Margaret Klein Salamon States: I am absolutely thrilled by an article that recently appeared in Inside Philanthropy, and wanted to share it with you. It is a deep dive into what “climate mobilization” means, our City by City project, and the $100,000 grant that Climate Mobilization Project recently won from the Unitarian Universalist Congregation on Shelter Rock.
The first and last paragraphs are below. Please read the entire article and share it widely, especially with anyone you know in the philanthropic world.
Many thanks,
Margaret
An Unusual Grant Fuels a Push to Start Treating Climate Change as a Real Emergency
By Tate Williams
A major challenge to organizing and advocacy around climate change is how even to approach a problem so large, complex, and gradually advancing (although it feels less gradual with every year, to be honest).
An advocacy group that launched in 2014 has one answer—we respond like we’re at war.
For the Climate Mobilization Project, the climate crisis demands not incremental changes or gradual reductions in emissions, but an emergency response led by government that is on the scale of the response to World War II after the attack on Pearl Harbor. The group just picked up a grant from the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Shelter Rock of $100,000, an amount they say is the “country’s single largest philanthropic investment in emergency climate action.”
...
The compelling thing about the Climate Mobilization Project is that, while arguably unrealistic in its goals—since there's no political consensus on this issue, as Rockoff's paper notes—it is unflinching in its diagnosis of the level of response that climate change warrants. Much of its goal is to build a movement around how we should collectively think about climate change—mainly that the status quo of the approach to date is unacceptable. And from the standpoint of a funder like UUCSR, it’s a status quo that’s certainly unjust.
