Equitably Funding Community-Led Climate Action

Dianne Hills is the executive director of My Brother’s Table, a soup kitchen and service agency serving low-income residents in Lynn, on the North Shore of Massachusetts. Through her work, she has witnessed the disproportionate burden the residents of her city bear when it comes to climate impacts. Extreme heat has been especially harmful for the community.

“I’ve been a part of a group working on climate change adaptation and resilience, particularly around responding to extreme heat events in our community,” Hills says. “In Lynn, we have many people who are high risk for heat-related illnesses because of existing conditions. It doesn’t help that our city’s characteristics—sparse vegetation, heat-absorbing infrastructure and lack of access to air conditioning—put residents at additional risk.”

Communities and Climate Challenges

Hills' community isn’t the only one facing challenges from the effects of climate change. Recent years have brought people across Massachusetts and beyond face-to-face with the current and future realities, from heat stress and poor air quality to extreme weather and flooding. The impacts of these kinds of events are not felt equally by all. Areas with significant low-income communities, People of Color and recent immigrants often face more intense climate impacts. And, they don’t always have the resources available to manage them or recover after an event because of the lingering effects of historic redlining and modern-day systemic inequalities.

Residents of frontline communities like these are rarely included in conversations and decisions about the resources and solutions needed to address climate change impacts. Yet, they are the witnesses to what’s happening on the ground—their lived experiences and perspectives are critical. Since we must build a more resilient future for all, it is essential for communities to have authority over decisions that affect them.

Weaving Equity Into Climate Funding

It’s not just about developing equitable solutions and resources for climate adaptation—equity needs to be a part of how resources get allocated to implement solutions. Organizations like Groundwork Lawrence, My Brother’s Table and countless others who are embedded in addressing the challenges their communities face haven’t always been invited to or included in the critical convening of local leaders that shape the funding and tools for addressing the causes and impacts of climate change. The funding that is available is often hard for low-income communities to access and has restrictions or requirements that can make it harder for community-based organizations to meet their unique combination of needs, opportunities and challenges. 

Given Massachusetts’ commitment to addressing climate change—with robust 2030 and 2050 targets, plans and policies—it is essential that equity is front and center throughout the process of developing and implementing solutions. In working alongside the state toward these climate goals, The Nature Conservancy, other environmental organizations and community-based organizations noticed the gap in state initiatives to effectively meet the climate funding needs of communities.

“Current funding and programs for climate mitigation and adaptation often reinforce structural racial and economic inequalities in the state,” says Emma Gildesgame, climate adaptation scientist for TNC in Massachusetts. “So, we partnered with community-based, equity-focused, grassroots organizations to learn from their first-hand experiences and knowledge and start working differently to get better results.”

Equitable Partnerships and Processes

Since 2019, a core team of conservation, environmental justice and community advocacy organizations—convened by TNC—has come together with the goal of securing additional funding for addressing the causes and impacts of climate change, with an intentional focus on underserved people of color and low-income people previously underserved by funding programs. In direct partnership with community organizations and residents, the core team assessed the existing funding gaps and identified opportunities to improve what’s already in place. 

A funding consultant also generated several proposed solutions for equitable and sustainable funding. The team then settled on a solution that places a fee on real estate property insurance, which would fund initiatives that provide benefits to communities and strengthen their health and well-being.

“It was critical for us to source solutions from communities, collaborating, co-creating and iterating on the process as we went,” says Steve Long, Director of Policy and Partnerships for TNC in Massachusetts. “We built those relationships with the help of an equity consultant—the Institute for Sustainable Communities—to develop an equitable process, build frameworks for power-sharing and making consensus-driven communal decisions, and learn to work at the pace of trust.”

“Our goal was to take a holistic, people-centered approach,” adds Gildesgame.

The core team developed a legislative proposal, as well as a series of actionable recommendations that bring the findings of this collaborative effort to a broad audience of policymakers from the state, nonprofits and others working on climate justice.

Sharing Our Process

The core team also produced a final report to provide a roadmap for how others within and beyond government agencies can adopt and adapt more equitable, inclusive approaches to funding and financing programs related to climate mitigation and adaptation. It also provides an in-depth description of the team’s approach to collaboration with actionable insights for others hoping to adopt an equitable and inclusive processes, recognizing that it can still be iterated upon.

Together, all these elements will help scale the team’s work towards their vision for a more sustainable, equitable ecosystem for funding and implementing climate adaptation and mitigation.