The Need to Make Foundations Transparent
Part 1: The growing influence, funding and environmental activism of foundations
For decades, activists have demanded transparency from industry lobbyists who might spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on defending their interests. Their spending is under extreme public scrutiny and highly restricted. But foundations, trusts and philanthropists are spending hundreds of millions of dollars funding NGOs, journalists and specialist fiscal-sponsored activist organizations, and none of it is scrutinized or restricted. How is it possible that these philanthropic bodies can continue to influence policies and public narratives from the shadows?
The short answer is that groups that campaign for (industry) transparency like Corporate Europe Observatory and US Right to Know are almost completely financed by these same foundations (many of whom are not revealing the ultimate source of those donations). The longer answer is a normative double standard: that foundations are seen as benign and defending social justice while industry suffers the consequences of being a righteous risk. If you think you’re doing God’s work, who would notice or mind if you pluck a few from the collection basket.
The Domain of Zealots
In a Politico exposé into the Global Strategic Communications Council (GSCC) (the PR division that spins the climate story for the European Climate Foundation (and until the Politico exposé, revealed nothing about their funding sources) the director, Tom Brookes, accepted that they are using exactly the same tactics as what was portrayed in the anti-industry book, Merchants of Doubt. But he preferred to consider his public relations organization’s tactics in a positive light as he believes he is telling the truth. Politico dubbed GSCC as the Merchants of Certainty since they were breaking all of the same rules to fight against climate change. The implication here is that the righteous do not need to be transparent.
A spin doctor who has no issue with breaking all the rules because he believes he is acting on behalf of the truth … my definition of a zealot.
Foundations still benefit from the halo effect perception as charity-based initiatives funding education, healthcare and development for those in need. Any time a well is dug or a vaccine is injected, the PR professionals are taking a snap for their annual reports. But in the last decade, the foundation sector has professionalized with a large number of consultants, activists and political operatives moving in to manage the funds, converting them into efficient, interconnected agents of change. At the same time, the amount of wealth coming into the sector has risen exponentially. The Firebreak’s Foundation Capitalism series has looked at the new tools used to turn the field of philanthropy into a big business.
These investigations have been part of a personal journey. Several years ago, I watched the anti-glyphosate campaign film, Into the Weeds, only to see my name and work personally attacked on the screen. When I contacted the film’s fiscal sponsor, the Utah Film Center, to ask who the donors were, they replied they had to protect the anonymity request of the funders. I would have expected some transparency given how the film, and the global promotional tours supporting its anti-pesticide message, were criticizing the secretive work of industry. Is it fair that every industry restaurant receipt is scrutinized (and publicized) but activists can spend millions attacking them and hide their funders in the shadows?
Hundreds of Millions for … Communications
In my career in lobbying, we could do a lot with communications budgets from 50 to 100 thousand dollars. NGOs used to run effective campaigns with even less. Most large budgets were allocated to lab testing and substance compliance (and in the last 20 years, a large ecosystem of white-coat opportunists feeding from the trough of regulatory risk analyses has emerged).
Just imagine what activists could do when a group like the European Climate Foundation splashes out €275 million a year to a flotilla of NGOs to lead them in their “net zero” climate campaigns? Or what about giving a group like the Agroecology Fund $100 million a year from tech billionaire profits, not to support peasant farmers in developing countries but to lobby against conventional agriculture innovations in advanced nations?
Shouldn’t we be able to know who is receiving how much and what they are spending it on?
Nobody needs a million dollars for a communications campaign, let alone 100 million. This is more than enough to tip the scales in policy debates. These foundations are not only spreading the wealth among NGOs and influencers, they are funding large media organizations or setting up fiscal sponsors to pay journalists directly to cover their campaigns. Academics and labs are getting earmarked funding from foundations supporting their universities while whitewashing the interest groups behind their research projects.
Before this evolution in foundations taking a focus on environmental campaigns, activists could control the narrative and impact policy debates with hundreds of thousands of dollars. Now they are receiving hundreds of millions. Is it any wonder that the anti-industry, anti-capitalist narrative has dominated the Western dialogue for the last decade? If foundations were forced to be transparent, we could follow the money. Instead we are just following the decline of public support for capitalism, research and innovation, confused as to how that happened.
This free money though does not come without risks. With millions in the bank, NGOs no longer have to spend their time and budgets asking for small gifts or membership dues (and they are losing contact with their supporters). NGOs themselves are losing influence in these campaigns, either by being forced to read from the foundation’s script or by having fiscal sponsors setting up their own campaign groups without NGO involvement.
Case Studies in Non-Transparent Foundation Abuse
The Firebreak has been lifting the veil on how foundations have been pulling the strings from the shadows without being transparent or honest actors in the policy debates.
Sher Edling
Sher Edling is a tort law firm than only exists to sue oil companies for the damages from climate change on behalf of state, local and first nation governments. They have never actually won a case and their objective of these climate nuisance cases is to generate bad PR and public outrage against fossil fuel companies. They are funded via a fiscal sponsor, presently New Venture Fund, who have channeled over $12 million into the law firm to keep the lights on and the celebrity influencers cooperative. The Firebreak revealed the tactics they used to get the Michigan State AG to sign on to their copy-paste litigation strategy.
Heartland Health Research Alliance
The Heartland Health Research Alliance (HHRA) was founded by Chuck Benbrook and a group of tort lawyers and activist scientists to try to link herbicide use to maternity health issues. Using dark donor-advised funds, their foundations funded the scientists universities to enable their labs to manufacture evidence and identify victims that the law firms could then prepare as plaintiffs. The Firebreak showed how the group even secretly (and illegally) transferred almost one million dollars to the Ramazzini Global Glyphosate Health Study via an academic’s university.
European Climate Foundation
The European Climate Foundation is a fiscal sponsor representing more than a dozen foundations running climate campaigns. Their goal is to redistribute funds to a large number of NGOs, consultancies and influencers to dictate the climate narrative and lobby governments toward establishing their net-zero by 2050 strategy. They do not communicate how much and whom they sponsor but an investigation by Florence Autret, and translated by the Firebreak, revealed that they are funding a “flotilla” of NGOs. In 2023, their tax declaration revealed they had received €275 million from foundations for their campaigns.
The Effective Altruism Cult
Effective Ventures is the “holding company” behind the Effective Altruism strategy of tapping into the billions of wealth from tech and financial services, creating an algorithm and a cult of giving marketed at millennials. They attracted people like Sam Bankman-Fried who was so caught up in the power of giving that he looted Alameda Research and SBX, leaving more than $5 billion unaccounted for by the time he was discovered. The Firebreak showed how the donor-advised foundation structure has been abused by Effective Ventures’ fund management units.
The Albertan Oil Squeeze
The Albertan provincial government in Canada was so frustrated by a large number of NGO campaigns that was attempting to seal the province off, preventing them from exporting oil and gas, that they launched the Allan Inquiry to investigate where their power and influence was coming from. They discovered a network of large American foundations running the campaign from behind the scenes, empowering them to the point that the Royal Canadian Mounted Police declared certain groups to be violent threats to national security. No mainstream media gave significant attention to the findings of the Allan Inquiry. The Inquiry concluded that it was a problem that these foundations did not need to declare their interests and involvement, but made no recommendations how.
Press Payola Series
What the mainstream media covers today tends to reflect how much the foundations donate to them or the journalists their fiscal sponsors support. The Firebreak showed how one fiscal sponsor (Covering Climate Now) was created by a large number of climate-driven foundations to release funds and provide training to journalists to ensure that all news stories are considered as climate stories. This news capturing tactic is starting to become so refined that the Firebreak has launched the Press Payola series to look at how other fiscal sponsors are trying to control the news flow on other issues (like PFAS and salmon aquaculture).
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It is one thing to talk about how foundations are abusing the funding mechanisms and influencing debates from the shadows and it is another thing to provide solutions to create a more legitimate and fair playing field for all stakeholders. The second part of this analysis will look at certain tools exploited by foundations to hide their special interests. These tools need to be stopped or regulated.