One dollar. A hundred. A thousand. Here's why it doesn't matter.
There's a moment in every great band where someone stops playing their instrument and just listens. And they hear that no single part could do what the whole band do together.
That's basically the whole idea behind pooled giving.
It's not a new idea. Giving circles (groups of people who combine their donations and direct the money collectively) have been around for decades. They started because people figured out, pretty quickly, that $500 going somewhere alone does a lot less than $500 going somewhere as part of $50,000. Pool enough, and suddenly you're funding work that moves the dial.
So how do The Climatics fit into that?
A giving circle, broadly. But with one deliberate difference.
In a traditional giving circle, members vote, debate, and collectively choose the recipients. For many causes, that's a great model - it keeps donors close to the decisions and builds shared ownership of the outcome.
Climate, though. Climate is its own thing.
For those of you who have been following along for a while, you’ll know that part of the origin story of The Climatics is that one of our co-founders, MJ, kept trying to figure out where to donate and kept hitting a wall. She cared a lot; however, she didn’t have the scientific and strategic literacy to know which organisations were actually driving change, versus those that felt good but weren’t making the big systemic shifts that are needed. The landscape of climate action in Aotearoa is wide, the approaches are varied, and knowing which ones are well placed to create durable, systems-level change requires expertise that most of us just don't have.
That's the reason The Climatics was born. We let ourselves dream for a minute and thought, if we could bring together any configuration of expertise to make these decisions, what would that look like? Given the wide-ranging nature of the issue, how could we be truly confident that we were thinking this through holistically? And that was the origin of our independent curation team. It’s made up of people with depth across climate strategy, policy, law, finance, and mātauranga Māori. This rockstar team assesses the organisations based on our criteria and funding areas and, finally, selects the grantees. Our community funds the work. The experts choose it.
It means the decisions aren't shaped by who's most persuasive in the room, or which organisation has the best grant-writing team. Smaller, less-resourced organisations doing powerful work; vital stuff that might not look sexy; systemic approaches that don’t fit the normal funding mould - we make sure they all get a proper look in.
Why pooling and climate are a particularly good fit
Climate change is a collective action problem. The whole reason it's hard is that the costs of acting are individual and immediate, and the benefits are shared and long-term. Individual action is important. On its own, though, it can't shift systems.
The work that does shift systems, such as legal challenges, transport advocacy, policy reform, Māori-led environmental action, can feel less tangible, it can be largely invisible. It doesn't generate the kind of before-and-after photo that makes for a great fundraising campaign. You can’t declare success by presenting the number of new trees in the ground. A bit like how nobody cheers for the soundcheck. But the gig doesn't work without it.
Funding that kind of work takes patience. And it takes scale that most of us, on our own, can't reach.
Which makes it a really good fit for pooling. And while each contribution is different, they do the same work. The amounts aren't equal, and we're not pretending otherwise, but once the money is together, it moves as one. And it moves further.
It's all about community
There's something that happens when people pool resources that doesn't show up in the grant totals… community. People who care about the same things, in the same place, at the same time.
That matters more than it might sound. Climate action can feel isolating. The scale is enormous, the political pace is frustrating, and the gap between what one person can do and what the problem needs can wear you down. Being part of something shifts that. It's not the whole answer, but it has the power to change the way the work feels.
When we announce our grantees, we're not just reporting where the money went. We're pointing at what a group of people made happen together. That's worth celebrating.
That's the song The Climatics is playing, and there’s a part for everyone to play.
