I’m a fourth‑generation Detroiter. It’s the place that shaped me, and the place I ultimately returned to after living in cities across the country and abroad. Some of my fondest childhood memories are simple ones—packing into my grandparents’ car after Sunday dinner, spending long afternoons with my cousins on Belle Isle, or walking the wooded trails of Palmer Park with my parents. In those spaces, I felt free, alive, and joyous.
At the same time, I also grew up walking past vacant homes, overgrown lots, and neglected playgrounds on my daily commute to school. I saw firsthand how disinvestment harms community health and wellbeing. It decays the built environment, yes, but it also dims the brilliance of people who live there.
These experiences are why I focused my career on investing in people and places that have been marginalized, left behind, and forgotten. They deeply inform how I approach my role as a funding partner at the Kresge Foundation. My 12 years in philanthropy have taught me what equitable solutions look like and important lessons about how we invest. One truth has become clear to me: A just, green future is built through place, power, and care. And all three must work together.
The Power of Place
Climate change may be global, but its impacts, its solutions, and its leadership are profoundly local. Place determines the risks communities face, the tools they have, and the histories they carry.
You cannot effectively fund what you do not understand. And you cannot understand a place without listening to the people who live there.
At Kresge, working nationally while staying rooted in local realities has been one of our greatest strengths. As a national funder, it’s essential to forge trusted partnerships with local philanthropy, local government, and community and civic leadership. Equally important is investing in networks across each of those sectors to amplify learning, leadership, and build connective tissue.
Through initiatives like our Climate Change, Health & Equity (CCHE) and Climate Resilient and Equitable Water Systems, we bring together community organizations and national partners to learn from one another, to build shared strategies, and to create blueprints that other cities can adapt. In 2025, when we launched the second phase of CCHE, we nearly doubled the community-based partners in the initiative from 14 organizations to 25. This allowed us to invest more in each of Kresge’s four focus cities—Detroit, New Orleans, Memphis, and Fresno.
Place gives us the context. But understanding context alone doesn’t guarantee change. To move from understanding to action, communities need power.
Building Community Capacity and Power
If place tells us what’s needed, a community’s capacity and power determine who gets to decide.
Too often, philanthropy funds climate work only through organizations with “environment or climate” in their name. But climate impacts don’t stay in their lane:they show up in housing, health, transportation, and economic opportunities. So, the people closest to those issues must be part of the solution.
When we launched the Climate Resilience and Urban Opportunity Initiative in 2014, we intentionally shifted resources directly to community-based, equity-focused organizations—many of whom had never been considered “climate” grantees.
Catalyst Miami is a perfect example. In 2014, it was a prominent human services organization focused on social and economic mobility, providing services such as health, education, and financial coaching. They began addressing climate change because residents were coming to staff for help with flooding, hurricane impacts, and financial instability. Their climate work emerged from the lived experience of the people they served, not from a strategic plan.
Community power isn’t just about access—it’s about accountability: shared decision‑making, distributed leadership, and solutions shaped by those most affected.
Fostering a Community of Care
Organizations are made of people. And in environmental and climate justice work, those people are overwhelmingly women and women of color.
Well before 2020—before the onset of COVID‑19, before the murder of George Floyd, before the country’s racial reckoning—these women were already carrying the weight of multiple crises: a hurricane one month, an ICE raid the next, inadequate healthcare, on top of chronic underinvestment.
Philanthropy often moves resources in response to “a moment,” but expects nonprofit leaders to continue showing up with the same energy, the same creativity, the same resilience after the resources are gone.
I’ve sat in rooms where trauma surfaced in real time. I’ve watched brilliant leaders burn out because they were holding their communities together with no safety net of their own. And I have grappled with my own proximity to burnout.
Today, the landscape is even more challenging. The administration’s attacks on climate action,and the demonization of many of our environmental and climate leaders, have deepened an already bleak funding environment and significantly threatened the safety, security, and wellbeing of leaders and organizations.
If we say we care about the condition of people and the planet, we must care about the resilience of the people doing the work to protect them. That means funding wellness and rest. It means reducing reporting burdens. It means having an adaptive approach when our neatly crafted grantmaking strategy falls short in the face of yet another crisis.
It means asking, “What can we take off your plate?” instead of “What else can you deliver?” It means asking, “How can we help?”
In 2023, we launched the Fellowship for Liberated Futures in partnership with ProInspire, The Chisholm Legacy Project, and Dr. Chera Reid, which is an 18‑month fellowship providing rest, respite, and wellbeing for Black women working at the intersection of climate change and racial justice.
Our second cohort is underway. It is one model, but it represents our deep belief that it is our responsibility to care for the whole person and invest in our leaders’ wellbeing just as much as we invest in projects, places, and power building.
Closing
We are living in a moment that demands courage from funders. Not performative courage. Not rhetorical courage. But the courage to fund differently. If we as funders can align our resources with the wisdom of place, the leadership of communities, the power of networks, and the humanity of the people doing the work—then we will not just fund projects. We will fund transformation.
My hope is that when we lean into our imaginations—when we remind ourselves of the future we want to exist—the false choices that have long divided our field begin to fade. Urban versus rural. Resilience versus adaptation. Conservation versus community development. Mitigation versus justice. And others that I’m sure you all can name.
While we are not called to do everything, when each of us steps into our unique role, collectively, we make it possible for every community to have clean air, fresh water, healthy food, vibrant green space, and the ability to thrive. So let us lead with that wisdom. Let us fund with that wisdom. And let us build a just, green future worthy of the communities we serve.
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Shamar Bibbins serves as managing director of The Kresge Foundation’s Environment Program, which helps US cities combat and adapt to climate change while advancing racial and economic justice.