Our Approach

New ideas.
Working together.
Support from start-up to scale.

Our approach is anchored in four pillars of work: venture philanthropy, field innovation, organizational development, and collective impact. These supplement and reinforce each other as they help align, coordinate, reinforce, and develop the climate field. 

With venture philanthropy, we foster the development of start-up and early-stage innovators into world-class climate leaders. Field innovation identifies and targets key bottlenecks and challenges for the energy transition field and supports research, convening and initiative seeding to solve them. Organizational development helps Growald grantees, and others across the field, grow into healthy, self-sustaining organizations. Our belief in the power of networks brings all this work to scale, aligning and coordinating the power of philanthropy for collective impact.

Together, these pillars support our mission: to catalyze climate innovation, radical collaboration and leadership toward a stable, healthy world in which all beings thrive. 

Learn more about our four pillars below.

As a venture philanthropy fund, we incubate, seed, and scale organizations with potential for outsized impact. We take risks, testing and supporting new ideas and initiatives, particularly those driven by leaders from communities that are traditionally underfunded. In our venture grantmaking we seek out:

• high risk, high reward: innovative organizations that often use untested approaches with high potential for impact

• measurable results: short- and long-term quantifiable measures of progress and success

• scalability: ideas, organizations and leaders with potential for exponential impact

• clear exit strategy: organizations with a pathway to sustainability beyond our involvement

Our approach is helping to build a strong, inclusive and effective corps of climate champions worldwide. Our past, present (and future!) grantees inspire key financial actors, policymakers, the media and wider movements to take on the challenge of change at a critical moment for our collective future.

We help break through bottlenecks in the energy transition field by advancing new initiatives, convening, research, and thought leadership. Through these efforts, we are able to explore new areas of work which can then move the field past existing gaps or barriers, or in new directions. Over the years, we have fostered innovation on issues including air pollution, water pollution, diplomacy, finance, and renewable energy expansion.

Our field innovation work:

• incubates ideas from which we find new and innovative organizations for our portfolio

• amplifies our impact by normalizing new approaches throughout the field and funder community

• allows for experimentation through an ecosystem approach when no single organization can lead a solution

• supports the development of research products that address gaps identified by the energy transition field

Through field innovation we engage the broader ecosystem of civil society and foundation partners with a goal to facilitate energy transition from subnational to global levels.

A core practice of our venture philanthropy approach is to provide grantees with resources and high-touch organizational development and programmatic guidance to help them grow into healthy, effective, and sustainable organizations. We have also begun to support the broader field through thought leadership, convening, shared services and initiatives. We invest in and build:

• a strong pipeline of talent to start and strengthen climate organizations

• a robust marketplace of service providers who can support climate organizations’ diverse organizational needs in effective and innovative ways

• an organizational culture of reflexivity, learning, and growth within climate civil society organizations.

Our goal is a vibrant organizational support ecosystem that enables climate organizations to thrive in the pursuit of their missions.

We recognize that the scale and speed of change required for the energy transformation is such that no single actor can accomplish it alone. The field has learned that collective impact models, collaborative giving and network action are powerful keys to unlocking impact. 

Through our collective impact grantmaking, we:

• support field-led collective impact networks and regrantors

• seed and strengthen infrastructure for philanthropic collaboration

• help embed collaborative practices across the ecosystem 

In addition to our collective impact grantmaking, we dedicate time and resources to lead ALFIE, an informal community of funders aligned in their efforts to encourage clean electricity globally. Together, we galvanize and align resources and aggregate knowledge to bring our collective response to the climate emergency to the scale of the challenge. Each year, we host an international gathering to learn together with foundations and NGOs how to achieve a just power sector transition.

If you are a philanthropist interested in learning more about our approach or joining the ALFIE network, please contact us.