Every few months I sit in a workshop, sometimes as a participant, more often now as a facilitator, where young climate organizers are taught how to raise money. How to craft a value proposition. How to align their work with a funder’s priorities. How to write a proposal that is, in the words of one recent UN session I attended, both technically sound and emotionally compelling.

I understand why these spaces exist. They mean well, and the skills they teach are real. But I have started to notice what we are actually teaching. We are coaching the people the system excludes to perform more fluently for that system. We are treating a problem of power as if it were a problem of talent.

The numbers make the mismatch hard to ignore. Between 2022 and 2024, youth-led climate justice initiatives received 0.96 percent of grants from the largest climate foundations, according to the 2025 Youth Climate Funding Study by the Youth Climate Justice Fund and ClimateWorks Foundation. That is a slight improvement on the 0.76 percent recorded for 2019 to 2021, and the dollars nearly doubled, to $85.9 million. But 41 of the biggest climate funders made only 307 youth grants over three years, and 29 of them made five or fewer. This is not a pipeline. It is a rounding error that occasionally rounds up.

There are 1.2 billion of us aged 15 to 24, roughly 16 percent of the world’s population, and those under 30 will carry the longest and heaviest share of climate impacts. The gap between who lives with the crisis and who is trusted to direct money toward it shapes the architecture of climate philanthropy.

So why doesn’t coaching close the gap?

Because the real bottleneck is not skill. It is access, and in philanthropy access runs on relationships. That has always been true, but the share of households that give has slid from two-thirds in 2000 to about half now. More money is moving through fewer hands.

Read the full article about climate philanthropy's access problem by Zainab Bie at Nonprofit Quarterly.