Ivey Foundation to ‘spend down’ $100M endowment focusing on economy-based climate solutions. Decision offers big opportunity, but also risk of 'drowning out' other approaches.

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On Tuesday, the Ivey Foundation went all-in for the climate. 

In an open letter, the foundation’s president and board chair announced the country’s sixth-oldest foundation will spend down its $100 million endowment within the next five years. In keeping with the foundation’s strategy over the last decade, spend-down funds will support organizations with a targeted focus on climate solutions that promote economic prosperity, with a strong focus on the foundation’s existing grantees.  

“Foundations need not continue in perpetuity for perpetuity’s sake,” they wrote, in the letter. “There is a strong argument that their philanthropic resources can, and in some cases should, be fully utilized for the most critical issues we face today.

“In our case, the Ivey Foundation’s singular focus on addressing climate change through the Economy and Environment Program makes capital distribution especially well-suited to achieving maximum impact in the near term.” 

Dr. Bruce Lourie, President of the Ivey Foundation (Courtesy: Ivey Foundation)

Leaders in the environmental and philanthropic sectors were quick to celebrate the news. 

“I was thrilled,” says Devika Shah, executive director of Environment Funders Canada, a network for environmental funders (of which Ivey is a member.) “I think it signals to everybody that climate change is such a serious and urgent issue that funders are taking drastic measures like these.”

Shah says the move is important both for the injection of cash it will provide to the environmental sector and the signal it sends to other funders who care about the climate.

“By making a decision like this,” she says, “I think it’s just really, really important in explaining to people that this is not like any other issue our species has faced before — this is very, very different.”

Juniper Glass, principal of philanthropic consulting firm Lumiere, too, welcomed the news. “I think it took some guts,” she says, noting how uncommon it is for Canadian foundations to spend-down. (Among the 130-odd members of Philanthropic Foundations Canada, the member-network for private foundations, just four have explicit spend-down mandates, according to Sara Krynitzki, the organization’s director of communications.) 

But despite the low numbers in Canada currently, the momentum for the practice has been picking up steam in North America. In September, for instance, Bill Gates announced his intention to sunset the Bill & Melinda Gates foundation with assets of more than $50 billion, within 25 years. In Canada, too, momentum has been building, spurred by the urgency of social issues, and by provocations from activists and philanthropic advocates. 

“I think that all of the work of social justice and racial justice movements have helped pave the way for this decision,” says Glass. “[Perpetuity] has been very explicitly questioned. And it totally has shaken up the thinking — even if it wasn’t well received at first.”

Yet amidst the celebration over the foundation’s decision, Glass also says there are important questions to consider about how the Ivey Foundation decides to give away their funds, including who will get the bulk of the support and who could be left behind. 

Jacqueline Lee-Tam in Montreal at the 2019 climate strike holding up a banner that reads “We are here to protect our water.” (Banner artwork: Isaac Murdoch and Christi Belcourt. Photo credit: Michael Leger) 

Narrow focus on environment and economy could risk ‘drowning out’ other approaches

When it comes to private philanthropy, the Ivey Foundation has led this country’s work on building an evidence base linking the climate transition to economic progress, according to Shah. 

“For a long time, I felt that in the environmental movement, we had a big gap in our ability to answer the economic questions,” she says. “And it is absolutely a prerequisite that we have done that proper economic thinking, analysis, modeling and lobbying, quite frankly — to explain to people what the economic opportunities are to acting on the climate and what the costs are of not acting.”

Many years ago, Ivey recognized this gap, Shah says, and to their credit, they helped fill it. They provided the money and the direction to launch several new organizations, including the Canadian Climate Institute, the Transition Accelerator, and the Institute for Sustainable Finance; and funded many others — all with the aim of building the evidence base, the policy case, and the organizational momentum to make progress toward a net-zero future. 

In an interview with Future of Good on Wednesday, Ivey Foundation president Dr. Bruce Lourie says that over the next five years, their priorities will remain largely the same. They will continue to provide support to many existing partners and will add additional fundees, based on their core granting priorities. These include accelerating progress on “pathways to net-zero,” like decarbonizing the country’s electricity supply; building a “broad-based, inclusive national consensus” on the adoption of net-zero policies; and promoting the adoption of “economy-wide” environmental policies.  

Three philanthropic and environmental sector leaders who spoke with Future of Good — Shah, Glass, and Jacqueline Lee-Tam, executive director of the Climate Justice Organizing Hub — were largely in agreement on the importance of these priorities. Where their perspectives differed, however, is on whether the foundation should widen its lens of focus, given the power it will yield in the sector over the next five years. 

While the foundation hasn’t yet mapped its anticipated disbursement by year, if they decide to give out about $20 million each year, they will be the largest private funder for climate initiatives in Canada, according to Shah.

For Glass, this leadership role means the foundation should boost their support for a broader range of groups using more varied approaches to tackling the climate crisis. 

“The potential pitfall of really strengthening voices that are pushing for mainly technological or financial solutions to climate change is that they will get heard more with government and with businesses, and other voices might get drowned out that are proposing a really different way,” she says, in an interview on Tuesday evening, following the announcement. 

In particular, Glass says she is hopeful the foundation will boost its support for grassroots community organizing and for Indigenous communities who are developing their own sustainable energy initiatives. 

Lee-Tam, too, urges the foundation to offer more grants for community organizing happening at the ground-level in communities across the country, saying that funding grassroots-led organizing has the potential to bolster the research and policy work the foundation is already doing. 

“2019 was the year that the world was shaken awake to the climate crisis, and that was not a result of top-down NGO campaigns or comms strategies,” she says. “It was directly a result of youth-led grassroots organizing.”

Lee-Tam emphasizes that there are grassroots groups engaged in every aspect of the foundation’s existing priority areas and says without funding these groups, bold changes will be stymied. 

“You can come up with the most brilliant policy and economic research…but when it comes to decision-makers actually putting it into policy, that relies on having the political will and politicians feeling the political pressure,” she says.

Lourie says he agrees with the importance of supporting community organizing, as one of many strategies to climate progress, noting that the foundation has funded prominent campaign-focused organizations like Environmental Defence and Stand, think tanks, including Pembina Institute, as well as organized labour groups and First Nations. 

“I’d argue that we’re probably doing some of the most radical funding in the country. We just present ourselves in a different way,” he says. “We’re not about flash, [or getting] attention to the work that we do. We’re just working hard, beavering away; working with people all across the country who have different styles and approaches.”

Indeed, in 2021, the foundation donated $100,000 to Environmental Defence to support electric vehicle adoption, $200,000 to Future Majority to help young people get their voices heard by policymakers, and $75,000 to Sustainability Network and GreenPAC to increase political and public literacy around climate change and climate policy. 

Lee-Tam says this is all valuable work, but still leaves out a key part of the “movement ecosystem.” She says there is an important distinction between groups who do organizing work who are registered non-profits, like Environmental Defence, for instance, and groups who “actively resist NGO-ization.” 

Groups, like Fridays for Future, Climate Justice Montreal and Climate Justice Edmonton, she says, are vastly underfunded, predominantly volunteer-run and youth-led, and “much more agile” than their NGO peers. “This is the sub-sector that was responsible for the transformative moment of the 2019 climate strikes,” she says.  

Lee-Tam, whose organization provides capacity building support for grassroots organizations, also underscores the importance of the Ivey Foundation offering direct support to Black and Indigenous-led organizing. 

“The climate crisis is a multiplier of all issues. It is people who are already the most marginalized in society who will be most affected.” She says that it’s these same groups who are coming up with solutions that get at “the crux” of the climate issue, by confronting the root causes of climate change, including colonialism, white supremacy, and “runaway capitalism.” 

A review of the foundation’s 2021 grants suggest they haven’t offered any support to groups pushing for anti-capitalist solutions to climate change.

“No, and I don’t think they will — and that’s okay,” says Shah, when asked about this funding focus. “I don’t believe that there’s one right way to do this. I think we need lots of different voices, pushing for things in lots of different ways.” 

Shah agrees with Lee-Tam that some of Ivey’s money should flow to BIPOC-led solutions, 

but disagrees that the foundation has a responsibility to shift the focus of their work to include more grassroots community organizing initiatives. 

She says there’s an essential, pressing need for more philanthropic funding for this kind of work, which includes “Greta-style” protests in the streets, narrative-shifting arts and media work, and more, but says Ivey doesn’t need to be the one to do it — that other funders must come to the table with funds to help, too. She says this can build on the good work Ivey is doing in the environment and economy space. 

No open call for applications in Ivey’s plan

After announcing the spend-down news on Tuesday, Lourie says he received about 100 emails, including from people with ideas for projects the foundation could fund. 

In their spend-down letter, the foundation said they won’t be accepting unsolicited grant applications, but rather will continue to fund existing partners and that foundation staff will also identify some new prospective partners and reach out to them directly. 

For some, the lack of an open call might suggest the foundation is limiting the range of organizations and ideas it’s exposed to. 

But Lourie disagrees with this perspective. “Rather than [using] a more traditional approach, where people send in grant applications, and a foundation board kind of sits back and reviews them and makes the decisions, we’re actually out in the community with people on a regular basis. And it’s through that process that people find us and we find them,” he says. 

He points to the influx of emails in his inbox as an example that people always find a way to get in touch: “We support ideas that are coming out of the community, but our process isn’t paper-based, it’s much more human-centered.”

Glass is sympathetic to the foundation’s decision in this regard, saying that while an open call can expose a foundation to more ideas, it’s not a “panacea” and not always the “most just way” of distributing capital. She says open grant applications can mean a lot of time spent by organizations to apply for funds they don’t then receive. 

She adds, however, that in the absence of an open process, she’d like to see the Ivey Foundation make assurances that they’re going to “incorporate the values of equity” and that they’ll fund “diverse strategies for change.”

Lourie says supporting Black and Indigenous-led projects will be part of the foundation’s funding, building on some existing partnerships, including with Indigenous Clean Energy, a non-profit that advances the role of Indigenous people in clean energy. 

Further, he says he’s hopeful that his organization’s bold move will prompt thinking at other Canadian foundations about how other institutions can accelerate their support for climate progress, and indeed, notes that several peers have already told him Ivey’s decision will put spend-down philanthropy on their agenda.

“I think this is going to really start a serious conversation in philanthropy in Canada, which I’m super excited about,” he says.

Correction: A previous version of this story said that if the Ivey foundation distributes about $20 million each year for the next five years, they will be the largest environmental funder in Canada, according to Devika Shah. In fact, Shah said this would make them the largest “climate funder” in Canada. Future of Good regrets the error.

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