What Might It Take to Close the Intention-Action Gap on Climate Funding?

Last week was a bit of a whirlwind. On Tuesday night, we hosted our first official gathering for The Climatics community in Auckland. On Thursday, I spoke at the Philanthropy New Zealand conference about the intention-action gap in climate giving. When I got home to Wellington and went back through my notebook, looking at the pages of scribbled quotes, and reflections, and ideas from the trip, I felt like I was doing a jigsaw puzzle.

And because writing is often a way of processing for me (and because I’ve been missing writing these blogs!) I thought I’d share my musings.

The hypothesis

For years I’ve been obsessed with the question: how do we build climate agency?

Before I moved to Aotearoa, I was working with a network of 600+ social entrepreneurs tackling climate change and our broader environmental predicament at an organisation called Ashoka. I kept having the same conversation: we have proven solutions for much of the climate challenge, the science is unequivocal about the urgency, and we know people care - deeply. So why isn’t action happening at the speed and scale needed? The answer: because we need solutions everywhere, and that takes everyone. But climate is overwhelming - it’s too big, I’m too small, it’s too late, someone else will do it… all of these very rational reasons flood in. And they’re agency killers.

So I spent time researching what social entrepreneurs around the world were doing to get people to take action. I wasn’t interested in the types of single-action approaches, I was looking for the types of solutions that activated people to drive change themselves, that unlocked their internal motivation to be climate changemakers beyond any one intervention. I studied over 100 approaches working with wildly diverse groups: from small fishing communities in Africa to Fortune 500 companies, from judges in China to coal communities in Appalachia.

Despite the huge range of contexts, I found consistent strategies. We called it the Climate Changemaker Playbook, and it came down to three things:

1. Making it Personal – connecting climate to what people actually care about
2. Gathering Support – creating communities so people aren't doing it alone
3. Creating Enabling Conditions – building new structures that make action easier

You can read the full report here if you’re interested.

But what’s relevant for this blog, and what I was speaking about at the Philanthropy New Zealand conference was whether this might apply to activating communities of philanthropists.

Because in very many ways, philanthropy faces exactly the same blockers.

The much discussed climate funding gap

There are stats flying around about how little philanthropic funding goes to climate. Some say less than 2%, some say 4%. Yet research shows that nearly half of New Zealanders are willing to give to climate action.

Last week, our friends at Fundsorter released data that shows this really clearly. Across Christchurch, Selwyn, and Waimakariri, 8% of funders stated that climate change is a focus or priority, but only 1% of grant funding was actually allocated to climate. You can read their report here.

People care. Deeply. But turning that care into funding going out the door is flipping hard.

Testing the hypothesis here

Maybe you can already see where I’m going with this…

When MJ approached me last year with a vision for building a pooled fund for climate in Aotearoa, I immediately wondered whether the playbook strategies could work for climate giving?

You might be able to notice the playbook strategies above in what we do here at the Climatics:

• Making it Personal: We spotlight the incredible climate work already happening across Aotearoa that most people have never heard of. We make progress visible.

• Gathering Support: We're building a community of climate donors who are part of something bigger.

• Creating Enabling Conditions: That’s the fund mechanism itself - we built a pooled fund that removes the friction. Instead of navigating hundreds of charities, we hope donors can trust our expert curation team to do the heavy lifting.

What we saw in our first round makes me think that it could be working. Several of you told us you’d never donated to climate before because you didn't know where to start.

What I heard at the conference

At Philanthropy NZ, I heard two things that stuck with me.

Eleanor Cater from Community Foundations of Aotearoa NZ said: "People want to improve their philanthropy. The more fulfilling their giving feels, the more they want to give."

Bill Kermode from the Centre for Strategic Philanthropy said: "We need to tell the stories of good more powerfully in order to spark more giving."

Both of these connect to making progress visible—showing people that change is happening, that their contribution matters, that they're part of something working. And neither was talking specifically about climate. This applies across all giving.

Everyone, everywhere, all at once

At our Auckland launch event, we asked everyone to choose a one-word "climate superpower" to wear on their name tag. The full list was: translating, questioning, listening, teaching, mobilising, celebrating, caring, building, storytelling, composting, imagining, navigating, defending. Thirteen different superpowers.

Thirteen different ways people show up for climate.

Here's what I'm learning: closing the intention-action gap is possible. The strategies work. We're seeing it with The Climatics. AND we need many on-ramps. The Climatics is one version. One way of activating climate giving that will work for and appeal to a subset of folks. Hopefully lots of folks! But it's not the only way.

Because climate change will take everyone, everywhere, all at once. And that means we need as many pathways to action as there are superpowers in the proverbial room.

We can't solve the funding gap with pooled funds alone. But we can start closing the gap between caring and giving—and we can do it in ways that meet people where they are.