Annual 2025 Report

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Global Greengrants Fund channels resources to grassroots leaders worldwide who are protecting ecosystems and advancing climate and environmental justice. By investing in community-led action, we help plant seeds of transformation that grow into resilient futures for people and the planet.

A Letter from Laura García and Dr. Nisha Owen

Seeding Resilient Futures

Dear Friends and Partners,

Every seed carries a promise. Planted with care, nurtured in community, and rooted in the right conditions, it can grow into something far greater than what first meets the eye. At Global Greengrants Fund, we see this truth reflected every day in the work of the grassroots movements we accompany. Across forests, coastlines, farms, and cities around the world, communities are planting the seeds of resilient futures—defending their lands, strengthening their cultures, and building pathways toward climate and environmental justice.

In 2025, we were reminded how essential that work is. Around the world, communities faced profound challenges. We witnessed the continued erosion of multilateral climate commitments, including the United States' withdrawal from key global agreements. Authoritarianism tightened its grip in many regions, civic space narrowed, and violence—including devastating conflicts and genocide—tore at the fabric of communities. Extractive industries expanded their reach, threatening forests, rivers, and Indigenous territories, even as the world’s ecosystems are already under immense strain. And yet, amid these pressures, grassroots movements held the line. They defended vital ecosystems from destructive development. They organized across borders to advance environmental justice. They strengthened local food systems, protected Indigenous governance, and created community-led solutions rooted in generations of knowledge and care for the Earth.

This is why Global Greengrants exists.

For more than three decades, our role has been to move resources to the people closest to the challenges—and closest to the solutions. Through our global network of advisors and movement partners, we support grassroots leaders who understand their lands, cultures, and communities in ways that distant institutions never could. Their work is the foundation of resilient futures. Global Greengrants’ vision includes supporting the broader network of grassroots funders, especially those with deep local knowledge and trust. This enhances outreach and access from communities, aligns with their culture and values, and helps bridge global and local funding gaps.

In 2025, with our partners, we deepened our foundation. Grassroots organizations in over 120 countries advanced solutions protecting ecosystems, democracy, and Indigenous and local community rights. This year saw milestones, including the emergence of the Congo Basin Environmental and Climate Justice Fund, developed over years of collaboration with Indigenous and community leaders in Central Africa, which created a mechanism to fund movements defending the rainforest.

Our global advisory network—over 250 members—remained central to our decentralized grantmaking model, identifying solutions and directing resources to underserved communities. We witnessed grassroots achievements that you’ll read more about in the report below, including Indigenous ecological knowledge in Botswana, disability-led efforts recognizing sunscreen as a vital health and climate tool, and women farmers leading energy transformation. These victories show that meaningful change requires relationships, trust, and long-term effort, and that it thrives through collective action.

Our work depends on dedicated grantmaking partnerships and advisors, strong grantee relationships, and generous donors supporting local-led solutions. Together, we foster an ecosystem of change. Amid systemic failures, grassroots movements demonstrate what’s possible—resisting harm and building just, regenerative futures. This report’s stories testify to that impact.

Each story represents a seed planted in challenging conditions—and a future taking root. As we look ahead, with your support, we remain deeply committed to accompanying these movements for the long term. Because resilient futures are not created in isolation, they emerge through the strength of interconnected movements, relationships, and shared knowledge across a vibrant ecosystem of people working toward change.

With gratitude and solidarity,

Laura García
President and CEO
Global Greengrants Fund

Dr. Nisha Owen
Executive Director
Global Greengrants Fund UK

Group of smiling people taking a selfie indoors while holding certificates during a community or training event.

Image credit: Ehécatl Ríos/Roots

Connecting Resources and Movements

For more than 30 years, Global Greengrants Fund has nourished local climate and environmental action worldwide—quickly, flexibly, and rooted in trust. This work is only possible because of the extraordinary community of supporters who stand alongside us: grassroots partners, individual donors, foundations, advisory boards, regional partner funds, global collaborators, and fiscal sponsorship partners. Together, they form a powerful ecosystem of solidarity. With their commitment and shared leadership, we nurture interconnected climate and environmental justice movements that grow local action into global impact. Our grantmaking statistics reflect not only the breadth of our reach but also the depth of our collective power that makes it possible.

All monetary numbers are in USD unless otherwise specified.

Core Numbers* US Numbers UK Numbers Total Numbers**

Core Numbers*

1,463

Grants Awarded

117

Countries

$12.1M

Total Granted in 2025

US Numbers

UK Numbers

Total Numbers**

2025 Core Grantmaking by Issue Area***

$.41M

in climate justice grants made through 722 grants in 99 countries. These grants support recovery, mitigation, adaptation, resilience, and prevention measures directly connected to the global climate crisis.

$.07M

in just energy transition grants made through 305 grants in 67 countries. These grants are investments in a transition away from fossil fuels and other extractive industries and towards equitable and regenerative alternatives.

$.64M

in healthy ecosystems and communities grants made through 867 grants in 103 countries. These grants support the health and resilience of local ecosystems and communities.

$.55M

in local livelihoods and agroecology grants made through 204 grants in 66 countries. These grants are investments in local farmers, fisherfolk, beekeepers, and artisans whose economies help restore the environment, ensure fair wages, and remain resilient amid disasters.

$.03M

in governance of land and territory made through 366 grants in 69 countries. These grants are investments in local people's rights to make decisions about their own land, water, and resources.

$.09M

in disability-inclusive climate justice grants made through 127 grants in 53 countries. These grants bridge gaps between disability and climate justice movements.

$.43M

in feminist climate justice grants made through 694 grants in 87 countries. These grants invest in gender-just climate action.

in International Financial Institutions grants made through 138 grants in 47 countries. These grants support grassroots groups holding financial actors accountable.

$.61M

in Indigenous rights grants made through 423 grants in 71 countries. These grants are investments in the critical role Indigenous Peoples play as stewards of the environment.

$.55M

in right to defend the environment grants made through 187 grants in 54 countries. These grants protect activists' and communities' rights to defend the environment.

$.04M

in youth-centered climate justice grants made through 542 grants in 88 countries. These include grants and mentorship to young people pursuing cutting-edge climate change initiatives worldwide.

*Global Greengrants Fund comprises two entities, one located in the US, Global Greengrants Fund (established in 1993), and Global Greengrants Fund UK (established in 2012). Numbers labeled “US” or “UK” encompass grants passed specifically through each individual entity. Numbers labeled “core” include combined core grantmaking for both the US and UK organizations, as well as grantmaking through regional partner funds. Core data do not, however, include DAFs or fiscal sponsorships.

**Total grantmaking numbers include donor advised funds (DAFs) and our fiscal sponsorships, in addition to our core grantmaking.

***There is overlap between issue areas, as some groups' activities fall into multiple categories.

Grantee Partner Highlights

Image Credit: Elizabeth Weber

Seeds of Resilience and Transformation: Movement Stories

Global Greengrants is more than a grantmaker. We’re a connector, strengthening movements through relationships and resources. Our decentralized, global, advisor-led grantmaking supports thousands of grassroots leaders to restore environmental equilibrium, advance equity, and strengthen safety for those who defend life. This model of grantmaking is by design—to stay centered in relationship, avoid replicating existing power structures that have created today’s climate crises, and to ensure that those most affected by systems of harm are the ones leading change.

We make one-time investments in grassroots movements that scale, first-time investments that ignite lasting infrastructure, and long-term partnerships to sustain change, fortifying the resilience, safety, and enduring leadership of communities at the forefront of climate and environmental action.

This is how transformation happens—not from the top down, but from the roots up, through the collective impact of thousands of interconnected people-led initiatives across the globe.

From local action to global impact, discover below how the movements we support are seeding resilient and just futures.

Forging Just Energy Futures

The shift to a just energy future is already underway, led by communities on the frontlines.

Explore inspiring examples from South Africa to Chile of grassroots movements meeting local energy needs while protecting ecosystems and community rights.

Image Credit: Vaal Environmental Justice Alliance (VEJA)

Launch Stories

Restoring Indigenous-Led Territorial Governance

The territorial governance of Indigenous Peoples—from Indigenous-led efforts to rewild land in the Arctic to Indigenous-led conservation in Papua New Guinea—is essential to the survival of biodiversity and our shared planet.

Read stories of grassroots movements reclaiming and strengthening Indigenous territorial governance to protect ecosystems and future generations.

Image Credit: Yuturi Warmi

Launch Stories

Investing in Inclusive Climate Futures

Around the world, those facing the deepest climate impacts are already leading indispensable efforts to foster movements, democratize resources, safeguard ecosystems, and cultivate futures grounded in generations of ecological knowledge and collective care.

Explore examples of grassroots movements seeding resilient and inclusive climate futures.

Image Credit: Rural Encounters on Environment and Film (REEF)

Launch Stories

A Global Watershed of Knowledge and Action

Global Greengrants supports grassroots climate and environmental action through a participatory, decentralized grantmaking advisory network comprising regional and thematic boards, global recommending partners, and partner funds. Like interconnected rivers flowing through landscapes, advisors are integral members of the movements they fund, identifying powerful solutions long before traditional funders ever could, with the ability to accompany those ideas into lasting impact. This approach shifts decision-making power to the people whose lives, lands, and waters are under threat and enables resources to reach frontline groups that others cannot reach—safely, accountably, and at scale.

Image Credit: Pio Figueiroa, VacaBonsai Colectivo Audiovisual

The Current Advisory Network

“Our capacity to deliver resources that can truly transform the protection of the most important biodiversity-rich and climate-regulating biomes that are in our countries is infinitely bigger than what anybody can do from the outside.”— Maria Amália Souza, Founder of Fundo Casa Socioambiental, Global Greengrants regional partner fund in Brazil

The Global Greengrants advisory network includes more than 250 advisors across over 25 advisory boards, partner funds, and global recommending partner boards. From the Pacific Islands Advisory Board to the Next Generation Climate Board, advisors are activists, scientists, Indigenous leaders, and community organizers with regional or thematic expertise who know where flexible grants can make the biggest difference. Many in the network also lead key environmental and climate justice funds in the Global South—like The Environmental Justice Fund and Fondo Tierra Viva—shifting long-term management of philanthropic resources held in the Global North into the hands of the Global Majority.

The network can be envisioned as a living watershed—a constellation of local streams flowing through diverse landscapes, each shaped by its own terrain yet connected within a larger global system. Advisors and grassroots partners act as tributaries, channeling knowledge, trust, and resources directly to the communities where they are most needed. Rather than a single central current, the network moves like an interconnected river basin: decentralized, adaptive, and constantly renewing, with local flows strengthening the vitality of the whole. Across regions, ideas and support circulate like water, sustaining movements, nourishing resilience, and carrying momentum from one place to another.

This model builds trust, reduces barriers, and increases the flow of support and resources to people that need them most, feeding movements to flower into burgeoning ecosystems that shift power, democratize resources, and protect the planet.

The New Congo Basin Fund: Supporting Global South Philanthropy

Image credit: Congo Basin Environmental and Climate Justice Fund

Since 2016, Global Greengrants has made 324 grants totaling $2.06M in 5 countries in Central Africa.

“The Indigenous peoples and local communities that have lived in the forest for so many years, they are the ones who safeguard the forest. They are the custodians of the forest. They know the solutions to the problems.” — Samuel Nnah Ndobe, Coordinator of the Central Africa Advisory Board

The Congo Basin is home to the world’s second-largest tropical rainforest, an ecosystem vital to the planet’s climate and a critical carbon sink. For generations, Indigenous Peoples and local communities have protected these forests through deep knowledge of their lands and waters. Their leadership remains one of the most effective defenses against the growing pressures of extractive industries and environmental degradation.

Global Greengrants began supporting grassroots leadership in the region through early investments across East and Central Africa. In 2016, we established a Central Africa Advisory Board to guide locally rooted grantmaking and strengthen regional movements. Partners have since trained Indigenous women in sustainable forest management in Cameroon, convened youth climate resilience forums in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and strengthened networks of community forest defenders.

Building on this foundation, the Congo Basin Environmental and Climate Justice Fund is emerging from years of collaboration and consultation with Indigenous and local communities. Formally launching at COP30 in Brazil, the Fund will expand support for grassroots movements protecting the Congo Basin’s forests and river ecosystems.

This shift in philanthropic influence—from the Global North to the Global South—is central to Global Greengrants’ long-term strategy. By redistributing resources and decision-making power, we are helping rebalance a system long dominated by Global North philanthropy. Through sustained support for locally led, activist-driven Global Majority Funds, we invest in the financial autonomy of movements and strengthen the ability of communities to shape their own futures.

Learning as Movement Infrastructure

Alongside grantmaking, Global Greengrants invests in learning. Our approach creates unique opportunities for activists, organizers, community leaders, and funders to exchange strategies, share lessons, and strengthen collective approaches to climate and environmental justice. These exchanges connect grassroots leaders with one another—and with the funders and allies who support their work—building a shared ecosystem of knowledge and practice.

Supporting this web of learning is central to how we accompany movements. Flexible funding helps grassroots groups act quickly, but sustained impact also depends on opportunities to reflect, adapt, and learn across regions and issue areas. When movements are connected in this way, they strengthen their strategies, avoid working in isolation, and accelerate the spread of solutions rooted in local knowledge.

By investing in learning alongside funding, Global Greengrants helps cultivate stronger networks, more resilient movements, and coordinated action capable of advancing lasting climate and environmental justice.

Image Credit: Pio Figueiroa, ShePriesthood International, Rural Encounters on Environment and Film (REEF)

Earthseeds: A Global Learning Hub

In 2025, Global Greengrants reached a significant milestone with the completion of the Earthseeds Hub—a dynamic and thoughtfully designed digital platform created to strengthen learning, reflection, and knowledge exchange across our global network.

At Global Greengrants, grantmaking is only one part of how we accompany grassroots movements. Equally central to our mission is the cultivation of relationships, shared learning, and strategic exchange across advisory boards, regions, and thematic lenses. These form the connective tissue of our decentralized model, strengthening the infrastructure that allows locally led climate and environmental justice solutions to take root, evolve, and travel across borders.

The Earthseeds Hub emerges from our strategic commitment to learning as a practice, not a product. Essential to achieving lasting impact is learning that is continuous, grounded in lived experience, accountable to movements, and shared across geographies and partners. Earthseeds makes learning visible, accessible, and actionable across the organization and our wider ecosystem.

More than a repository of documents, the Earthseeds Hub is a living learning space. It gathers curated resources, collective reflections, case-based insights, and strategies from grassroots partners and advisors around the world. By connecting knowledge generated at the local level to broader network-wide learning, the Hub helps surface patterns, deepen analysis, and put new insights into practice.

Earthseeds plays a critical role in enabling meaningful connections. The platform supports cross-pollination between thematic and regional work, allowing advisors and partners to learn from one another’s approaches, challenges, and innovations—while honoring the specificity of place, culture, and grassroots leadership. In this way, Earthseeds strengthens alignment of learning with impact, while honoring diversity that is central to our model. It fosters a learning culture where advisors are stewards of knowledge and relationships, helping shift learning into an embedded organizational practice.

The Earthseeds Hub is rooted in a deep respect for the wisdom held within our advisory network and partner communities. Advisors’ lived experience and collective analysis yield essential insights that shape strategy and practice. In doing so, the Hub reinforces our commitment to learn with—rather than about—the communities we support.

Global Greengrants will begin rolling out the Earthseeds Hub with the network in 2026. As it grows, the platform will evolve alongside our strategy, strengthening a learning ecosystem in support of grassroots climate and environmental justice movements worldwide.

Collective Learning for Gender-Just Climate Solutions

In 2025, Global Greengrants made 694 grants totaling $5.43M in 87 countries to support gender-just climate action.

“It’s important for us to ‘walk the talk’—and this type of learning helps us do that.” — Program Manager from Fundo Casa Socioambiental, Global Greengrants regional partner fund in Brazil

Behind these grants is a deeper commitment: strengthening our own practices to reflect the justice we seek to advance.

The Gender and Environmental Justice Working Group, composed of advisors and partners across the Global Greengrants network, helps deepen this commitment. The group explores what it means to apply a gender justice lens to participatory grantmaking, ensuring that funding decisions reflect the lived realities of the communities most affected by environmental harm.

In 2025, the Working Group continued its Engaging with Gender Justice Conversation Series, convening advisors from across regions to reflect on how gender intersects with environmental justice and how grantmaking can better support inclusive movements.

These conversations surfaced critical insights—from Indigenous cosmovisions and spiritual understandings of gender, to the intersections of ableism, environmental justice, and gender equity. The learning is already shaping how advisors identify and resource movement leadership across the network, strengthening support for women and LGBTQI+ leaders advancing climate solutions on the frontlines.

Just as importantly, the discussions have reinforced a shared understanding that climate action must also nurture care, healing, and collective well-being. By integrating these feminist values into grantmaking, Global Greengrants is helping movements address not only environmental crises, but the systems of inequity that drive them.

Transforming Philanthropy

No grassroots group or philanthropic institution can construct the just, sustainable futures we dream of alone. System-wide transition requires both the collective effort of grassroots movements across geographies and experiences, and a seismic shift in how philanthropy shows up: with greater trust, flexibility, collaboration, and courage to water the seeds of community-led change.

Global Greengrants works collaboratively with movement partners and allies to catalyze that shift. Together, we engage philanthropy to move more resources and rethink how impact is defined, whose leadership is valued, and what it takes to support durable, movement-driven change. In 2025, Global Greengrants advocated for support to grassroots climate and environmental movements in key philanthropic conversations—from the stage of the Summit for Collaborative Funds to closed-door sessions hosted by International Funders for Indigenous Peoples (IFIP)—and actively boosted movement leaders’ presence and perspectives in international decision-making spaces.

When we tend partnerships between funders and the broader ecosystem of feminist, Indigenous, and grassroots climate justice movements, we cultivate more coordinated, sustained, and equitable resources for frontline solutions—helping remarkable transformation to bloom globally.

Image Credit: Roots, Elizabeth Weber

Global Greengrants at COP30

Image credit: Pio Figueiroa

“In an era when negotiations are increasingly shaped by markets, corporations, and extractive interests, people power remains the most reliable driver of transformative climate action. Philanthropy must invest in the long-arc work of movements—supporting both their ability to intervene at moments like COP30 and their ongoing efforts to build durable, transnational organizing infrastructure.” — B de Gersigny, Global Greengrants Vice President of External Relations

Global power dynamics shift when international climate decision-making spaces center movements. Global Greengrants partners with grassroots groups to influence conferences like the climate COPs and highlight pivotal local climate and environmental solutions.

In 2025, Global Greengrants supported nearly 50 grassroots partners across Africa, Latin America, and Asia to attend COP30 in Belém, Brazil—not as observers, but as protagonists. This was especially crucial for COP30. The Brazilian Amazon is home to a strong Indigenous and climate movement infrastructure, making it a vital year both to bolster Brazilian activists’ presence at COP30 and to foster cross-regional bonds. Movement leaders made their mark at this significant global climate conference, sending a clear message to global decision-makers: movements hold the most effective, equitable climate solutions.

Image credit: Pio Figueiroa

Beyond supporting travel to and participation in COP30, Global Greengrants supported pivotal on-the-ground initiatives. Together with partners, we hosted gatherings on “From Roots to Futures: African and Afro-descendant Paths to Climate Justice at COP30 and Beyond” and “Creating Bonds: Environmental Defenders from the Amazon, Africa, and the World,” which fostered rich connections across regions and issue areas. We supported the People’s Summit, The Global South House, and the launch of the Congo Basin Environmental and Climate Justice Fund, all of which seeded powerful international momentum for movement-building and Global-Majority-led resource distribution. We also boosted movement-led narrative change through our support to House of Socio-Environmental Journalism, an unprecedented alliance of more than 20 independent media outlets led by InfoAmazonia. The initiative created a collaborative reporting hub that amplified journalists rooted in the regions most affected by climate and environmental crises. By elevating locally grounded perspectives, the initiative helped reshape how COP30 was reported, bringing forward narratives of Indigenous leadership, grassroots innovation, and territorial defense that are often overlooked in global climate coverage.

To link learnings from these on-the-ground efforts into transformative wisdom on movement-centered philanthropy, Global Greengrants convened two donor learning conversations that connected funders directly with insights from staff and grassroots partners who participated in the negotiations. These sessions created a rare window for philanthropy to hear firsthand how feminist, community-led climate solutions are shaping more democratic and justice-centered approaches within international climate spaces and beyond. As a bridge between grassroots movements and philanthropy, Global Greengrants helps translate movement leadership into learning opportunities for donors, ensuring that those closest to the impacts of climate change can also shape the strategies and investments meant to address it. By bringing donors into these dialogues, Global Greengrants invites philanthropy to witness the power of grassroots movements—and the transformative possibilities that emerge when those movements are resourced with sustained, flexible support.

At COP30, Global Greengrants helped ensure that grassroots movements were not only present in global climate spaces, but able to gather, learn, and act together. By supporting frontline leaders to convene across borders, strengthening spaces for reflection and solidarity, amplifying movement-led journalism, and connecting philanthropic partners with the realities and solutions emerging from frontline communities, Global Greengrants helped movements bring their priorities and lived expertise into global climate conversations. For many grassroots leaders, these moments of exchange are as important as the negotiations themselves, building the relationships, shared strategies, and collective strength that sustain movements long after the summit ends. Through this work, Global Greengrants continues to serve as a bridge between grassroots movements and philanthropy, helping ensure that climate solutions are shaped by the communities defending their territories and building more just futures.

The Nyéléni Forum: Food Sovereignty Movements Leading Systemic Change

Image credit: Grassroots International

“We are not here to scale down, but to scale deep—to root solidarity in trust.” — Nyéléni Forum participant

In September 2025, Global Greengrants joined a diverse delegation of funders—including allies such as Grassroots International—in Kandy, Sri Lanka for the Third Nyéléni Global Forum. Participating as part of the Nyéléni Funders Circle, we came to listen, learn, and stand in solidarity with the social movements advancing food sovereignty and shaping a more just and regenerative future for food systems and the planet.

The gathering marked a historic moment: for the first time in the 18-year history of the Nyéléni process, a delegation of philanthropic funders was invited to participate in the forum. The invitation reflected a growing recognition that philanthropy has a role to play—not in directing movements, but in accompanying them with the long-term, flexible support needed to sustain transformative change.

The Nyéléni Forum gathered farmers, fishers, Indigenous leaders, feminists, and workers from 102 countries, where they carried with them a pivotal truth: that solutions to the intertwined crises of climate, hunger, and inequality already exist in the hands of those most affected. The Nyéléni Forum—born from decades of organizing by grassroots social movements—has long been the beating heart of the global food sovereignty movement.

What unfolded was more than a conference; it was an organizing moment of deep intersectional analysis, collective strategy, and political imagination. For grassroots movements, the Forum resulted in four campaigns to advance food sovereignty and climate justice on a global scale, as well as a Kandy Declaration. For funders, the main learning was clear: global resilience is built from communities that feed, heal, and defend the planet, and it is our responsibility to stand with them—not above, not ahead, but alongside.

Fostering Relentless Hope

Image credit: Global Greengrants Fund

“Relentless hope isn’t optimism. It’s action.” — Laura García, CEO of Global Greengrants

When 70% of people globally live under authoritarian regimes, hope is a critical tool for movements to continue organizing, resisting, and reimagining democracy.

Recognizing this, Global Greengrants encouraged funders to stand with grassroots climate and environmental groups, whose visions for the future cut through the clouds of current global turmoil and orient us toward possibilities for people and planet to thrive, together.

We uplifted relentless, movement-led hope in 2025 through:

Relentless Hope In Action — During the Global Summit of Collaborative Funds and New York Climate Week, Global Greengrants and Youth Climate Justice Fund hosted two meaningful funder conversations. Attendees heard stories from frontline organizers in South Africa, Ecuador, Ghana, and the Philippines and strategized on what solidarity looks like in action.
Funding Youth-Led Grassroots Movements Fosters Relentless Hope — Following our relentless hope events, we explored together with Youth Climate Justice Fund what we see across both organizations: youth-led climate justice movements carry a disciplined, organized, and compelling form of hope, one that funders must support with more flexible, trust-based funding.

Hope is not about passive optimism, but about active engagement, resilience, and the belief that collective action can create meaningful democratic progress. When local movements are well supported and hold sovereignty over their resources, they are powerful, resilient, and adaptive forces transforming hope into action.

The Power of Narrative Change

Narrative change is a powerful force in the fight for climate and environmental justice. The stories that shape public understanding of the climate crisis influence whose leadership is recognized, which solutions gain traction, and where resources ultimately flow. For grassroots movements, shifting dominant narratives is not simply about communications—it is about expanding visibility, legitimacy, and support for the people and communities advancing solutions on the frontlines.

At Global Greengrants, communications and influencing are essential tools for strengthening movements. By elevating the voices, knowledge, and leadership of grassroots partners, we help challenge narratives that overlook frontline communities and instead highlight the transformative work already underway around the world.

In 2025, Global Greengrants used storytelling, media partnerships, and digital platforms to help reshape philanthropic narratives, encouraging funders to recognize and invest in the cultures of care, courage, and collective action that grassroots climate and environmental movements are cultivating across regions. Through our blog, media publications, and collaborative storytelling initiatives, we showcased how interconnected grassroots groups—when resourced and connected—can transform local action into global solidarity and lasting systems change.

Below are a few examples of how narrative change helped amplify movement leadership and expand support for grassroots climate solutions.

Movement Stories:

Thought Leadership:

Collaborative Support for Grassroots Climate Movements: The CLIMA Fund

The CLIMA Fund is a collaboration between Global Greengrants, Grassroots International, Thousand Currents, Urgent Action Fund for Feminist Activism, and Youth Climate Justice Fund—a like-minded community working together to fund grassroots climate and environmental movements and spark funder-to-funder learning.

In 2025, the CLIMA Fund hosted a dialogue series that brought together grassroots leaders from climate justice movements across the Global South and funders to discuss how movements are defending democracy. The series was an inspiring balm in a context of deepening authoritarianism, escalating climate shocks, and political systems straining under the weight of overlapping crises. The resulting thematic brief on “Why Grassroots Climate Justice Movements are Critical for Defending Democracy” follows additional thematic briefs on youth and climate, community-controlled renewables, and more.

In 2026, the CLIMA Fund will celebrate its 10th anniversary, host a dialogue series for funders new to environmental justice, and kick off a new initiative to resource grassroots movements protecting and restoring watersheds.

transformational-jounrey-feature-543x800

Our Transformative Journey

Since 2022, Global Greengrants has undertaken a deep process of reflection, learning, and strategic renewal—a Transformative Journey.

In the 30 years since Global Greengants’ founding, the philanthropic ecosystem has shifted dramatically. The climate crisis has deepened, while the countries most responsible have withdrawn from international agreements. Funding has also been slashed and resources shifted to technical climate solutions that expand extractivism, even as the urgency to build community power and dismantle the systems underpinning today’s crises continues to grow. Recognizing these shifts, Global Greengrants knew we had to stay nimble—revitalizing our strategies and goals to ensure even deeper alignment with the needs of grassroots climate and environmental justice movements.

Our Transformative Journey started with a series of consultations across the global advisory network designed to test new ideas and approaches to supporting grassroots climate and environmental justice movements. Through this process—combining consultation with a wide network of advisors, partners, and allies, data analysis from decades of grantmaking, and strategic learning—we examined where our model has the greatest impact and how our global ecosystem of advisors, partners, and funders can most effectively support movements in the years to come.

In 2026, culminating from years of generative reflection, learning, and visioning, we’re excited to launch our strategic framework and a rearticulation of the areas of movement-led climate and environmental justice impact we support. This outlines a renewed and robust roadmap for our work and a shared vision for well-resourced movements with the power to make substantive change toward the arc of repair and justice.

The power and impact of the work we support emerges through networks—through the connections, collaborations, and shared learning that strengthen movements over time. Together, we are cultivating an ecosystem where grassroots leaders, advisors, and funders learn together, adapt, and build collective strategies for lasting change.

In this sense, the journey itself has been transformative. As we have strengthened our own learning practices, we have also reaffirmed the central insight that has guided Global Greengrants for more than three decades:

Lasting environmental and climate justice solutions grow from the knowledge, leadership, and vision of the communities closest to the challenges—and the possibilities—of our shared future.

Image credit: Global Greengrants Fund

Power through Partnership: Our Fiscal Sponsorships

Fiscal sponsorship strengthens philanthropic infrastructure. Partnering with the Agroecology Fund and the Environmental Defenders Collaborative to share financial administration and connect across networks amplifies collective impact. When aligned funders work in unique yet synergistic ways, we multiply movement solidarity.

$.2M

through 248 grants in 66 countries made by the Agroecology Fund^

Image credit: Tamara Espinoza

Group of women gathered around a red generator inside a community structure, with two women shaking hands during a community handover or partnership moment.

$.7M

through 343 grants in 70 countries made by the Environmental Defenders Collaborative

Image credit: Pastoralist Peoples’ Initiative

^The Agroecology Fund’s total grantmaking includes their Global Grant Program and four Regional Funds. While most of Agroecology Fund’s grantmaking passes through Global Greengrants’ grantmaking system, some grants made through Agroecology Fund’s partnership with East Africa Regional Agroecology Fund and West Africa Regional Agroecology Fund—totaling $419K through 14 grants—passed through Trust Africa's administrative system instead of Global Greengrants’, and aren’t counted in Global Greengrants’ global grantmaking statistics.

CR_Sumut_GGF_English_Report_2024-10429-3 (2).jpg

Image credit: Climate Rangers North Sumatra

2025 Financial Overview

Total Data UK Data

Total Data

$34.4M

Total grants allocated in 2025

$69.8M

Total assets

$48.7M

Total expenses in 2025

UK Data

Expenses

Numbers labeled “total” include Global Greengrants Fund (US), Global Greengrants Fund UK, donor-advised funds (DAFs), regional partner funds, and fiscal sponsorships. UK data highlight the numbers within that overall umbrella that are specific to Global Greengrants UK.

Total Expenses UK Expenses

Total Expenses

UK Expenses

Financials

For U.S. and European-based operations in fiscal year ended June 30, 2025.

For financials from prior years, visit greengrants.org/financials.

Total Details UK Details

Total Details

UK Details

Portrait of an older man seated indoors during an interview or conversation.

Image credit: Family and Friends of Roy Young

In Memory of
Roy Young

In April 2026, we lost Roy Young, one of Global Greengrants Fund’s earliest champions and our very first donor.

In the earliest days, when Global Greengrants was still the Caribou Fund, Roy’s belief in the idea helped make it possible. At a time when there was no track record, no proof of concept, and no guarantee of what this would become, Roy showed up with trust and conviction—willing to back something rooted in values, not certainty.

Roy lived a life shaped by a deep love of the natural world and a willingness to act on it. He was not only a supporter of environmental organizations, but an activist—someone who stood up for what he believed in and took risks in service of that. He believed in backing people and ideas that center care for communities, land, and the planet long before they were widely recognized or resourced.

His early support helped lay the foundation for Global Greengrants’ approach—rooted in trust, local leadership, and the understanding that meaningful change comes from those closest to the challenges.

At a time of uncertainty, Roy’s legacy feels especially relevant. He believed that individuals have a role to play, not just in what they stand for, but in what they are willing to support and make possible. That early belief, sustained over time, is what allows new ideas, movements, and approaches to take root and grow.

We are deeply grateful for Roy’s role in helping bring Global Greengrants into the world, and for the example he leaves for all of us.

Gratitude

Just as a seed needs the right conditions—healthy soil, water, sunlight, and the quiet collaboration of countless living systems—to grow, social change takes root within an aligned ecosystem of people, movements, and institutions working together. Global Greengrants is one part of that living system, and our work is made possible through the shared commitment of a vast community.

We extend deep gratitude to the grantee partners, advisors, movement leaders, and allies whose courage, knowledge, and persistence nurture the grassroots movements shaping more just and regenerative futures. Their leadership is the soil from which climate and environmental justice grows.

We are equally grateful to the generous funders and philanthropic partners who believe in the power of grassroots action and make this work possible. Your partnership helps seed the imagination, solidarity, and resilience of communities confronting the intertwined crises of climate, inequality, and democracy.

Together—with movements, advisors, allies, and supporters—we are cultivating the conditions for lasting change. Because when communities are trusted, resourced, and connected, the seeds of justice take root and grow into a more equitable and thriving world for people and planet.

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Image credit: Rural Encounters on Environment and Film (REEF)

Annual 2025 Report

A Letter from Laura García and Dr. Nisha Owen

Connecting Resources and Movements

2025 Core Grantmaking by Issue Area***

Grantee Partner Highlights

Seeds of Resilience and Transformation: Movement Stories

Forging Just Energy Futures

Restoring Indigenous-Led Territorial Governance

Investing in Inclusive Climate Futures

A Global Watershed of Knowledge and Action

The Current Advisory Network

The New Congo Basin Fund: Supporting Global South Philanthropy

Learning as Movement Infrastructure

Earthseeds: A Global Learning Hub

Collective Learning for Gender-Just Climate Solutions

Transforming Philanthropy

Global Greengrants at COP30

The Nyéléni Forum: Food Sovereignty Movements Leading Systemic Change

Fostering Relentless Hope

The Power of Narrative Change

Collaborative Support for Grassroots Climate Movements: The CLIMA Fund

Our Transformative Journey

Power through Partnership: Our Fiscal Sponsorships

2025 Financial Overview

Expenses

Financials

In Memory ofRoy Young

Gratitude

In Memory of
Roy Young