Editor’s Note: This article was originally published on July 21, 2025.
Ask colleagues and grantees about Tom Steinbach and the word “thoughtful” comes up a lot.
After eight years leading one of the country’s largest climate funders, Sea Change Foundation, Steinbach recently became the head of Rainier Climate, the new climate grantmaking operation launched by Steve and Connie Ballmer and their son, Sam. Powered by the former Microsoft CEO’s centibillionaire fortune, some expect Rainier Climate to become the field’s biggest player.
“Tom is a smart and thoughtful strategist who knows how to bring people and resources together to solve big problems,” said Pete Maysmith, who recently became president of the League of Conservation Voters, a top Sea Change grantee under Steinbach, via email.
“I have nothing but the highest admiration for his thoughtfulness, his care, his strategic thinking,” said Steve Toben of Toben Consulting, who leads the Climate Action Lab at Forward Global, and was one of those who believe Rainier will “become the world’s largest climate funder.”
“Tom earns the trust of influential climate funders because he brings both credibility and results,” said Jennifer Kitt of Climate Lead, a nonprofit that has recruited billionaire donors like the Ballmers to climate giving, and which Steinbach helped found in 2019. “He’s not just a thoughtful advisor — he’s a partner who can translate complex climate challenges into clear opportunities for meaningful action.”
Steinbach now holds one of the most powerful positions in American climate philanthropy. With $431 million in multi-year commitments in late 2023, the Ballmers took a spot among the largest climate funders in the country.
“Rainier Climate is a new philanthropic initiative focused on accelerating meaningful climate action,” said Steinbach. He declined a request for an interview, but provided details by email. “We’re in the process of building our core team, establishing our strategic direction and forming key partnerships that will enable us to support partners doing this critical work. I’m looking forward to sharing more about Rainier Climate later this year as our organization takes shape.”
It is not Steinbach’s first time at the summit of environmental philanthropy. Prior to Sea Change, Steinbach served as the environment program head of the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation for nearly nine years, during which it emerged as a major leader in climate philanthropy. Today, it remains the largest legacy foundation in the space.
Steinbach’s partnership with the Ballmers is not wholly a surprise, at least for those paying close attention. He has chaired the board of Climate Lead, the billionaire recruiting operation, since 2021, and the Ballmer family said in 2022 that they were “honored and grateful to partner with” the organization as they made their first batch of climate awards. (At the time, it was called the Climate Leadership Initiative.)
That said, Steinbach has also moved in humbler orbits. Before joining Hewlett, he headed the Bay Area open space group Greenbelt Alliance for eight years, served for a half-dozen years as the Boston-based Appalachian Mountain Club’s conservation director, and spent a year as an analyst in the Congressional Budget Office. The one-time management consultant might also be able to help you on the slopes. His LinkedIn profile shows an early stint at Vail Resorts as a ski instructor.
What’s clear from his recent history — and everyone I spoke to — is that he is a master billionaire whisperer. The Ballmers will be the third billionaire family whose philanthropy he has helped directly shape, after Sea Change donors Nat Simons and Laura Baxter-Simons, the son and daughter-in-law of the late Jim Simons, and the Hewlett family, which had several family members on the board of the Hewlett Foundation while he was there. He remains involved with the Hewletts via a place on the Flora Family Foundation board. (Sea Change and Flora declined to comment; Hewlett Foundation said no current staff had worked with Steinbach.)
Steinbach has long since given up guiding novice skiers down snowy slopes in favor of leading ultra-wealthy donors into climate philanthropy. What can his journey, and those who have known him along the way, tell us about the role he will play with the Ballmers?
What friends and acquaintances say about Tom Steinbach
Gregg Small, executive director of the Seattle-based nonprofit Climate Solutions, first met Steinbach in the late 1990s, when both were young executive directors in the Bay Area. Small’s organization has since become a Sea Change and Ballmer grantee.
“Tom is one of the most experienced and well-respected climate philanthropists in the country,” said Small, who now lives near Steinbach in Seattle. “It would be difficult for the Ballmers to hire someone better than Tom to run their shop.”
Climate Solutions received at least $750,000 from Sea Change during Steinbach’s tenure, and a three-year, $7 million grant from the Ballmer Group prior to Steinbach’s arrival at Rainier. Asked what it was like to be Steinbach’s grantee, Small said he did not work directly with him on those grants.
Small thinks his neighbor is well suited to lead what he, like Toben, called “one of, if not the largest climate philanthropies.” Echoing Kitt and virtually everyone else I spoke to, he highlighted Steinbach’s skill with cultivating megadonors. “Tom has been perfecting that art form for decades,” Small said.
Similar opinions come from others who have never received a grant or contract from Steinbach.
Amy Solomon, a consultant who worked more than a decade with the Bullitt Foundation, who said she had run into Steinbach at meetings for years, called him “very smart,” but also a “kind person” with a sense of humor, who shields his staff from the strong wills and sharp edges of the donors he has worked under.
“I don’t think he could have lasted as long as he did if he wasn’t good at managing people, and that suggests that he has sensitivity and emotional intelligence,” she said. “I imagine that he’s had to be a buffer at times, between staff, people and donors.”
What did Steinbach fund at Sea Change — and what can that tell us?
While it’s clear colleagues and grantees think Steinbach is the right person for the job, the most pertinent measure of a funder can be, simply, what they fund. In Steinbach’s case, his time at Sea Change reveals a striking reliance on a small group of regrantors, particularly a single intermediary.
Between 2017 and 2024, the years Steinbach was in charge of Sea Change’s grantmaking, a massive share of the foundation’s big checks went to or through the U.S. Energy Foundation, the nation’s biggest domestic climate regrantor, and a central player in the funding landscape since the Hewlett Foundation and the Packard Foundation helped launch the first phase of mega climate philanthropy in 2008.
All five of Sea Change’s biggest grants during that stretch went to U.S. Energy Foundation, which, during those eight years, received more than $104 million from its San Francisco neighbor — and that count is based on million-dollar-plus grants alone. That’s about a quarter of all of Sea Change’s funding during that period.
Given that U.S. Energy Foundation is a regrantor, and only a few of those awards were for general support, a significant share of this money presumably went to other organizations, but details are limited in Sea Change’s IRS filings and on its website.
Other top Sea Change grantees include a mix of so-called Big Green groups, while there are also major awards to fiscal sponsors and a variety of policy- and advocacy-oriented groups. The League of Conservation Voters received some of the foundation’s largest checks outside of those made out to U.S. Energy Foundation, while the Partnership Project, a coalition of several of the nation’s biggest environmental organizations, received an annual $3 million award for several years. Natural Resources Defense Council and the Sierra Club were other top awardees.
Sea Change has also sent multiple major grants to two of the nation’s top fiscal sponsors, Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors and Tides — the records do not indicate which organizations ultimately received that funding — as well as to policy and advocacy groups like American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy, Vote Solar and Regulatory Assistance Project.
Sea Change’s grantmaking under Steinbach shows a preference for intermediaries, whether in the form of purpose-built regrantors, major NGOs or fiscal sponsors. Yet that does not notably distinguish its funding from other megadonor-backed peers. New operations like Waverley Street Foundation and Sequoia Climate Foundation have cut many major checks to such groups despite pursuing different strategies, as regrantors and intermediaries have become a staple of the climate funding landscape.
In fact, Sea Change’s 990s and website offer so little information that the foundation’s reputation among its peers — as a funder focused mainly on technocratic and elite-driven policy change, as various sources put it to me — might speak loudest of all.
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What type of funders will Steinbach, the Ballmers and Rainier be?
Early funding is not always indicative of where a funder will place its biggest bets, nor is its public pronouncements. But they are what we have to go on, and so far, it’s looking like Rainier’s will be a broad portfolio, albeit with one notable omission.
In the Ballmers’ $217 million initial round of climate grants in 2022, more than half their dollars went to the Climate and Land Use Alliance grantmaking collaborative ($118 million) and the Tenure Facility ($12 million), both of which work on Indigenous land tenure. That suggested such themes might be a priority — and climate justice intermediaries I spoke to at the time felt the family could end up being a major backer, partly based on experiences with Sam Ballmer.
Yet the couple’s second round of grants — which totaled $534 million, nearly a quarter higher than the amount announced in late 2023 — looked a lot more like a Sea Change grantee list, even though Sea Change reports Steinbach remained its executive director into November 2024. Nevertheless, Sea Change favorites led the list, with the biggest award going to U.S. Energy Foundation ($85 million over three years), closely followed by a Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors project, the Energy Transition Fund ($69 million over four years). European Climate Foundation, one of the climate regrantors created by the backers of ClimateWorks Foundation, and two of its projects, received more $80 million, also over several years.
Last year, the couple’s pace slowed slightly from 2023, with $468 million in grants, according to Steinbach. That’s still more than the entire Hewlett Foundation gives out annually, and Rainier focuses entirely on climate. Reflective of the changing norms in the new world of billionaire mega-giving, Rainier currently lists just four staff, including Sam Ballmer, although it likely relies on the well-staffed Ballmer Group for support. The year’s awards broadened its portfolio still further, and offered more evidence that international giving will be a big feature of its work.
Its top two 2024 grantees were the funder collaborative Ocean Resilience and Climate Alliance, or ORCA, and One Acre Fund, which both received $45 million over three years. Climate Lead also benefitted as its board chair became Rainier’s president, getting $15 million over two years. Finally, four awards for work in Brazil or the Amazon — to FUNBIO ($16 million), Health in Harmony ($4 million), Instituto Arapyaú ($20 million) and the ClimateWorks network regrantor Instituto Clima e Sociedade ($20 million), all four-year grants — suggest a desire to back the COP30 host’s decarbonization and forest restoration efforts. The overall portfolio also includes several international regrantors known for close ties with front-line communities, though the largest grants mostly went to other recipients.
Other than the Brazil awards, it is difficult to say exactly which countries and regions are benefitting from the Ballmers’ climate bucks, something Steinbach acknowledged by email. “It’s tricky to report by geography (e.g., Europe), as many of our grants involve work in multiple geographies,” he wrote. “Rainier’s intent is to focus on geographies that reflect the highest levels of GHG emissions, such as the U.S., Europe, China, India, Southeast Asia, Brazil, etc. This is not a fixed list and will evolve as emissions and opportunities change.”
Rainier now has a website, which includes a list of grants, as well as identifying five focus areas: energy and transportation; deforestation and land use; buildings and industry; communications and advocacy; and agriculture. Interestingly, only one of the five priorities’ short descriptions mention people.
That seems to be in keeping with one element that stands out about Steinbach’s tenure at Sea Change: a lack of emphasis on climate justice or DEI. Under him, the foundation did not appear to back the front-line groups and movements that gained climate philanthropy’s attention after nationwide racial justice protests in 2020. Sea Change has still not, for instance, signed the Climate Funders Justice Pledge.
When I asked if Steinbach had a weakness as a grantmaker, Amy Solomon, the consultant formerly of the Bullitt Foundation, brought this topic up herself, as did sources who spoke to me on background. “He isn’t necessarily the most front of the pack about issues on DEI,” Solomon said. “That’s not who he is, given age or experience.”
In a response to a pre-publication fact check mentioning this critique, Steinbach noted that Rainier made a $4 million grant to the Heartland Fund, as well as four grants to environmental justice groups that I covered in a 2023 article. (Those five grants account for 5.8% of the updated total funding for that year, by my math.) Steinbach also sees those themes infusing much of its other funding.
“More broadly, many of the U.S. orgs Rainier has made grants to focus a portion of their work at the intersection of climate and equity, and a number of our non-U.S. grants are supporting organizations for work that, if successful, will have positive impacts on marginalized communities, though DEI is not a label those communities would find familiar,” he wrote.
With the Trump administration eagerly revoking every climate policy in sight, rolling back international aid, and attempting to trash decades of science and research, climate justice is not the only part of the movement taking a big hit right now. But how Steinbach approaches the topic offers one barometer for his priorities and values, and those of the Ballmers.
“You’ve got an administration here that not only doesn’t care about [DEI], they’re hostile to it, and you have communities that were poised to experience an influx of resources and be in a lead position. How does he handle that?” Solomon said. “That’s probably a big challenge for him.”
“There are going to be people that no matter what he does, it’s not good enough, it’s not fast enough, it’s not the right people,” she added.
