I introduce myself as the non-climate co-founder of The Climatics. It gets a laugh, which is partly why I do it, but it's also the truth. Pip is the one who reads IPCC reports for fun and can quote them back at you with appropriate footnotes. I'm the one googling stuff between meetings so I can nod with more confidence.
And now we’re two funding rounds in with a growing community of donors. Over $175,000 committed to climate organisations across Aotearoa. Somewhere along the way, the non-climate co-founder got a bit more climate than she bargained for - and I’m relishing every morsel of learning along the way.
When you sit down to think about giving to climate, or to any cause, for that matter, the urgent need in Aotearoa really hits home. Climate. Poverty. Nature. Housing. Health. Food security. Equity. The list goes on and all of it is interconnected, all of it pressing, all of it deserving.
So where do you place your small piece of environmental philanthropic capital? How do you make sure it has impact, rather than just that warm post-giving glow (which is also valid!)? How do you fund the system rather than just the most visible symptom of a broken one?
That question had me feeling like I was standing at the entrance to a very large library, knowing the answer was in there somewhere, and not quite knowing where to start.
Most people I know care and want to do something. But with over 29,000 registered charities in Aotearoa alone, even knowing where to look feels like a full-time job. Add to that the fact that we’re in the middle of the greatest wealth transfer in history, with more people, and more women, stepping into giving decisions - many for the first time. The will and generosity is there but what’s hard is knowing how to make it count. (I wrote more about the great wealth transfer here if you want to have a read.)
This is a gap The Climatics is trying to close. We don’t want to tell people what to care about, we just want to make it easier to act on what they already care about. Without a trusted way in, many people either fall down a very long rabbit hole trying to figure it all out themselves (that was me for a while!), or put it off until they end up doing nothing. Stuck between wanting to act and not knowing how to best do that. Which helps nobody, least of all the climate.
That's partly why I started The Climatics with Pip. To help people (including me!) to find their aisle in the labyrinth of giving options.
One of the things I'm proudest of (on the DL, because you know we're not allowed to be too pleased with ourselves in this country), is that The Climatics isn't just a place to donate. It's a place to learn.
Many of our newsletters highlight what's happening in the climate space in Aotearoa without requiring a science degree to follow along. Our grantee spotlights introduce you to the organisations we're funding and explain why - what lever they're pulling, what part of the system they're working on, why that matters right now. Our blogs try to make the complexity feel accessible and navigable rather than paralysing.
We want to take donors on a journey with us. Learning together, co-creating this wonderful community together, rather than transactionally lecturing some climate-y facts and figures at them while taking donations. Because Pip and I are figuring this out alongside everyone else, just with slightly more spreadsheets, nerd-burgery, 90s vibes and late-night reading than the average person.
And there's more coming on the education front. We're working on ways to deepen that learning experience even further, watch this space.
I am not a philanthropy expert either, for the record. But I've been in this work long enough to have done a lot of reading and learning, and one book that has been instrumental to my approach is Giving Done Right by Phil Buchanan. It's a guide to best practice philanthropy and Pip and I draw on much of their philosophy for how we run The Climatics.
The mantra I always come back to is that all philanthropy is good philanthropy. If you're giving, that's a wonderful thing. AND (here comes the improv brain in me), there are choices, and there are better choices. The "yes, and" of giving. Less "your donation was wrong," more "what if we could make it work even harder?"
At The Climatics, we take that question seriously on behalf of donors. We conduct deep due diligence, our rockstar curation team does deep thinking and discussion about what's underfunded and what the climate ecosystem in Aotearoa needs right now. Donors pool their funds with us and every dollar goes directly to the work.
We take a portfolio approach, by spreading across different levers, different types of change, different parts of the system. Because complex problems don't have single solutions, and neither should our giving.
One thing occasionally raises an eyebrow when I talk about The Climatics. We have a funding pillar called "Transform the Politics." And I totally get the flicker of unease - I feel it too sometimes, and I'm the one who got on board and helped name that pillar.
I am not, temperamentally, a political person. I find political point-scoring exhausting. Like most humans, I have my opinions but overall, I'm much more comfortable making a pun than a policy argument.
And I've come to understand that sometimes the most powerful lever for systems change is a political one. Not partisan - The Climatics is firmly, resolutely non-partisan - but systemic. The rules of the game stuff. The policy settings and frameworks that either enable or block the change we need. Funding work that challenges those settings isn't political. It's strategic.
Does that make me a political person? Nah, it makes me someone who's learned to follow the logic wherever it leads.
Maybe not. Possibly never fully. That's OK, I'm still working on it myself.
What The Climatics wants is to meet you where you are. Offer you a way in that doesn't require a PhD, a perfectly curated climate-friendly lifestyle, or a strong knowledge about methane vs CO₂ lifespans (although if you want to know, Pip will absolutely tell you). Take you on the journey without making you feel like you should already have a baseline understanding or master plan for solving the climate challenge. Give you a way to make your giving count, without requiring you to become an expert first, or necessarily ever.
Our fund round closes 8 July. We have donors who believe in our kaupapa so much that another dollar-for-dollar match fund is running right now, so every donation gets doubled. That kind of maths makes sense to me, regardless of how much I know about carbon cycles.
If you're in, we'd love to have you. Climate experts welcome. The climate-curious, the climate-adjacent, and the climate-not-sure-yet are all very much welcome too.