To Save The Planet, We Must Save Democracy First

For a decade, we’ve watched the same pattern play out in communities across the country. A utility company tries to kill rooftop solar in Florida, hitting low-income renters hardest. A tech giant wants to build a diesel-powered data center in a Minnesota town that never asked for it. A rate hike quietly goes through that will cost working families hundreds of dollars a year, while the people most affected never had a seat at the table.

Every one of these is a climate story. Every one is also a democracy story. You cannot protect the climate without protecting democracy. The communities most harmed by pollution are the same ones losing voting rights, facing federal raids on their civic organizations, and getting mapped out of political power. When that happens, climate progress stalls.

When communities of color lose voting rights protections, the political maps get redrawn in ways that make it harder to elect officials who answer to them. That is not separate from climate. Political power determines whether a city council approves a permit for a new gas plant, whether a state legislature funds clean energy, and whether anyone in Congress is actually accountable to the people breathing the dirtiest air.

That’s not a rhetorical flourish. It is what ten years of work has taught us, and what has guided every grant we have made.

Related: Fisk University Faces Backlash Over $1 Billion Data Center Development Project

For too long, philanthropy treated climate, labor, and racial justice as separate fights to be won in sequence. Communities we work with never had the luxury of separating these fights. The families paying the highest percentage of their income on energy bills are the same ones breathing the dirtiest air and living in the places flooding first. They’ve always known these weren’t separate problems. We just needed philanthropy to catch up.

So we often became the first climate grant for worker rights organizations. For racial justice groups. For civic engagement teams in rural counties no one else was funding. More than $180 million over ten years, distributed on the belief that when you fund across these intersections, the results aren’t just additive — they’re exponential.

The wins bear that out. In Arizona, home to the nation’s largest public utility, the Salt River Project, grantee partners educated voters around a historically inaccessible utility board election process. In Minnesota, grantee organizing helped pass a law requiring 100% clean electricity by 2040 and drive Amazon to pull back from a massive diesel-powered data center. In Florida, advocates blocked utility companies from ending net metering and stopping rate increases that would have hit fixed-income households hardest. In Virginia, partners helped bring the state back into the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, directing half its revenue to low-income energy efficiency programs while cutting carbon pollution.

These campaigns didn’t win through legislation alone. They won because communities had organized, sustained, multiracial power that could show up at regulatory hearings, turn out voters, and hold the line when corporations tried to run out the clock.

Which is exactly why the current assault on democracy should terrify anyone who cares about climate. 

The FBI raided the Ohio Organizing Collaborative, a voter registration organization. Raids like that have a chilling effect. The work slows, volunteers go home, and fewer people show up at the public hearings where utility rates get set and gas plant permits get approved. The Supreme Court’s Callais ruling, which gutted key Voting Rights Act protections for communities of color, isn’t somebody else’s problem. When democracy is under pressure, the communities with the least institutional protection feel it first and worst and those are precisely the communities that have been driving the most transformative climate work in this country.

This is why, as we enter our second decade, we’re expanding our work rather than retreating. We’re now operating in 14 states. We’re taking on the data center build-out, one of the fastest-growing sources of electricity demand in the country, too often placed in communities of color with little input from the people who live there. And we’re investing in democracy infrastructure alongside climate infrastructure, because you can’t do one without the other.

The next decade will be harder than the last. The political headwinds are real, the rollbacks are real, and the communities we work with are absorbing attacks on multiple fronts simultaneously.

But so is the momentum. The wins in Arizona, Minnesota, Pennsylvania, Nevada, and Virginia happened in this climate, in this political moment, with these stakes. They happened because local organizations had the resources to build durable power, not just show up for a single campaign and disappear.

Our communities don’t experience these crises alone. When we fund them together — climate, racial equity, democracy as a single, integrated strategy — the results reflect that wholeness. Ten years of evidence says so.

The question for philanthropy, and for anyone watching what’s unfolding right now, is whether we’re willing to meet this moment at the scale it demands. We intend to be.

Andrea Cristina Mercado is the President and CEO of the Climate Equity Fund

The Climate Equity Fund has invested more than $180 million at the intersection of climate, racial equity, and democracy over the past decade. Its national grantee summit took place June 22–24 in Charlotte, North Carolina.