Transcript of the podcast:
BARBARA WHEELER-BRIDE: Hi, everyone, and welcome to another episode of Giving With Impact, an original podcast series from Stanford Social Innovation Review developed with the support of DAFgiving360™. I’m your host, Barbara Wheeler-Bride, an editor at SSIR. In this series, we bring together voices from across the philanthropic ecosystem to have a conversation about what’s at the heart of achieving more effective philanthropy.
Today, we’re going to talk about climate change, and how donors can strategically and most effectively support community-driven efforts to address the disruption it causes.
More and more people are displaced by droughts, storms, and floods that are exacerbated by a warming planet. And everyone from farmers to workers to the elderly are at greater risk when temperatures soar. In this episode, we’ll talk to two nonprofits on the front lines of mitigating the effects of climate change, and address more broadly an idea in climate philanthropy that supporting local leadership and local wisdom is the most just and most effective way to save and heal the planet.
Our guests today are Claire McGuinness, Strategy and Partnerships Manager of the One Acre Fund: Maya Batres, Senior Advisor on People and Climate at The Nature Conservancy; and Shawn Jensen, Director of business Development from DAFgiving360.
Claire, let’s start with you. Can you tell our listeners a bit about the One Acre Fund, and how your work with farmers has changed as the climate continues to change?
CLAIRE McGUINNESS: Absolutely, and thanks for having us on. So a bit of background for those who aren’t familiar, One Acre Fund is a nonprofit social enterprise that works with smallholder farmers in Africa. And our raison d’etre is to make smallholders less hungry, more prosperous and more resilient. And to give you a sense of who we’re talking about, these are farming families who tend to have about an acre of land that they cultivate year to year, and who oftentimes aren’t able to grow enough produce to support their family for the entire year and have to endure several months of meal skipping and other quite onerous coping mechanisms to make do with what they have.
So what One Acre Fund does is we supply the financing, the high-quality farming supplies like seeds and fertilizer, and infield training that farmers need to transform their livelihoods and ensure that they have enough food on the table to feed their families adequately. Right now, we work with over 5 million farmers across Sub-Saharan Africa in 10 countries.
And we were formed about 20 years ago, and when we started out, we were really laser focused on income and hunger, and really driving improvements in those areas. Our goal typically is to help farmers achieve a 30- or 40% bump in income. But in the last five, 10 years, as we’ve seen just the really significant effects that changing weather patterns has had on farmers and what they’re able to harvest, what shocks and challenges they face, it’s become more and more clear to us as an organization that we need to bring resilience really into the heart of what we do and how we understand success, and not as something, you know, a nice to have that happens on the side.
And so what that looks like for farmers is a whole host of things because there’s no silver bullet to help people achieve resilience. So that’s things like working with farmers to improve their soil health because healthy soils are better able to bounce back from both floods and droughts, offering farmers the right seeds, whether that’s a drought-resistant seed or a seed that’s designed to thrive well in a very specific agroecological zone, it’s offering safety nets like insurance so that if a farmer faces a flood or a drought or another shock event to their harvest, not all is lost, and thinking really seriously about diversification, so moving away from monocropping corn, and instead planting a variety of plants, building in assets like trees through agroforestry to help farmers to diversify their income base so that if any one stream fails due to one of these challenges, they have other means of income to fall back on.
So with your question of how our thinking about this has changed over the long term, really the biggest change, as I said, is just pulling all of this thinking really into the epicenter of who we are as an organization and what we do, and really adding it as an additional north star alongside income and hunger.
BARBARA:
Thanks, Claire. What would you say is the biggest challenge facing smallholder farmers right now, and what are the opportunities for funders and donors to get involved?
CLAIRE: That’s a really great question. So I think the biggest challenge truly is resources, and that’s because, you know, as I mentioned, there are a lot of just really proven, well evidenced methods that we know work like diversification and soil health. The challenge isn’t finding a new magical method to meet the challenges, it’s, , accessing adequate resources to deploy the solutions we already have. And so if I were to be asked by a funder for advice on what they can do, I think it would be to identify organizations who are already doing this work at scale, and are able to just rapidly deploy those resources and get them out to where they’re most needed through approaches that are already working. And in particular, I would really think about trying to reach groups who are working with the world’s smallholder farmers. This is because this group actually controls some studies suggest up to 40% of the entire planet’s active farmland, but right now have only access to 1.7% of the global finance that’s been deployed to deal with the challenges of changing weather patterns and resilience. So that would be my recommendation.
BARBARA: Claire, you’ve pointed out a really big gap for smallholder farmers, and I think that’s really motivational for our listeners and donors and advisors.
I have one more question for you. Given that a lot of climate change solutions leverage technology, can you talk a bit about how One Acre Fund uses technology to help farmers?
CLAIRE: Absolutely. I think a particularly exciting new area of technology that we’re spending a lot of time thinking about is a group of technologies collectively called remote sensing tech. And this means using satellites and drones to collect data from a distance.
We’re able through these tools to actually for the first time ever really be able to offer farmers very accurate guidance on upcoming weather, which is something, we take for granted in the states and in Europe but is not something that is readily available in rural Africa. We’re able to combine large data sets on soil quality, past farmer behavior based on their time with us in our program, climate modeling, and a host of other sources of data, and use that to collectively come up with hyper-hyper-targeted recommendations on exactly what seed, and exactly what type of fertilizer, and exactly what planting methodology a farmer should use on their very specific one acre field, which is really just a step change improvement on what people are able to offer farmers right now, which is advice that’s tailored really to just the broader agri-ecological zone, which can have a lot of variation within it.
And so by deploying this tech, we’re able to help farmers make use of super customized guidance that allows them to boost their yields to make up for some of the yield loss that they might otherwise be facing due to, rains that are coming late, due to maybe less rain that they’re getting that season, or a host of other kind of climate-related challenges.
BARBARA: Thanks. It’s great to hear about the value that the technology is bringing to the farmers you work with.
Maya, I’d like to turn to you next. many of our listeners have heard of The Nature Conservancy, but can you tell us specifically about your work to address climate change?
MAYA BATRES: Thank you so much for having me. I’m really excited to talk about my work at TNC. For those who don’t know The Nature Conservancy, we are a place-based organization, and what that means is we have a local presence in all 50 states and more than 80 countries where we are protecting and supporting conservation of some of the most important landscapes in the world. I work on our climate team with our global science policy and conservation staff to reduce the impacts of climate change to people and nature in a way that prioritizes community needs, and make sure we’re accounting for economic and environmental outcomes.
On climate change, we’re focused on catalyzing the clean energy transition and advancing natural climate solutions. We’re working on the transition to clean energy in two ways. First, we’re advancing climate and clean energy policies and public funding opportunities. And second, we’re accelerating the build out of renewable energy in the United States in ways that consider conservation communities and the climate.
With natural climate solutions, our focus is on making sure that healthy lands and seascapes can reduce carbon emissions and increase carbon storage. That means working to protect and better manage and restore nature, so that it can reduce emissions, while also addressing the biodiversity crisis and the loss of plants and animal species. For me specifically, this work is around thinking about and working with communities who experience the impacts of climate change, sort of the first and worst communities, and collaborating to explore ways that clean energy and nature can be tools in their toolbox, and that their voice is not only heard, but they’re represented and included in decision-making processes.
We work with a really wide range of partners, and we leverage our state chapters, and mobilize over one million members to advocate for climate action. And one of my favorite things about TNC is that there is probably a preserve near you. It’s always fun to be outside and see one of our oak leaf signs in the wild. I bet that your listeners will start recognizing those as they go in nature.
BARBARA: That’s great. Can you give us a specific example or two of some of the communities you all are working with?
MAYA: Yes. This is one of the most exciting things to talk about from my perspective. There are so many good examples of this work, but one body of work that I’m really excited about and proud of is our work to find lower impact areas to site renewable energy, in this case on former mine lands. And we call this work our Mining the Sun Work, in case your listeners are interested in learning more. And the Mining the Sun Work is all about seeking opportunities for economic and environmental revitalization through siting solar and storage on former mine lands and disturbed areas.
I love to tell the story of our Cumberland Forest project. This is The Nature Conservancy’s largest conservation project in the heart of Appalachian coal country. The project is a little over 253,000 acres, and it straddles communities in Kentucky, Virginia, and Tennessee. So if you’re picturing this in your mind, it’s one of the most beautiful, densely forested, mountainous areas, just like what you would think of being in the heart of Appalachia, and it’s home to some of the most important biodiversity in the region. It also has a long history of coal production, and that remains an important part of the economy today.
The Cumberland Project itself has a history of coal mining on the property, and as TNC was acquiring this property and this land for conservation, we were also developing our Mining the Sun strategy. It became really clear to a lot of people at TNC that this was such a perfect confluence of our climate and conservation, and community priorities.
So a couple of years ago we worked with the state energy agency to identify areas of the property that weren’t suitable for the type of reforestation and forest management work that we were doing, but that could be suitable for solar development. These sites happened to sit on part of the property that are former mine lands. We put out an RFP, a request for proposal, and had a lot of interest in exploring solar development opportunities. And as of right now, we have plans to build about 17 solar and storage projects, totaling 49 megawatts. So for those who don’t know that equivalency, it’s about 6,500, a little more than 6,500 homes in the heart of Appalachia.
It’s estimated that these projects are going to have a significant tax revenue benefit to the area, which is really important as the community thinks about the transition away from coal mining. And not only is there an economic benefit from the project itself, but something that I really like about this body of work is that there’s a community reinvestment model that works in parallel with our conservation and energy project plans. This is called the Cumberland Forest Community Fund, and it’s a local grant program aimed at supporting nature-based economic and community development in southwest Virginia, Tennessee, and Kentucky. The fund is supported by a combination of mining and gas royalties and philanthropic contributions to TNC made by folks who are really invested in this community, in the central Appalachians, and who want to see a prosperous future for the partners and community members that they work with.
The fund has already had a significant impact by investing in local projects and local organizations that are working on increasing outdoor access for community members and providing economic diversification through outdoor recreation. I’ve had the privilege of visiting some of these places and I just can’t express to you how powerful this all is, literally powering through renewable energy, and I’m really excited to see where this work goes.
BARBARA: Maya, can you just say a little bit more about the response from the community?
MAYA: I don’t want to speak for a community, but what I can say is that this is a community that is thinking about the transition already, and they’re looking forward to the next 20 years and what the sustainable options are for diversification of the economy where they live. And what they like about this is it’s really tapping into the existing resources and the potential that this area has without bringing something flashy and new. It leans into the strengths of the area, and it’s really exciting to see the opportunity to continue to have important energy production come from this area.
BARBARA: Thank you. I have one quick follow up question for you about the work that TNC is doing as it relates to biodiversity and the biodiversity crisis we see with a decline in number of species, threats to their ecosystems. Could you maybe just dig in a little bit more, either in this project or another to talk about the work TNC is doing in that area?
MAYA: The loss of biodiversity and the biodiversity crises is on top of a lot of people’s minds right now. I know I see it myself as the granddaughter of farmers who are experiencing the impacts of climate change.
Since 1970, there has been nearly a 70% average decline of birds, mammals, amphibians, reptiles, and fish. And The Nature Conservancy is well aware, using science, that we need to address this crisis in the next few years, not decades. We have a clear path to get there. We are, first, aiming to conserve hundreds of millions of hectares of land and ocean by 2030. And that’s not just about saving the trees or the fish, it’s about stabilizing climate and protecting communities from floods and fires and other impacts of climate change and reversing the massive decline in species we’ve seen in the last 50 years. We also see that nature is doing the heavy lifting, and that we need to support nature. When we talk about climate and biodiversity, we know that nature is working overtime for us. Forests, wetlands, and mangroves are pulling carbon out of the air and giving wildlife a place to thrive, and they can’t do it alone. We need to invest in the important ecosystems that will support sustained livelihoods for people and ecosystems for plants and animals.
BARBARA: Thanks, Maya. Shawn, in your decades of living and surfing the Southern California coastline, what have you noticed firsthand about the effects of global warming?
SHAWN JENSEN: Absolutely. Thanks, Barbara, for having me, and for that question. Yeah, I feel very lucky and fortunate to have grown up in southern California, close to the coast, and still live there today. And got to spend a good majority of my life surfing and doing other ocean activities, and just really appreciating the ocean and the coastline for all it does for our planet. And we’re seeing a lot of changes year-over-year through the decades, as you mentioned. Global warming is certainly taking a hold on the ocean. We’re seeing water temperatures increase, which has a direct impact on the food chain, and kind of the ecosystems within the ocean based on animals finding their appropriate temperatures that they like to be in, and then up the food chain, We’ve seen more and more instances of harmful algae blooms year-over-year, which starts at the plankton level, and impacts animals all the way up to sea lions and even whales, where they become poisoned by these algae blooms. And it’s not directly necessarily tied to climate change, but there’s a lot of connections there that can be made. Coastal erosion is another thing that we’re seeing right before our very eyes, and it’s happening at a pretty quick pace. Whether it’s more storms, tidal surges, or sea level rise, we’re seeing coastlines deteriorating, and in some cases, even disappearing.
So it’s definitely not far from home, the impacts of climate change, but more globally there’s also a lot of impacts as well. And Maya was just touching on a lot of those with the impacts to our biodiversity in the ocean. The ocean being something that captures a lot of carbon, is obviously very important for our entire planet, and also offers a source of food for a lot of countries across the world. So food security can also be impacted by climate change.
BARBARA: It’s great to hear you bring that personal connection to what I imagine are conversations with your donors about how they might contribute to some of the solutions that Claire and Maya were just talking about. Climate change is obviously a huge topic, and as we’ve all just showed through examples, it’s a global topic.
How do you talk with donors who have a passion for the environment and want to begin supporting causes that specifically support climate solutions?
SHAWN: Yeah, it’s a challenge because climate change, protecting the environment, these are huge issues. And what we don’t want is for a donor to feel overwhelmed and feel like they’re in a position where they’re unable to make an impact or unable to contribute to some of these causes. So really what we need to do in our position working with donors is work with them to really help them understand what their specific passions and goals are and what causes are important to them. So really having those open-ended conversations to help them find their focus and what motivates their giving. If we think about somebody that’s just exploring making contributions that would help the impacts of climate change, do they want to think about that at a local level, at a national level, or even global? And then thinking about what types of areas they want to make an impact in as far as is it education and research or an actionable impact?
So it really comes down to asking them a lot of questions. I know Claire had mentioned, recommending to donors to look at some more established scalable organizations, which I also would recommend, but we do also support a lot of donors who are in the tech industry. And for them, they’re excited about some more exciting startup initiatives, especially as it relates to combating climate change. There are a lot of startup organizations that are trying to do things differently, and we have donors that approach it from all different angles. But it really comes back to having that conversation with them and helping them hone in on what their focus is.
Luckily at DAFgiving360, we have a great resource to help us guide this conversation. It’s called the Giving Guide. And this is a comprehensive tool that we can walk through with donors, or they can self guide themselves to help them go through this process. So even at the introduction, just reflecting on what their motivations and values are and what causes are important to them. And it just obviously starts with a very wide spectrum, and then starts to narrow down as they think about where they actually want to deploy assets. there are two activities in that guide that I really like. One is where they’re able to find and vet charities. So thinking about once they’ve honed in on what the causes and impacts they want to make in the world are, they can start to then research and find charities that might be aligned with those activities. Then they’re able to compare those organizations to one another to see how long they’ve been established, how large they are, what type of work they’re doing, the scale of their work, etc., and just get an idea of how giving to one organization might be different from another.
Another great tool that we have in there is a giving budget. We think about giving assets to different organizations at different times of the year. Where we find ourselves now, today, is that a lot of our donors want to set aside money for reactive giving. When we are having these natural disasters, ongoing storms, and other events, our donors like to have money set aside not only for their proactive giving that they’ve researched and want to help contribute to, but also having money set aside for that reactive giving as well.
BARBARA: There’s certainly no shortage of emergencies, or climate emergencies, for people… to support and help provide some kind of relief, and then hopefully thinking, too, about longer term impacts, or ways to address climate change.
Shawn, one thing I take away from your overall advice about considering where donors might give is just what their motivations are, maybe what their passions are. And I want to connect that back to something that both Claire and Maya touched on, which is just this kind of idea of your organizations’ central mission, not necessarily being climate-driven initially, but how you kind of layered on climate solutions, or thought about climate change as it relates to your overall core mission.
I have one more question, Claire and Maya, for each of you. I wonder if you could share a lesson or an insight you’ve learned from your work with local communities about tackling climate-related problems in their own fields and backyards, or what lessons do you think the wider field of philanthropy and donors could learn from your experience? Claire, we can start with you.
CLAIRE: Yeah, it’s a really great question. an insight I have definitely taken away from this work with smallholder farmers at One Acre Fund is really seeing how strong the interplay is between innovation, risk, and behavior change. And what I mean by that is smallholder farmers, tend to be folks who earn about a dollar a day or less, have very, very little that they’re able to set by, or save, which means that they have little to really no buffer to help protect them if something goes wrong or there’s a shock that affects their income. And so because of this, they are extremely risk averse, as anyone would be. And what that means in terms of what we’re talking about today is that though the farmers we work with, they’re very smart and savvy entrepreneurial people, and understand that something we recommend,, might make good sense for their farm, like diversifying their crops or using a different variety of seed, that kind of risk aversion makes people a little less likely to, I think, lean into innovations that can really deliver a lot of value and a lot of benefit.
And so when we think about how to overcome that at One Acre Fund, it’s using tools like, insurance products that will protect farmers if something goes wrong, so that they have the confidence to take up new practices and try out new approaches.
It’s thinking about how to help people overcome the hesitancy… that they might have about a new practice and the risk that’s associated with it so that they can really pursue new cutting edge innovative practices that will really get us all further down the road to where we want to be. And so, you know, what’s true of farmers is true of businesses, and it’s true of governments. folks don’t want to go out on a limb on a new practice. But one of the nice things is that historically, one of… the essential functions of philanthropy has been smoothing out risk of new innovations so that folks can actually, try out something new, see if it works, and hopefully unlock enormous new impact.
When I think about where philanthropy can be, you know, most catalytic and really just unlock impact that’s waiting to get out there, it’s providing support in ways that help to risk smooth in that way, and help, you know, both risk-averse farmers and risk-averse businesses make progress.
BARBARA: Thanks, Claire. I really like that idea, smoothing out the risks because there’s certainly many perceived and also just like obviously the reality of doing something different and the change in behavior or mindset. So thanks so much for that.
Maya, do you have anything to add?
MAYA: Yes, I love this question, and for me, listening and being in community have been some of the most important things I’ve done in my 10-year career at The Nature Conservancy because no matter how long I do this work, I am constantly inspired and in awe at the creativity and innovative spirit of communities. They really know what they need to thrive. I think it’s easy for us to get caught up at our desks hoping that there’s one single thing that we can do, one project we can invest in that’s going to change the course of the future. And what is so cool about this work is that just like biodiversity, the differences in approaches, the unique ways communities that are most directly impacted by climate change are leading in the identification and the challenges to design solutions.
So to that end, I would say providing an ability for communities to be nimble and pivot, and make long-term investments in these places, not project-specific investments, it’s really important because communities often do need to pivot to immediate needs, thinking about what that means long-term. And from my experience, these communities for a long time have been leading in the identification of solutions and ways to reach all of our shared outcomes. So the longest lasting examples of conservation and climate work that I have seen have been heavy on community input and community leadership for the long-term outcomes.
BARBARA: Thanks, Maya. I think that’s really important, and kind of brings us full circle to the introduction of talking a little bit about the importance of local leadership, local wisdom, and really listening to communities, and supporting communities, not just in emergencies, but in their long-term strength, and really helping them build that resilience that Claire talked about, too, at One Acre Fund.
So thank you all for this conversation. I am so glad that you were able to join us, Claire, Maya, and Shawn. I really appreciate you taking the time and sharing your expertise with us.
CLAIRE: Thanks so much for having us.
MAYA: Thank you.
SHAWN: Thank you.
BARBARA: Thanks for listening, everyone. Please consider leaving us a review on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts. It helps other listeners discover the show. We hope you’ll check out more episodes in this series, as well as other podcasts from SSIR. This podcast series is made possible with the support of DAFgiving360, who played an important role in the selection of topics and speakers. We’ll talk with you again soon.
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