Too often, funders begin with the question: What’s feasible? What can be measured, delivered, controlled? So funders give money to what feels safe. We invest in incremental progress. We seek outcomes we can count: meals served, training sessions completed, tons of carbon captured, while the systems we hope to transform may continue to falter.
This mindset often leads us to manage the margins of a crisis rather than confront its root causes. When we start with limitations or constraints, we end up pushing for small changes instead of big ones. We fund what seems feasible instead of what might be necessary.
But there’s another way to think about change. Start with the future we need and work backward to figure out what must begin today. This isn’t just about setting bigger goals. It’s about changing how we fund change: what we support, what risks we take, and what relationships we build.
The future as strategy
In June, I was honored to organize and host a session at the TED Countdown Summit in Nairobi, Kenya, on how to pursue breakthroughs. In a room of people working in climate or climate-adjacent fields, I asked them to engage in some constructive daydreaming. I asked the group to imagine the world of 2060: a world in which all of their hopes and dreams have been achieved, a world with a stable climate. Instead of planning from where we are to where we might go, we started in the future we want and then worked our way backward to identify the barriers to that future and, from that, the interventions we need to launch today to remove those barriers.
I chose 2060, rather than 2030 or even 2050, because, jaded by slow progress and ominous projections, those of us working on climate issues have already imbued those dates with our cynicism. To imagine the world anew, we must place ourselves in an abundance mindset. Doubt kills far more ideas than failure will ever have the chance to do.
This exercise is called right-to-left thinking. And it can be incredibly powerful in allowing us to form truly new ideas and shape actions and interventions that overcome or circumvent current (or imagined) constraints.
This approach isn’t entirely new to ambitious problem-solving, though it’s rarely applied to philanthropy. DARPA understood this when they created the internet. They didn’t start with “How can we make communication technology a little better?” They started with “What would it mean to have a communication system that could survive a nuclear war?” Then they worked backward. When President John F. Kennedy announced the moon landing goal in 1961, NASA didn’t begin with “How can we make rockets slightly better?” They started with “What would it mean to put a human on the moon by the end of the decade?”
These weren’t just big goals. They were impossible goals that became inevitable because they worked backward from what was necessary.
Rethinking the funder-grantee relationship
Right-to-left thinking not only changes what funders fund; it transforms how funders and grantees work together. When you’re building toward a shared, long-term vision rather than managing incremental progress, everything about the relationship must change.
You can’t get there with one-year grants and quarterly reports. You can’t get there with predetermined metrics and risk-averse boards afraid of any failure. You can’t get there by forcing grantees to promise specific outcomes in unpredictable systems, then penalizing them when reality doesn’t match their original projections.
Right-to-left thinking fundamentally changes how funders evaluate proposals, define success metrics, and assess the level of support needed given the dynamic and complicated circumstances on the ground. When you’re working backward from a transformative future, you realize that traditional key performance indicators often measure yesterday’s assumptions about what matters, while the real work of systems change requires constant adaptation to unexpected challenges and emerging opportunities.
This perspective demands that funders give grantees far greater freedom and flexibility to design their own strategies based on the complexity of the problems they understand best. It demands that funders invest in robust learning support that helps grantees understand what’s working and adapt as they build toward a shared long-term vision.
It means shifting the conversation from “Here’s what you must accomplish this year” to “Here’s the future we’re building toward: how will you know if you’re making progress, and what do you need to navigate the inevitable surprises along the way?”
It inevitably means multi-year grants that free grantees from the constant anxiety of fundraising so they can focus entirely on large-scale transformation.
It means wraparound support that invests in the personal and professional development of grantees, because transforming systems requires transforming the people who lead that change.
We incorporate this approach with the Climate Breakthrough Award, the program I lead at Climate Breakthrough. Instead of asking potential grantees “What climate solutions can we fund that seem most likely to work?,” we ask: “What would it actually mean to have a stable climate by 2060?” Our guiding principle is simple: “Is this bold idea possible?” rather than “Are we confident it will succeed?”
In our case, this generates completely different questions about the vision: “What if the world had a global fossil fuel non-proliferation treaty? Imagine if low-carbon options were readily available, we wouldn’t be making pizza boxes out of endangered trees. Imagine if clean energy and nature protection were no longer a partisan issue in rural America. What if fossil fuel projects couldn’t get insurance to move forward?”
The courage to begin
Right-to-left thinking requires us to bring boldness that matches the scale of the problems we’re working to solve. It challenges us to take the kinds of risks that seem impossible from a quarterly report perspective but become inevitable from a generational change perspective. Whether we’re talking about climate action, democratic participation, health equity, or economic justice, the principle is the same: Fund the relationships that create conditions for changes you can’t yet imagine. Support the infrastructure of transformation, not just programs that deliver services.
The people of 2060 are counting on us. They’re counting on us to have the courage to begin with their tomorrow, not our today.
Savanna Ferguson is the executive director of Climate Breakthrough, a nonprofit organization that aims to make an outsized impact on resolving the climate crisis through its global philanthropy. Prior to Climate Breakthrough, she spent nearly a decade building her expertise by working with major environmental nonprofit and foundation clients at CEA Consulting. She holds a bachelor’s degree in environmental studies and writing and minors in geology and biology from Whitman College, and a Master of Fine Arts in writing from the University of San Francisco.
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