A decade ago, environmental program staff at the David and Lucile Packard Foundation were starting to doubt their strategy.
The Los Altos, California grantmaker had helped launch modern climate philanthropy in 2008 by joining with two other foundations, Hewlett and McKnight, to pledge $1 billion for the crisis and set up the global intermediary ClimateWorks Foundation. But years into that effort, Packard’s team were worried something was missing.
“One of the concerns we had was that it was so centralized,” said Walt Reid, the former head of Packard’s environmental portfolio, in an interview last year after departing the foundation. “If you had … a small number of people in the Global North choosing the strategies to invest in, then where does the diversity come from?”
Their answer was a pair of checks, nearly $5 million apiece, to two climate activists, one an Australian Greenpeace staffer and the other a Chinese media producer. Those awards, also backed by the Oak Foundation and the Good Energies Foundation, marked the launch of what is now called the Climate Breakthrough Award. Modeled after the approach of the U.S. government’s DARPA research agency, the project aims to give the field’s most innovative minds the money to pursue their biggest dreams — and to overcome philanthropy’s tendencies toward safe bets and incrementalism in the process.
Ten years later, it seems a growing number of funders agree with both Packard’s concerns and its solution: the Climate Breakthrough Award is bigger than ever.
Last week, the organization announced five recipients, the largest cohort in the program’s history, including awardees in Brazil, the Netherlands, Singapore, Uruguay and the United States. Each will receive $4 million in multi-year flexible funding and support services.
The prize has racked up an impressive track record. John Hepburn, one of the project’s inaugural awardees, went on to launch the Sunrise Project, an international regrantor that has won support from a wide range of backers. Another awardee, Bruce Nilles, who was the founder and lead strategist of the Sierra Club’s Beyond Coal campaign, is now the vice president of Climate Imperative, another intermediary favored by donors. A third, Nicole Rycroft, the founding executive director of Canopy, a nonprofit that works to make paper product supply chains more sustainable, went on to win tens of millions of dollars from The Audacious Project. In all, awardees have landed more than $236 million in follow-on support from funders, according to the project.
Like with those winners, Climate Breakthrough’s own funders have rewarded its success. Savanna Ferguson, executive director of the organization, said new funders and continued support from its existing funders have allowed it to expand both the number of awardees and the prize amount — which had been reduced after the first year to add more awardees, but is now back to nearly its original size.
New backers include the Lemelson Foundation, whose namesake was a noted engineer and inventor, and Oceankind, the fund established by Lucy Southworth, the wife of Google co-founder Larry Page. Other funders include the IKEA Foundation, Quadrature Climate Foundation, Vere Initiatives and Packard.
Even Al Gore is on board, at least verbally. The former vice president — whose own nonprofit, Climate Reality Project, is a major force in the sector — was a reference for two of the awardees (whose identities the Breakthrough team asked remain private). The team asked him to share a message of congratulations for the 2025 class, and he obliged with a one-minute video clip.
The Nobel Peace Prize winner, incidentally, was only one interviewee in the incredibly extensive process Climate Breakthrough goes through to scout candidates and, ultimately, choose winners. “We talk to hundreds and hundreds of people,” said Tony Bricktua, senior communications officer at Climate Breakthrough. “The vetting process is ridiculously crazy. A lot of our awardees have said that the Climate Breakthrough people know them better than their families.”
Prizes are often critiqued, including in the pages of IP, for their time demands on applicants. And Climate Breakthrough’s intense review process is likely a source of frustration for those candidates who do not make the cut. But in several ways, Climate Breakthrough is less a typical prize competition than a highly unusual grant: the project takes no applicants, only about 12 to 15 finalists go through final vetting, and a write-up is required only at the last stages.
The payoff for the winners, as Reid stressed to me, is the kind of freedom that philanthropy rarely affords even its most trusted grantees.
“Really everything drives towards incrementalism in philanthropy, whereas the DARPA model, and what we’re trying to do with Climate Breakthrough, is just the opposite,” said Reid, who serves on the Breakthrough board. “Let’s find great people, but then let them do whatever the hell they want.”
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Awardees say flexibility and time is invaluable
The story of Alessandra Orofino, a winner this year from Brazil, illustrates how Climate Breakthrough’s support can open different pathways than traditional funding.
Orofino spent more than a decade at the helm of a Brazilian digital activism nonprofit Nossas, which she founded and grew into a $2.5 million organization. The experience left her frustrated with the limitations of the philanthropic funding model.
“People go do their pitches when they have a pretty good sense of what they want to do, but often they don’t have all the information,” she said. “And once you start building, that’s when you realize that you may be following a slightly misguided path, but you’ve already pitched, so you’ve already committed to something, and now you have to follow through on a plan, even when you kind of know that it’s probably not the best possible version of that plan.”
While her experience was that grantmakers allowed pivots, the room for shifts is relatively narrow, since funders are typically backing the idea, not the founder. That is a far cry from Breakthrough’s model, which allows awardees to completely shift their plan. Orofino, who has also run a for-profit TV show, compared Breakthrough’s support to the flexibility allowed with private sector funding via, say, a venture capital investment, where founders have complete control.
The model is “quite refreshing and very empowering,” she said. She is planning to use Breakthrough’s support to acquire for-profit media to use them to promote positive climate messages. But, of course, that could change.
Gavin McCormick, also a 2025 winner, illustrates another dimension of what this type of support makes possible.
McCormick, who cofounded the emission reduction technology nonprofit WattTime and the greenhouse gas emissions coalition Climate TRACE, wants to use his prize money to shape the carbon accounting rules for green industries.
“We’re an example of a project that if we were to take any for-profit funding, it would kind of ruin the point of the project,” he said. “There would be too much pressure to move away from impact and move towards whatever makes money.”
The broader topic of emissions tracking has been a source of controversy within the private sector, the climate movement and philanthropy, including in the case of the Bezos Earth Fund’s much-publicized split with its former grantee, Science Based Targets initiative.
McCormick appreciates the long-term approach that the award allows for when relieved of the burden of meeting payroll each month. “I can’t name another philanthropic grant where the first step is to take six months to make a really good plan,” he said. “It’s so different.”
Climate Breakthrough’s other 2025 awardees include Liming Qiao, a Singapore-based energy transition strategist focused on Asia; Ramón Méndez Galain, whose successful push to help decarbonize Uruguay’s energy grid was recently profiled in the Washington Post; and a team including Giuliana Furci of Chile, Merlin Sheldrake of the United Kingdom, and Toby Kiers of the Netherlands, who are working to establish the legal, regulatory and scientific groundwork to make greater use of fungi in climate strategies.
“We’re not the experts, but they’re out there”
Ten years in, Climate Breakthrough remains a relatively low-profile affair. It is far less well-known than long-established awards like Goldman Environmental Prize, let alone Prince William’s Earthshot Prize, whose association with the British royal has made it a social media darling, despite expert doubts and awarding far fewer dollars per funder than peers.
But Ferguson says the project is just getting started. One past obstacle to attracting more funding has been that many grantmakers lack the flexibility in their portfolios to support big, broad bets like Breakthrough, whose awardees work on topics ranging from peatlands to oil wells. But the organization is now at a stage where that should no longer be a constraint.
“We actually are very interested in talking with funders who have restrictions in terms of geographies or issue areas because we’ve built up such a deep and broad candidate pool,” Ferguson said. “We can find an awardee in that space who’s worthy of the award.”
To date, the organization’s support has come almost entirely from legacy funders. Climate philanthropy, meanwhile, has seen a massive influx of new billionaire donors, including some of the world’s wealthiest, like Bezos and Ballmer. Ferguson hopes to bring more new donors into the fold by convincing them of the value of taking a high-reward bet, one that’s backed by a lot of experience.
One of the project’s relatively new funders is the Lemelson Foundation. Founded by inventor Jerry Lemelson, the Portland, Oregon-based philanthropy has long supported innovation and entrepreneurship, and has now made two $1 million grants to Climate Breakthrough.
Joel Clement, director of climate action at Lemelson, sees the award as a way to support the brightest minds in the climate challenge at a time when many grantmakers are questioning their strategies.
“I think a lot of funders are sitting around wondering right now, ‘What are we missing?’” Clement said. “And we’re not the ones that can figure that out. We’re not the experts, but they’re out there.”
Michael Kavate covers climate philanthropy and billionaire donors. He welcomes all feedback, tips and requests.
