Creative and Intentional Resourcing
In 2021, Walton, along with key frontline Climate Justice leaders, played a key role in helping to reallocate $141 million from the Bezos Earth Fund to frontline accountable intermediaries, with The Solutions Project (TSP) receiving $43 million themselves. Additionally, TSP co-developed three movement support funds with frontline organizations, The Justice 40 Accelerator, Communicating Our Power Fund and The Fund for Frontline Power (A note that this is 100% governed and stewarded by grassroots organizations and leaders and is being held at TSP at the request of those organizations).
These funds were developed in partnership with movement groups such as the Climate Justice Alliance and Groundswell. These partnerships help build trust and deepen the commitment that TSP has in ensuring that these funds go directly to frontline, grassroots organizations.
TSP focuses on granting multi-year, unrestricted grants whenever possible. And they work to be emergent and nimble when events such as climate disasters happen, working to get money on the ground quickly. They also lean heavily into resourcing narrative power and strategy, amplifying work and stories to further their advocacy for climate action, policy changes and funding.
The impact of these practices is huge. One of TSP’s grantees, Soulardarity based in Highland Park, MI ran a community-controlled energy democracy campaign to install thousands of solar powered streetlights after the original ones were taken away. These streetlights will not only provide energy cost savings for years to come, but the campaign helped to strengthen community cohesion and power. Frontline grantees know what they need and how to be responsive to the multifaceted desires of their communities even when those desires/needs do not fit into a narrowly defined grant portfolio.
Walton also hopes that movement accountable intermediaries can be more organized and strategic, continuing to show up courageously as a necessary force of the philanthropic sector. Because while TSP has moved upwards of $60 million in 2025 (with a milestone of $100 million more) to upwards of 350 frontline-led organizations, there are much larger climate focused intermediaries in the ecosystem moving three to four times that amount of money, who are not working directly with frontline groups.
By working in collaboration with like-minded collaborative funds, funders like TSP help make movement accountable funding the norm instead of an outlier. Additionally, Walton stresses that in being a movement-accountable intermediary, TSP needs to fundraise every year. This can mean getting creative and working to build partnerships between grantees and non-traditional institutions, sectors, and people to bring in additional funding. Walton elaborates, “It’s important to understand that moving resources is expansive and multidimensional, meaning it can look like moving money, making connections to other funders and opportunities, sharing our platform, paying for a grantee to attend a conference or a training, etc. It’s showing