organizing there, is closer to repair than to charity. Naming that is not an attack on generosity. It is a more accurate account of where the money came from.

There is a hope, right now, that technology could help. That hope increasingly centers on artificial intelligence, even as AI itself comes with real environmental costs through its growing demand for energy, water, and computing infrastructure. Those trade-offs deserve scrutiny, especially in climate work. Even so, the hope is that AI could potentially take some weight off the capacity problem: research, prospect lists, the grinding administrative load that small teams carry alone. Yet, a tool that helps you find funders cannot make those funders willing to build new relationships. Those relationship still have to be earned, one conversation at a time, and there are only so many hours in anyone’s day. Efficiency has a ceiling, and that ceiling is other people’s attention.

This is what the coaching model keeps missing. You can make excluded people more fluent in the language of the system, and the system will still decide whose story is worth a meeting. The exclusion does not happen at the proposal stage. It happens earlier, when priorities are set, frameworks are written, and success is defined, usually by people who have never lived the conditions they are funding to improve. Deciding what counts as a valid intervention is the real power in philanthropy. By the time a proposal is being scored, the important choices have already been made.

This points to the actual fix, and it is not a friendlier application portal. Climate justice is usually described as an outcome that philanthropy funds. It is more useful to treat it as a governance principle that shapes how a funder decides anything at all. The question stops being “how do we get young people ready for the room” and becomes “why was the room built without them, and are we willing to rebuild it?”

For US foundations, whose choices ripple straight into the lives of the people working on the frontlines, that rebuilding means bringing frontline and young people in before funding priorities are set, at the agenda-setting stage, not afterward as a consultation that ratifies decisions already made. It means governance with real authority: seats on grant review committees, board observer roles with speaking rights, participatory panels that assess applications, rather than tokenistic advisory boards that are thanked and ignored. It means funding organizations and movements, not only discrete projects, with long-term, flexible, trust-based support, so groups can follow their own goals instead of reshaping themselves to fit a grant cycle. It means paying young people for their labor rather than extracting it as “engagement.” And it means treating reporting as a tool for shared learning, not a compliance ritual that punishes the smallest teams for the sin of being small.

The question stops being “how do we get young people ready for the room” and becomes “why was the room built without them, and are we willing to rebuild it?”

It also means being honest about geography. The wealth that funds much of this work was accumulated through histories that map almost exactly onto the regions now most exposed to climate harm. Moving resources toward the Global South, and toward the people already organizing there, is closer to repair than to charity. Naming that is a more accurate account of where the money came from.

None of this is untested. Participatory grantmaking and unrestricted, trust-based giving are no longer experiments at the margins. The evidence base is real and growing. The harder work is following the logic of trust far enough that it changes who holds power, not just who receives a check.

The most underused resource in climate philanthropy is the judgment of the people already living the emergency.

I have been the young person coached to enter the room, and I now help design the rooms. What I have learned is that generosity and justice are not the same thing. A funder can give more money every year and still leave every decision exactly where it was. We can celebrate bigger funding totals, more youth-focused initiatives, and incremental progress, while the people closest to the climate crisis remain largely outside the rooms where priorities are set and resources are allocated. They will be better trained than ever to knock on the door, but still too rarely invited inside.

The most underused resource in climate philanthropy is the judgment of the people already living climate emergencies. How much of the funding decisions are we finally willing to share?