Earlier this year, Heather McGray was talking to a peer about the challenges facing nonprofits and philanthropy in the United States. From the Trump administration blocking Harvard University’s foreign students to threats to revoke climate groups’ nonprofit status, there’s plenty to discuss.
Like McGray, who founded the Climate Justice Resilience Fund in 2016 and has led it ever since, her colleague had been running a funding intermediary for years — but in India.
“Hey, we’re 10 years ahead of you — and you’d better be ready for 10 years,” McGray said her colleague told her, obliquely referring to Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, whose government has imposed restrictions on the country’s nonprofit sector since he was first elected in 2014.
In conversations with a handful of U.S.-based international climate justice regrantors over the past couple months, such sentiments arose again and again, regardless of the continent or countries where the intermediaries fund. These funds’ grantees, particularly those in social movements, have been navigating the adverse circumstances U.S. nonprofits now face — and worse — for much longer than peers stateside. With U.S. regrantors reporting a fast-changing landscape, such advice may come in handy.
“In some ways, what we’re facing in the U.S. is unprecedented, and in other ways, it’s happened before in other places,” said Emily Teitsworth, executive director of the Honnold Foundation, a regrantor founded by star rock climber Alex Honnold that supports access to solar energy in the Americas and island nations. “There are a lot of ways we can learn from communities and movements outside this country.”
With the Trump administration unleashing a series of attacks on the American nonprofit sector, these regrantors not only offer a look at how the administration’s moves are affecting international funders and grantees, but also at possible strategies from international peers that U.S. organizations can use to address such challenges.
Losing USAID funding and European support
Few corners of the world have been left untouched by the Trump administration’s dismantling of USAID. Based on internal estimates, the cuts will result in 1 million children untreated for malnutrition, up to 160,000 deaths from malaria and 200,000 more children paralyzed from polio over the next decade. The needless global health toll is just one part of a wider fallout that will also affect many climate justice nonprofits.
McGray said the impact has been “profound,” with the smaller groups that her fund works with facing not just the loss of direct USAID funding, but also the termination of USAID contracts and the end of pass-through funding from international NGOs that have lost USAID support.
“It seems like every week, we discover a new grantee partner who’s touched by the ripple effects of that massive change,” she said. Yet the loss of European aid — the U.S. is not the only Global North nation cutting back its aid budget — has been “probably even more important,” she said.
A leader at another U.S.-based regrantor, who requested anonymity to speak candidly, echoed those points. Some of their Global South philanthropic peers have lost 50% of their funding and a “huge number” of organizations have had to shut down due to the USAID cuts, while aid budget cuts by the U.K., Sweden and the Netherlands have meant there are few other governments to turn to for support.
“We are being asked to basically double our support from what we [are] normally doing, and yet we are getting less support,” they said. “There’s a vacuum that’s been created at the movement level because of the aid cuts.”
Short-term responses from international regrantors
Many of the short-term moves I heard about mirrored those that domestic foundations and regrantors are making, from rapid response grants to easing restrictions.
The Climate Justice Resilience Fund, for instance, is making it easy to revise or extend the timeline of its grants. It is also trying to expand a long-standing fund used to make small additions to existing grants, usually between $5,000 and $10,000, to provide short-term emergency support.
“There’s been a huge amount of demand for it, even prior to this ‘emergency situation,’” McGray said.
Two other leaders at climate justice regrantors, both of whom requested anonymity out of concern for publicity, said one major effort was to accelerate payments to existing grantees. For instance, one had paid a three-year award to a Brazilian grantee in full.
Both said their organizations and peers had also transferred money to trusted allies prior to the threatened Earth Day executive orders (which have not panned out, for now) to ensure it was not frozen, as well as taking security precautions, including anti-doxxing methods like removing certain information from their websites and evaluating travel risks for certain staff, such as trans colleagues. In some ways, they said, those measures have been all-consuming.
“Like, probably for the last three months, people have just been spending all of their energy and resources responding to this moment, and that’s really, really harmful, instead of getting us to focus on what we need to do,” one said. “There’s a tension between wanting to just hold the line and not give in to the fear mongering and not actually be buffeted around like that — and then actually also not wanting to be negligent because we’re in deep, responsible relationships with movements.”
But the current moment has also revealed this funding ecosystem’s potential for action and adaptation.
“We don’t want rising authoritarianism to be the inspiration for this, but I feel grateful to see how much money is moving to movements,” said another leader. “We’ve had some remarkable visionary conversations just in the last couple of days about what [our organization] could be if there’s more constriction and more contraction of our sector.”
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Lessons from resistance movements worldwide
Climate justice regrantors often work in nations where governments are neither stable nor predictable. Like other grantmakers funding in such environments, that makes them helpful, if approximate guides for this anything-might-be-next moment in America.
One major lesson that Teitsworth, of the Honnold Foundation, takes from movements around the world that have emerged after coups and revolutions is that collective action is needed, along with support by some kind of decentralized network.
“In philanthropy, there’s all of this focus on big-bet investments and growing individual institutions,” she said. “We are trying to rethink what scale means — and I think it’s really imperative that we do that in this moment with the federal bureaucracy kind of turning against the philanthropic sector.”
As foils for institutions that present a larger target, such community groups might be doing locally focused work individually, but collectively can make a big impact. “That kind of structure helps limit the sort of individualized attacks that we’ve started to see in the U.S.,” she said.
In some ways, such an approach characterizes the work that Climate Justice Resilience Fund and a wide range of other climate justice regrantors have been pursuing for years, if not decades. Other examples include many of the U.S.-based and international intermediaries backed by MacKenzie Scott in her early rounds of grantmaking.
However, another lesson from places of resistance is that under such circumstances, funding is often kept quiet and thus may be hard to track. In McGray’s chat with her Indian colleague, this was boiled down to a classic four-word suggestion: “Talk less, fund more.”
“We fund a lot more than you’re necessarily going to hear about,” McGray said the friend told her. “A lot of the things you hear about are just the tip of the iceberg of what we’re really up to.”
Michael Kavate covers climate philanthropy and billionaire donors. He welcomes feedback, tips and suggestions.
Correction (June 18, 2025): An earlier version of this article incorrectly described the geographic focus area of the Honnold Foundation.
