On a Friday morning in April, Dan Stein, the founder of Giving Green, a climate philanthropy organization, found big news in a surprising email. An anonymous donor had given his fund $10 million.
“I haven’t quite processed the number of zeros,” Stein said, adding that he was “excited, awestruck and surprised” by the gift.
Giving Green collects and distributes donations to a handful of nonprofits that it believes have the potential to make a significant difference in preventing climate change and reducing greenhouse gas emissions. The $10 million donation is by far the largest gift the nonprofit has ever received and essentially fell out of the sky without warning.
The mysterious gift went to the Giving Green fund, which is housed at Giving What We Can, an organization inspired by effective altruism that asks people from all over the world to pledge to give away a percentage of their income or wealth every year to give. The donor is anonymous and the gift comes from a donor-advised fund at Fidelity Charitable.
“They were also nervous at first that it was a mistake, and they went back to Fidelity to verify it before telling us,” Stein said of Giving What We Can.
Looking back at their data and speaking to organizations they recommend, Stein and his team believe the same donor may have given as much as $17 million more directly to those organizations over the past two years. Because the gifts are anonymous, it is impossible to confirm this, but Stein says the timing of the gifts, which came in two clusters, suggests they could have come from the same person or organization.
Fidelity Charitable said it does not comment on specific grants or donors.
Anonymous donations — even large ones — are not uncommon, but such gifts are generally the work of behind-the-scenes relationship-building, says Tory Martin, director of communications and strategic partnerships at the Dorothy A. Johnson Center for Philanthropy.
“When you get millions of dollars, there’s usually stewardship involved. The cultivation has taken place,” she said.
In general, anonymous giving is often seen as the highest form of giving, where a donor takes attention away from themselves, Martin said, adding that the donor thinks, “I’m doing this out of a sense of creating a better community and simply saying that this money should be used for other purposes, instead of sitting in my pocket or in my bank account.”
But for any individual nonprofit, receiving an anonymous gift can pose reputational risks if the donor is ultimately discovered to be controversial.
Stein doesn’t have any good leads on the identity of the mystery donor, though he doubts it’s a company trying to greenwash donations because it wouldn’t get public recognition for the gift. He sees the donations as proof that there are donors who want to donate to climate change, but don’t know where to donate. Providing highly researched recommendations is the reason he started Giving Green.
One featured organization, Industrious Labs, advocates for the decarbonization of heavy industries such as aluminum and steel. Evan Gillespie, a partner at the organization, said these industries are often mistakenly thought to be the hardest to reduce. Giving Green contacted them directly for what turned out to be a long review process that ended with Giving Green recommending them two years in a row.
“You have to take the leap of faith: ‘Okay, we’re going to reveal our most personal thoughts about how this is going to work,’” Gillespie said. He credits Giving Green’s recommendation with providing them with a few million dollars in funding, which is crucial without restrictions.
On its website, Giving Green explains why they have decided to recommend donations to Industrious Labs and its other partners and include detailed information about their campaigns, theory of change and future plans. Giving Green says its methodology is inspired by the principles of effective altruism, a philanthropic social movement that emerged from philosophy departments in the UK in the 2010s.
Advocates say they try to maximize the good they can do in the world and give to what they believe are the most effective charities and interventions. Some powerful and wealthy donors, especially from the technology sector, have effectively embraced altruism and poured money into areas such as mitigating the potentially worst impacts of artificial intelligence, pandemic preparedness, global health, and animal rights.
Many effective altruists also pledge to give away some of their income, while others have argued for the morality of earning as much money as possible to give it away.
“We think the climate problem is an incredibly generational problem and we think we as a society have to do things to stop it,” Stein said. “And that one thing that people can do is make donations, and they should try to make those donations in an effective way.”
Charitable donations to issues related to climate change have increased in recent years, although research from the non-profit organization ClimateWorks shows that this still represents a small share of total donations. ClimateWorks tracked $3.7 billion in philanthropic giving from foundations in 2022 to support mitigating the impacts of climate change or adapting to those impacts. Major giving by individuals is likely to account for another $4.2 billion to $9 billion in 2022, although this is harder to track, ClimateWorks reports.
The National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy argues that more money should go directly to communities now most affected by the effects of climate change, rather than to think tanks or national environmental organizations. They also warn that investing in technologies that will take years to develop are “false solutions.”
“What movement groups have said is: ‘System change, not climate change.’ And when you look at things that are cost-effective, you often still think about things with an extractive mindset. As if you’re trying to protect your bottom line. Save your money for a rainy day. Only give as much as is necessary,” said Senowa Mize-Fox, the movement engagement manager for climate justice at NCRP. “What we always say in the end is: the rainy day is here. The rainy day is here. The climate crisis is happening right now.”
Stein said Giving Green plans to distribute the vast majority of the $10 million donation as quickly as possible, with much of it going to the organizations they recommend. They will also spend smaller amounts on new organizations or programs within organizations that they support but are not yet ready to include in their top recommendations.
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