Know Your Network: Alejandra Hernandez on Climate Equity, Community Health and Finding Hope in Peer Connection
Welcome back to Know Your Network, TFN’s blog series highlighting the people making an impact across our community of funders, partners and allies — and beyond.
For this latest installment of KYN, we sat down with Alejandra Hernandez — a program officer for the Kresge Foundation’s Environment program, which supports cities in combating and adapting to climate change while advancing racial and economic equity. Alejandra also serves on the steering committee for TFN’s GREEN working group and was on the planning committee for TFN’s 2026 Fall Convening.
Read on to learn more about Alejandra’s take on why caring for the earth is caring for people’s well-being, the equity gap in national climate conversations and where she’s finding hope in these challenging times.
TFN: As a program officer in Kresge’s Environment program, you help lead the Climate Change, Health, and Equity Initiative. What does your work look like today, and what feels most important about it at this moment?
AH: So, I’m a co-lead for Kresge’s Climate Change, Health, and Equity, or CCHE, Initiative, representing the Environment program.
At its core, our work is about supporting partners to advance equitable solutions that protect people’s health and well-being from the impacts of climate change. That includes extreme heat, flooding and poor air quality, but also the health consequences that come with them, from respiratory and chronic illness to mental health impacts.
We work with 32 partners across 18 cities. Twenty-five are community-based organizations, and seven are national networks of health institutions and practitioners. Their work takes a lot of different forms, including community organizing, policy advocacy, community development, and culture and narrative change. What connects that work is a focus on ensuring that the communities most affected by climate change have a real voice in shaping the solutions.
And I think this work feels especially urgent right now. Communities are continuing to experience the growing impacts of climate change in very real and immediate ways. At the same time, we’re seeing federal rollbacks, funding uncertainty, and fewer resources available to organizations that are often on the front lines of responding to these challenges.
So for us, it’s not only about responding to the immediate impacts. It’s about supporting our partners to keep advancing solutions while also strengthening the power, relationships and infrastructure communities need for the long term.
That’s also why I think the community-of-practice aspect of CCHE is so important. Our partners are able to learn from one another, share strategies, and navigate challenges together through virtual peer learning, national convenings and smaller place-based gatherings, like the ones we held this year in Memphis and Pittsburgh. Especially in this moment, there’s real value in creating spaces where people can connect and learn from one another.
Ultimately, as climate impacts grow and the policy and funding environment becomes more uncertain, philanthropy has an important role to play in staying alongside communities, being flexible, and helping ensure that equitable, community-driven solutions can continue to move forward.
TFN: CCHE is built on the idea that climate change and health can’t be separated. What’s a lesson you’ve learned about that connection that you wish more people understood?
AH: Well, the way I think about it is that caring for the earth is caring for people’s well-being. During our recent Pittsburgh convening, for example, we visited a community health center that will also serve as the headquarters for one of our partners, Homewood Children’s Village. The building is filled with beautiful murals and artwork, along with elements of nature. And just down the block, there’s an urban farm and a church that hosts community meals and other programming.
It’s all one neighborhood, and it’s all connected. It’s all part of health and well-being. There’s been a lot of thought put into making this new clinic climate smart, making sure the building is resilient and can continue to operate under stressful conditions. But they’re also thinking about caring for the earth in a very literal way, like addressing toxicity in urban soil and understanding how that affects people’s health.
And there’s a generational piece to this too. Adult and youth well-being really go hand in hand. You can’t have one without the other. If we want young people to be healthy and thrive, we also have to think about the health and well-being of the adults, families, and communities around them.
So for me, that’s really the lesson: our environment shapes our health at every age. Taking care of the places where people live, learn, work, and come together is part of taking care of people.
TFN: What are you seeing in communities right now that larger national conversations on climate might be missing?
AH: I think there’s a lot of climate and health work that’s being approached in different ways across the nation, but I think what’s missing is more of that equity piece. We can have climate and health initiatives, but that doesn’t necessarily mean we’ll have equitable outcomes. It’s important to be intentional about how we approach the work, to really focus on who is being overlooked and who benefits from a particular initiative or investment.
TFN: As a member of the GREEN steering committee, what feels most urgent for funders working on climate and sustainable, equitable communities right now?
AH: I feel like this moment requires us to take our professionalism hats off. We’re navigating an extremely hard time. There are cuts at the federal level, and other foundations are pulling back from equity commitments or even walking away from the climate and health space altogether.
There’s a level of humanity needed right now, especially as we’re talking and being in partnership with our grantee partners. We have to be very transparent and clear as we’re all navigating this new and very scary world.
But that’s also an opportunity. We’ve been playing defense, understandably so, but I think it’s important to hold the tension of playing that defense while also being clear about our commitments to build the world we want to see. That means being strategic with the resources, talent, and relationships we have, and not getting stuck overthinking, over-strategizing, and over-analyzing, so we can be a little more nimble as a sector.
TFN: You helped plan TFN’s 2026 Fall Convening in Cleveland. What lessons are you taking from that gathering?
AH: It was great to hear from local community speakers and public sector leaders how Cleveland-based foundations have invested in their understanding and education around climate. That has increased their capacity to have that knowledge, make those connections, and bring back lessons from other cities and other nations to their hometown. Building that kind of capacity takes time, but you can really see the value of that long-term investment.
And as someone who lives in Detroit, home to the Detroit RiverWalk, which has been voted the best riverwalk in the country, I really enjoyed learning about Cleveland’s waterfront development. What stood out to me was the opportunity for local folks to be engaged in that process and have a real say in what they want their lakefront to look and feel like.
I also came away with a sense that there’s a real hunger for more peer-to-peer learning, whether around AI, storytelling and narrative change, or ways to build community wealth. I’m excited to see how those conversations keep growing and what we’ll learn from one another at TFN27 in Oakland.
TFN: Zooming out a bit, what’s giving you energy and hope right now?
AH: I would say the small wins. Even the small wins are giving me a lot of energy and hope, and we need more of that. I hope to see bigger ones in the future, but for now, the small wins sustain me.
Spaces like GREEN sustain me, too. Being a part of TFN’s GREEN working group has been such a great way to find a home beyond Kresge, and to make more connections with peers in the funding space. I also love how we’re invited to really help create some of these experiences, like informing convenings. And I love the culture of TFN!
We’re grateful to Alejandra for taking the time to share her experiences, lessons learned and hopes for the future.
Inspired by the conversation? Join us at TFN27: Mission Possible March 15-17 in Oakland, California, to connect with peers, learn from practitioners and explore how philanthropy can meet this moment.
From Public Investment to Lasting Community Power: BuildUS’s Framework for Strengthening Implementation Ecosystems
The Funders Network is committed to sharing the stories and strategies of our members, partners and others in the philanthropic sector working to create more sustainable, prosperous and equitable communities.
Today, we’re sharing a blog post by Jill Fuglister, executive director of BuildUS, co-chair of TFN’s Partners for Places Governance Committee and a 2016 PLACES Fellow. Drawing on three years of supporting place-based coalitions, she reflects on how partnerships between power builders and project implementers can turn federal investments into equitable outcomes, and introduces “From Policy to Possibility,” a new resource from BuildUS to help funders strengthen local implementation capacity.
BY Jill Fuglister, BuildUS Executive Director (TFN Partners for Places Governance Committee Co-chair and PLACES Fellow, 2016)
During my years at a regional foundation, I saw how sustained investment in organizing and coalition building led by and for communities that have experienced historic disinvestment led to big wins.
My experience at BuildUS has deepened my appreciation for how essential that local power building infrastructure is to turning ambitious national public policy into equitable outcomes. Over the past three years, I've seen how partnerships between power-builders and project implementers can advance complex projects and how the work of implementation can, in turn, build the community capacity and power needed to shape future decisions.
This is also where national and place-based philanthropy can be complementary. Place-based funders can make patient, long-term investments in organizations, leadership and coalition-building that enable communities to innovate and take bold actions. National funders can provide an influx of flexible resources, specialized expertise and connections across geographies to help communities navigate complex federal policy implementation and accelerate results.
BuildUS has been supporting place-based coalitions to implement Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, CHIPS and Science Act and Inflation Reduction Act-resourced equitable clean energy, infrastructure and economic development projects.
There’s a lot that makes this work hard. Technical gaps, policy and regulatory barriers, misinformation, lack of capital, disconnects between community and government, and more can derail promising projects. But partnerships between power building groups and implementers have overcome these barriers to move strong projects forward. They've also given communities historically marginalized from public investment decisions greater influence over which projects move forward, how they're designed and who benefits.
One example of this is the Allegheny Decarbonization Coalition. The coalition unites a diverse set of community, labor and government partners to advance climate resilience retrofits of public housing in Pittsburgh. Heinz Endowments has supported the organization at the center of the work for years to build the capacity and deepen relationships critical for the coalition’s development. National funders, including BuildUS, helped fuel the coalition’s momentum as the new federal funding opportunities emerged. When their federal grant was declined, the coalition had the strength and capacity to find a new path forward. As a result, they are on track to complete a public housing decarbonization pilot, and lessons from that work have informed the proposed Pennsylvania Energy Savings and Jobs Fund, legislation planned for introduction in 2027 to help replicate this approach statewide.
Over three years, we’ve learned a lot from our partners about the nitty gritty specifics of this work. We recently compiled these lessons into “From Policy to Possibility”, a new resource designed to help funders more fully understand all of the interconnected capacities communities need to turn public resources into meaningful outcomes. It also features dozens of example projects and the successful strategies we’ve seen groups on the ground use to navigate a federal policy context that changed direction midstream. In addition, it includes a framework that offers funders and practitioners a way to assess implementation capacities in the places they support: what's strong, what's missing, and where investments or new partnerships could make the greatest difference.
Why did we think it was important to create this resource?
First, the work of implementing BIL, CHIPS and IRA isn’t done. Billions of dollars are still flowing and projects are in progress, including many that we highlighted in our report. But the organizations and partnerships needed to deliver equitable clean energy, clean water and good jobs results remain vulnerable. If support recedes now, projects that are underway are at risk of stalling or reinforcing longstanding patterns in which public investments disproportionately benefit those with the greatest resources and power, a pattern that philanthropy has been trying to break.
Second, community capacity to shape public investments matters beyond any single funding opportunity. The federal, state and local governments invest in infrastructure, energy, housing and economic development every year. The capacities strengthened in places over the past several years can help communities influence this ongoing flow of public investments. Stronger implementation capacities also mean communities can move faster and more effectively to complete new and unfinished projects and shape how public funds are spent more broadly, creating a virtuous cycle of greater community influence and impact.
Third, with fewer philanthropic dollars flowing into implementation, funders face difficult choices about what to sustain. The From Policy to Possibility framework can help funders and practitioners make investment decisions strategically by identifying capacity strengths and gaps in an implementation ecosystem in the places they work, as well as opportunities for investment, coordination and partnership.
Finally, implementation ecosystems are part of the civic infrastructure we need to build a more equitable, green, and democratic economy. When communities build their capacity to shape public investments and see tangible results from their participation, they build the foundation needed to influence public decisions and hold institutions accountable. At the same time, more effective relationships between communities and government can help transform existing institutions and create new forms of governance that put equity and community priorities at the center.
The next major federal policy opportunity will no doubt look different from this one. But the lesson from the past several years is clear: investing in strong implementation ecosystems that unite power builders with project developers pays dividends well beyond any single project or funding opportunity. These investments can deliver more equitable outcomes today while strengthening communities' collective power to shape future decisions. Over time, they can help fundamentally change who makes decisions, whose priorities drive public investments, and who benefits.
Photo by Matthew Kaplan, courtesy of Chicago Teachers Union.
Registration is now open for TFN 2027: Mission Possible!
Registration is now open for TFN’s 2027 Conference: Mission Possible which takes place March 15-17 in Oakland, California!
Below is a message from our TFN27 Conference Co-chairs, Patrice R. Green of the Surdna Foundation, Tida Leagnavar of the California Endowment and Elizabeth Posey of the James Irvine Foundation.
Oakland knows something about turning seemingly impossible challenges into movements for change. With its rich history of activism, organizing, and cultural innovation, it’s a fitting place to gather for Mission Possible, The Funders Network’s 2027 Conference, March 15–17.
Oakland also reminds us that the challenges facing our communities rarely fit neatly into categories. Health, housing, climate, culture, democracy, technology and economic opportunity are deeply connected—and so are the people and organizations working to address them.
Here, we’ll see how those connections play out in a place with much to teach us.
As funders, we have an opportunity—and a responsibility—to do more than respond to the crises of the moment. How can we help communities shape the changes affecting their lives? And how can philanthropy support the leadership, relationships, and ideas that make lasting change possible?
At TFN27, we’ll explore these questions in true TFN fashion: learning from place and from one another. Through conversations with community leaders and firsthand experiences in Oakland and the San Francisco Bay Area, we’ll encounter approaches that challenge our assumptions and spark new thinking.
Whatever issues you work on or wherever you call home, you’ll find colleagues grappling with familiar challenges—and others bringing perspectives you may not have considered. That’s the power of coming together: sharing what we’ve learned, discovering new possibilities, and returning home better equipped to act.
We hope you’ll join us in Oakland. See you in March!
Join us in Oakland!
- Register for TFN27 and learn about registration prices, accessibility practices, and ongoing conference updates.
- Subscribe for the latest TFN27 updates, including registration details, speaker updates, and more!
- Read a blog from our CEO, Dion Cartwright, Have You Questioned Working in Philanthropy Lately?, on why we chose Mission Possible as this year’s theme.
- Interested in sponsoring? Reach out to Aileen to get started!
- Questions? Email us at TFN27@fundersnetwork.org.
Democracy is year-round work
BY Dion Cartwright, President & CEO, The Funders Network
Across the country, TFN members are building civic power well beyond Election Day.
Voting is one piece of that work. The rest happens when neighbors organize, communities develop leaders, and people come together to shape the decisions affecting their lives. TFN members are strengthening democracy in many forms, including civic participation, grassroots organizing, racial and economic justice, and community leadership.
What Democracy Work Looks Like in Practice
- The McKnight Foundation strengthens nonpartisan democratic participation year-round by supporting people's ability to come together across differences to influence decisions affecting their lives, from affordable housing and family-sustaining jobs to clean air and water.
- In rural Minnesota, West Central Initiative strengthens civic participation through its Rural Democracy work, helping residents develop leadership skills, build relationships and engage in local decision-making.
- In the American South, Partnership for Southern Equity advances voter education, civic leadership and grassroots value-based organizing through initiatives including Vote for Equity, Development Watch, and the Hosea Williams Freedom Academy, engaging historically disinvested communities and young leaders.
- In Los Angeles County, Liberty Hill Foundation invests in grassroots organizing and civic engagement. Its Liberty Vote! program supports nonpartisan electoral organizing, while its Fund for Change provides flexible funding to organizations advancing systemic change.
- The Surdna Foundation connects democratic participation with economic opportunity and institutional accountability, supporting communities in building the political and economic power to shape their futures.
- And The U.S. Energy Foundation supports local coalitions and community leaders, from farmers and business owners to health practitioners, in raising their voices on clean energy issues that shape their communities’ health, economy and future.
These are just a few examples of the many ways TFN members are supporting communities and democracy across the country.
Investing in Democracy, Every Day
Whether the work focuses on housing, transportation, environmental justice, economic opportunity or civic participation, lasting change depends on community leadership and real participation.
At TFN, we connect funders and partners across issues and geographies to learn from one another, strengthen relationships and advance more equitable, sustainable communities. We support advocacy efforts through information and resource sharing, amplifying messaging, and fostering solidarity across the network and beyond.
So what can philanthropy do?
- Make participation possible. Offer staff paid time off to vote or volunteer.
- Invest between elections. Support organizing, local journalism, civic education and leadership development.
- Commit for the long term. Provide flexible, multiyear funding that sustains organizations and community power.
- Support advocacy. Understand what's possible for nonprofits and foundations through resources like Bolder Advocacy.
Beyond Election Day
Vote on November 3. On November 4, keep investing in the people, organizations and movements strengthening our communities.
Democracy is built 365 days a year.
Listening, Learning, and Building Together in Detroit: Reflections from the 2026 PLACES Alum Gathering
BY Jonathan T. Reid, PLACES Fellow ’25, and Jasmine Thomas, PLACES Fellow ’11
We arrived in Detroit ready to reconnect. For two days, The Funders Network’s PLACES Alum Gathering brought together fellows from across the program’s history, including members of the first cohort and recent alums. Joy was palpable as familiar faces reunited and new relationships took shape among people who care deeply about community, equity, and sustainability.
Our fellowship experiences began almost 15 years apart, yet Detroit reminded us that PLACES continues to shape how we lead as our roles, institutions, and responsibilities evolve. It provides a professional home where we can share what we have learned, examine what we still need to understand, and invest in one another.
The gathering centered on Inspiring Revolutionary Optimism, a theme fitting for this moment. Philanthropy faces mounting pressure to deliver broader impact amid profound uncertainty. Communities are calling on philanthropic institutions to act with greater courage and accountability. In this context, hope has to be visible in our choices: how we listen, where we invest, whose leadership we trust, and whether we are willing to change our own practices so communities can exercise ownership and thrive.
Detroit Beyond the Data
Detroit made those conversations especially tangible. Its history of population loss, uneven investment, and unequal access to public resources reveals the long reach of disinvestment. A fuller understanding of the city and its possibilities requires listening to the people who live there and continue to shape its future.
Place-based philanthropy asks us to spend enough time in a community to understand what its stories mean. That means hearing residents describe their neighborhoods, noticing how people care for one another, and recognizing the local leadership already shaping solutions. Data helps us see patterns. People show us how those patterns play out in daily life and where positive change is gaining momentum.
We experienced that leadership and hospitality through Live6 Alliance’s work along Six Mile on Detroit’s west side. Spending time in a corridor gaining renewed entrepreneurial and economic vitality brought our conversations about community ownership and investment into focus. Local businesses create opportunities to earn a living, build wealth, welcome neighbors, and sustain the relationships that make a neighborhood feel like home.
We benefited directly from what those investments make possible. The spaces where we gathered and the welcome we received reflected the work of people committing their ideas, resources, and futures to Detroit.
Mobilizing Resources Through Relationships
That commitment was at the heart of Building Bridges: Strengthening the Connective Tissue of Place, a 90-minute resource mobilization workshop led by Jonathan T. Reid of ECMC Foundation and fellow PLACES alum Mary Coleman of Voqal Partners. PLACES alum and philanthropic partners explored how networks, intermediaries, collaboratives, and institutions can bring resources into closer alignment with community priorities.
Participants mapped the ecosystems around their work and traced how catalytic funding, knowledge, trust, influence, and decision-making move among local, regional, and national partners. Together, we examined where resources are flowing, where they are getting stuck, and which connections need more attention.
The conversation sharpened something many of us know from experience: trust shapes whether resources reach the people and priorities they are intended to support. Lasting impact depends on strong local institutions with flexible funding and durable assets that can withstand shifts in funder priorities and economic conditions.
Funders seeking sustainable impact must engage people closest to the problem, share power, and co-invest boldly over the long haul. This means committing resources, sustaining relationships through uncertainty, and trusting community leadership as priorities evolve. Those commitments give communities greater capacity to coordinate, adapt, and lead.
Freedom Dreaming in Practice
A private screening of the documentary In Love & Struggle, produced by Freedom Dreams in Philanthropy, became one of the gathering’s defining moments. Drawing on the visionary philosophy of James and Grace Lee Boggs, the film celebrates Detroit’s tradition of freedom dreaming and brings its grassroots activism, neighborly love, and community transformation to the screen.
Afterward, Chera Reid of Freedom Dreams in Philanthropy and Kevin “Coach Kellogg” Jones of Freedom Dreams Detroit joined us for a Q&A. The conversation pushed us to consider whose visions guide our work, the futures we help make possible through everyday choices, and our responsibility to turn those visions into action.
Coach Kellogg’s reflections on home and community stayed with us. They invited us to consider how we invest in the people and places that have shaped us, and what it means to remain accountable as our opportunities and responsibilities grow.
The film brought Detroit’s history and present into the room. Hearing people speak about their work and seeing the care with which they lead it gave us more to consider than a set of funding priorities. It asked us to examine whether our practices make room for the futures communities are already imagining and building.
Community as a Wellness Practice
That learning continued during time spent offline in fellowship with other PLACES alum at Mockery Zero Proof. Founder and owner Karlyta Williams, a southwest Detroit native, welcomed us into Detroit’s first zero-proof bottle shop and social space, created to cultivate connection, self-care, and joy.
Her hospitality made the value of shared spaces tangible. An entrepreneur’s vision had created room for people to pause, enjoy one another’s company, and build relationships. For residents who frequent the establishment, those opportunities can become part of the rhythm of neighborhood life.
The experience reminded us that community is sustained through shared practice and ritual: returning to a familiar gathering spot, caring for ourselves and others, making time for conversation, and welcoming someone new. These everyday acts give lived experience its communal meaning. Investing in spaces that support belonging and mutual exchange is part of investing in community well-being.
Demarra West, founder of Be Well Beautiful People, named something many of us have felt: when wellness practices fall away, we slowly lose our grounding. Her point resonated in a room full of people working within systems shaped by constant urgency, pressure, and change. Staying grounded helps us hold onto why we entered this work and remain intentional about how we move through it.
TFN PLACES is a wellness practice. Period.
There is something restorative about being with people who share a passion for justice and a vision for progress in philanthropy. We can exhale, reconnect, challenge one another, and return to our work with clearer minds and renewed direction. We need communities like this to sustain both our commitments and our capacity to act on them.
Coming Home and Carrying the Work Forward
For Jasmine, returning to PLACES offered an opportunity to reflect on the commitments she has carried from community and family philanthropy to corporate giving, and now to founding and leading a global strategy and governance advisory firm. Each chapter has deepened her understanding of how institutions make decisions, how resources move, and what it takes to translate investments into meaningful, lasting results.
Decisions made within and across institutions and borders have consequences for economies, businesses, households, and individual lives. Sound judgment requires attention to those consequences and to the knowledge of people most directly affected by those decisions.
For Jonathan, reconnecting with the 2025 cohort and building relationships across the alum network extended the learning and fellowship of his recent PLACES experience. Co-leading the resource mobilization workshop brought that learning into practice, creating space for colleagues to examine how their relationships and influence can better support community priorities.
Across these different career chapters, we recognized a shared responsibility: to put our lived experience, institutional access, and the resources entrusted to us to work in ways that strengthen communities. Coming home to PLACES asks us to consider what we are prepared to bring back and contribute.
We are grateful to the people of Detroit who welcomed us, trusted us with their stories, and shared their dreams. Through their leadership, businesses, gathering spaces, and everyday care, they helped us experience the connections among ownership, investment, belonging, and collective imagination.
We left Detroit with renewed relationships across the PLACES network of fellows and a deeper resolve to lead through active listening, invest for the long term, and follow the leadership already present in communities.
About the Authors
Jonathan T. Reid is a program officer at ECMC Foundation. He oversees a portfolio of grants focused on increasing the number of college students from historically underrepresented backgrounds, including low-income and first-generation populations, who attain postsecondary credentials. He is an alum of TFN’s 2025 PLACES Fellowship Cohort.
Jasmine Thomas is the founder and managing partner at Beacon Rowe, a global boutique advisory firm partnering with executives, boards, and institutional clients at moments of strategic inflection. She is an alum of TFN’s 2011 PLACES Fellowship Cohort.
Grounded in Place: A look at the impact of Partners for Places
Welcome to Grounded in Place, The Funders Network’s blog series highlighting the people and projects behind Partners for Places, TFN’s matching grant program that supports equitable collaborative partnerships advancing community-led climate and green infrastructure projects.
This series features voices from across the U.S., from community changemakers who have seen their neighbors step into roles as climate and water equity champions and national funders who found their grantmaking impact expanded in meaningful and unexpected ways. These community voices reflect more than a decade of investments from Partners for Places.
This story was originally reported in 2024. Grant totals, titles and project details reflect that time and may have changed since.
To kick things off, we’re taking a closer look at the Partners for Places model itself: how it brings together local governments, frontline community organizations and place-based grantmakers, and why that approach is working.
Partners for Places: A model for community climate action.
“We’ve got to heal our beautiful planet, and we’ve got to do it as a team.”
That’s how Isabel Sanchez, a community organizer in Boulder, Colo., explains the purpose behind the Partners for Places grant program.
She uses her lived experience as an urban farmer and natural disaster survivor to help vulnerable residents prepare to withstand and recover from environmental threats, including the increasingly frequent and deadly wildfires decimating the Rockies’ purple mountain majesty.
In all corners of the country, agents of change like Sanchez are not only fighting against existential climate risks.
They’re also fighting for the people in their communities — too many of whom have been sidelined, redlined and unaligned until finally being asked what they think and what they need.
Since 2012, Partners for Places has supported 228 grants in communities both large and small, spanning coast to coast and across geographically and politically diverse landscapes.
Partners for Places has generated more than $13 million to support community-driven climate solutions through its grants, matching funders and additional investments.
The matching grant program, managed by The Funders Network with equity supports and coaching assistance from the Urban Sustainability Directors Network and People's Climate Innovation Center, embraces a distinctive model that unites local governments, frontline community organizations and place-based grantmakers.
“We need collaborative, cross-sector partnerships if we are going to create resilient, sustainable communities. But those relationships don’t just happen by accident,” said Ann Fowler Wallace, TFN’s vice president of programs and partnerships. “We need to create opportunities for people in government, people in philanthropy, and especially people most impacted by climate hazards, to build trust and work together.”
In San Diego, the grants have helped support a leadership training academy to advance community organizing and green stormwater infrastructure along the Chollas Creek Watershed and its neighborhoods.
In New Orleans, what started as a community feedback loop for a city-produced climate plan seven years ago is now an ongoing collaborative making its own mini grants.
In smaller places like Columbia, Mo., and Līhu’e, Hawai’i, community-supported agriculture models are serving as gathering places and educational spaces — while bearing crops that feed residents and contribute to the local economy.
Shared Knowledge & Ongoing Support
Dr. Addison Busolan, coordinator of downtown Līhu’e’s business association, said that connecting with other Partners for Places grantees and TFN’s team was an invaluable resource in getting the project off the ground.
Partners for Places grantees receive peer support services, including training, bi-monthly virtual meetings, and one-on-one coaching and technical assistance from the Urban Sustainability Directors Network and People's Climate Innovation Center, which partners with TFN on the grants program.
Project leaders are also able to share their challenges and learnings, and problem solve with their cohort of fellow grantees.
“The orientation was awesome because we got to hear what everyone was working on and what’s holding them back,” said Busolan. “It makes us feel part of a community. We’re not just this lone idea in the middle of the Pacific.”
Those lessons are also shared more broadly.
Once the grant period winds down, a summary of each Partners for Places grant project is entered into the Partners for Places Idea Bank, a publicly accessible data bank featuring grant details, key takeaways and other resources.
Cultivating Trust
Bringing in philanthropic dollars through national investors and local matching funders allows for more flexibility and promotes grantmaking that “moves at the speed of trust,” as USDN’s Laurene Hamilton put it.
A frequent example: Typically, government funds can’t be used to support residents who want to attend meetings or participate in engagement activities.
In Partners for Places equity-centered design, project funds can be used to lower the barriers for community participation, such as providing childcare or stipends to cover transportation costs and supporting frontline community leaders.
In some Partners for Places communities, the government and community-based partners know each other well. In others, the grant money draws them to work together for the first time.
Universally, though, they learn more about how each operates to develop stronger long-term strategies and relationships.
“I think we’re onto something that not a lot of intermediary funds are doing in building those relationships between government, frontline groups and community and place-based foundations,” said Wallace, adding: "Ultimately, we're interested in supporting collaborative partnerships that build mutual accountability and shift power from government and funders to frontline communities."
Even funders and local leaders with the best of intentions can have blind spots in their efforts to authentically engage with the communities they seek to serve.
By sharing community engagement and leadership strategies with their cohort, grantee partners hear how some fixes could be as simple as moving meetings to times that don’t pull urban farmers out of the field, or as complicated as working to address the reluctance some historically marginalized communities may have in dealing with government officials.
“There is a lot of distrust in government due to historic redlining and other social inequities,” said Lauren Breckenridge, a special projects administrator for Miami-Dade County’s Department of Parks, Recreation and Open Spaces, which worked with local partners at Grow Roots Miami on a Partners for Places grant project to address food insecurity.
“We have this group on the ground that these communities can actually trust and welcome into their homes and not feel like the government. This was our way of making the impact that we don’t typically have the reach for.”
Grounded in Equity
The idea of co-creating what would eventually become Partners for Places was germinated at a 2010 meeting hosted by the Surdna Foundation.
Surdna, along with The Kendeda Fund, The Summit Foundation and The New York Community Trust, were the first national investors to sign on.
Since 2012, more than a dozen national funders have invested in the program, which offers an avenue to move resources into local communities and build connections with local funders, community and government leaders.
“It’s typical for nonprofits, despite wanting to be good partners with each other, to feel a little bit competitive for resources,” said Gavin White, planning and project director at Riverlife, a Pittsburgh nonprofit uniting West End residents around a long-term bridge infrastructure project. “So, the insistence on partnership and collaboration helps reshape the conversation around equitable distribution of resources.”
Applicants must identify local matching funds, often from community foundations. While the grants program always sought to address the needs of communities most impacted by escalating climate crises, Partners for Places underwent a strategic planning process in 2019 that explicitly centered racial equity in the work.
The renewed focus mirrored TFN’s broader efforts to position racial equity as a cross-cutting and foundational value across the network, from signature events like the network’s annual conference to the peer-led funder working groups that tackle a range of environmental, economic and place-based focus areas.
“If we meet the goals of racial equity, we’re building power in communities to lead on these issues,” said Wallace.
Increased Urgency
One recurring theme across all of these stories: The work to make communities that are sustainable, prosperous and just is ongoing — and far from complete.
Generations of decaying infrastructure, industrial pollution and systemic disinvestment, coupled with the unrelenting march of climate impact, require a herculean commitment to work beyond traditional silos.
And while our communities face an existential threat from climate risks, it can be difficult to generate momentum when conversations around climate issues feel too abstract — or politically fraught — for everyday residents to engage in.
But projects that improve a flood-prone neighborhood, protect community gardens or provide workforce training can have broad appeal.
And that’s especially important as our communities face increased political divisions and decreased civic engagement.
“We’re vested in this work,” said Chuck Morse, a New Orleans pastor who runs Thrive NOLA, a small-business development organization. “If we don’t address these climate challenges, we’re going to kill the bird that sings the song. We’re going to lose the culture if we don’t invest in the communities where the culture lives.”
Stay tuned for the next installment of Grounded in Place: A look at the impact of Partners for Places, where we’ll continue exploring the people and partnerships behind Partners for Places.
Have You Questioned Working in Philanthropy Lately?
BY Dion Cartwright, President & CEO, The Funders Network
It’s been an interesting time, to say the least.
I imagine many of us watch the national news or read the latest headlines and wonder whether we're moving forward or backward. Others may decide to tune it all out and act like everything is “normal.”
More importantly, I imagine most of you, like me, are thinking about how we can best support the communities we serve — and each other — while keeping our eyes open to possibilities we might otherwise miss.
Imagination is something!
We use it to dream big, solve problems, and envision a better future. But imagination can also fuel uncertainty, turning our hopes into doubts about what's really possible.
After 24 years in philanthropy, I’ve found myself wondering whether all this work is making the difference I’d hoped it would. I know from conversations with many of you, I’m not alone in asking those questions.
Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about faith — what it is and what it isn’t. And while I can’t claim to have figured everything out after all these years, I do know that faith requires us to look beyond our doubts and fears. To hold fast to what we know is right and what we believe is possible, even when the world gives us reason to question both.
I think about the vibrant neighborhoods of my hometown of Baltimore, the residents I met in Fresno fighting for clean water, and the tribal leaders at Standing Rock working to protect their land. I think about the emerging leaders TFN has helped shape, and the beautiful rainbow of people who make up philanthropy today. These are the people and places that give me hope and remind me why I love this work.
I find that same hope in you. From Boston to Houston, Atlanta to Dubuque and beyond, my friends and colleagues across TFN bring creativity, commitment and care to your communities. Change doesn’t always arrive in sweeping victories. Sometimes it happens neighborhood by neighborhood, street by street, policy by policy. It can be easy to miss just how much is happening when we’re focused on the challenges ahead.
I’ve seen what happens when the TFN network comes together. We may work in different places and focus on different issues, but we're bound together by our belief in equity and justice, in the right of communities to shape their own futures and in the power philanthropy has to serve those causes. When we bring our stories and experiences together, we start to see just how many reasons we have for hope.
That's what keeps me going in this work: The passion, the people, the relationships, and the way an idea in one place can spark change in another.
Which brings me to two words: MISSION POSSIBLE.
That's the spirit we're bringing to Oakland for TFN's 2027 Annual Conference, March 15–17. It’s an opportunity to come together, share what we’re learning, be inspired by each other and imagine what’s possible.
Registration opens next week, and I hope you'll join us.
I can’t wait to build the future we want together!
➡️ Click here to learn more about our conference.
📬 Click here to subscribe for the latest TFN27 updates, including registration details, speaker updates, and more!
What Happens When Funders and the Fed Share a Room?
BY Aileen Rosa Sánchez, Chief Development Officer, The Funders Network
One of my favorite parts of serving as Chief Development Officer at The Funders Network is experiencing the power of convening.
And I don’t just mean getting people into a room together. I mean what happens once they’re there, and what becomes possible afterward: a conversation leads to a connection, someone asks a question that shifts your thinking, or people discover interests they didn’t know they shared.
For two energizing days at TFN’s 2026 Fall Convening in Cleveland, members of our philanthropic community came together to learn, connect and think across the intersections of climate and environmental sustainability, resilient economies and thriving communities.
One highlight was a reception hosted by the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland for TFN convening attendees and members of our Inclusive Economies working group. We’re grateful to David, Lisa and the Cleveland Fed team for their hospitality. We learned more about the Federal Reserve Banks’ community development work, shared some of what TFN and our members are seeing, and explored areas of mutual interest related to sustainable economic opportunity.
I left thinking about something I’ve come to believe deeply through my own work: community itself is infrastructure.
Community as infrastructure
If you don’t spend your days in central banking, the Federal Reserve may not be the first institution that comes to mind when you think about community development. Most of us know the Fed for monetary policy, but the regional Reserve Banks also conduct research, engage communities and work to better understand economic conditions within their regions.
In Cleveland, we continued to hear about the importance of listening to and engaging with communities and partners. Relationships are at the heart of TFN’s work, too.
Relationships are infrastructure. Trust is infrastructure. Knowing who to call, who has experience with the challenge you’re facing, or who needs to be at the table is infrastructure.
For over 25 years, TFN has helped build and sustain that infrastructure, creating spaces where people can share what they’re seeing, learn from one another and build relationships across institutions, issues and geography.
Data, convening and amplification
Our hosts described three assets the Cleveland Fed brings to its community development work: data, convening power and amplification. There’s a natural connection to TFN’s role as a philanthropic intermediary.
We don’t collect the data ourselves. We bring together funders and other partners who hold data, knowledge, resources and different perspectives, creating opportunities to connect those assets across issues and places.
Amplification is an important part of TFN’s DNA. Philanthropy has tremendous power to amplify, not by speaking for others, but by helping knowledge, ideas and promising approaches travel farther. As an intermediary, TFN is particularly well positioned to do that. We can connect people and institutions, bring greater visibility to what is working, and create pathways for knowledge, ideas and resources to move in ways that strengthen communities, economies and the environment.
The Federal Reserve, philanthropy and community organizations each bring different roles, perspectives and resources to this work. Creating opportunities for those perspectives to meet allows us to consider economic data alongside what people are experiencing in their communities, make new connections and better understand where our work intersects.
What can we learn when economic data is considered alongside what people are experiencing in their communities? What new connections become possible when people who don’t normally share a room have an opportunity to talk and listen?
Our reception in Cleveland wasn’t about arriving at a predetermined project or partnership. It was an opportunity to learn from one another, exchange perspectives and explore where continued engagement could be valuable.
That brings me back to community as infrastructure. Convening gets people into the room, but that’s only the beginning. The relationships and trust built there create pathways for knowledge, ideas and resources to move.
The power of convening is ultimately what becomes possible afterward: putting those connections to work in ways that strengthen communities and create lasting impact.
The Fix Might Already Exist: Lessons from TFN's 2026 Fall Convening in Cleveland, OH
BY Brooke McPherson, TFN’s Senior Communications and Engagement Associate
Nearly 80 funders representing over 60 grantmaking organizations across the country gathered in Cleveland, Ohio last week for two days of learning from place and strategizing with peers at TFN's 2026 Fall Convening, co-presented by our GREEN, Inclusive Economies and PPREP working groups.
During her opening remarks, Dion Cartwright, TFN's President & CEO, told the room that this convening was a chance to actually stop, catch our breath, and think together. "The fix for a crisis in California might already exist in Oklahoma," she said. "We just have to actually talk to each other to find it."
That spirit of collaboration and curiosity ran through everything that followed.
Setting The Stage
Our first day opened with Cuyahoga County Executive Chris Ronayne grounding us in the issues and dynamics shaping Northeast Ohio, followed by a panel of NGO leaders working across energy, environmental justice and economic opportunity in Ohio and the Great Lakes region. He reminded us that challenges communities face don't come pre-sorted by issue area, and neither should the funding that responds to them.
With that in mind, we moved into a funder fishbowl — a familiar favorite at TFN gatherings — where discussion leaders shared strategies for advancing resilient, sustainable and prosperous places, and then opened the circle to the room.
It gave newer voices in the room a chance to be heard, and gave the rest of us a real sense of who's here and what strategies funders are actually testing right now.
Learning From Place
Site visits give us the chance to take these lessons outside the conference room. It matters to TFN that we learn from place, grounding our work in community initiatives that bring together diverse stakeholders to create more sustainable and equitable places for all.
Before heading out, we heard from community and philanthropic leaders who set the scene and provided context ahead of two separate site visits.
The first took us along the Cuyahoga River and Lake Erie shoreline. With the Cleveland Browns relocating their stadium from the North Coast and development accelerating along both the lakefront and riverfront, decisions are now being made that will shape the city's relationship with its waterfront for the next fifty years.
The North Coast Waterfront Development Corporation and ThirdSpace Action Lab are working to make sure Cleveland residents are informed and engaged participants in what gets built there — not bystanders to it. We heard directly from city planning and parks leadership, plus new leadership at the Cleveland-Cuyahoga County Port Authority, about how climate resilience and community benefits are being built into the process and the economic development opportunities that will follow.
The second site visit brought us to the Midline: more than 350 acres of formerly industrial land on Cleveland's East Side being redeveloped into a mixed-use employment and community district, part of Mayor Justin Bibb's Cleveland ERA Initiative.
It's the largest industrial redevelopment in the city's history, poised to create job opportunities for Cleveland's east side residents. The Midline Greenway alone will add more than two miles of trail and nearly 10 acres of new green space to one of the city's most park-deficient corridors, connecting seven neighborhoods to regional destinations from Lake Erie to the Health Tech Corridor.
Philanthropy's Stake in Local News
Our evening reception paired dinner with a conversation on philanthropy's role in supporting local journalism, featuring Press Forward's Dale Robinson Anglin and the Community Foundation of Greater Dubuque's Nancy Van Milligen.
The two made the case that philanthropy needs to get serious about investing in local journalism, which has been on the decline for several decades. You don't have to be a journalism funder for this to be your problem. Every issue area, from economic opportunity to youth services to environmental justice, depends on information getting out. Local news is one of the most effective tools funders have in advancing their work.
And its business model is broken. The question isn't whether funders should care. It's how philanthropy needs to help rebuild it.
From Listening to Acting
Day two shifted from listening to acting. Our opening panel invited funders to share how they're working in tandem across sectors instead of in isolation. We heard from James Hardy (Robert Wood Johnson Foundation), Ben Passer (McKnight Foundation), Karla Twedt-Ball (Greater Cedar Rapids Community Foundation) and Paula Sammons (W.K. Kellogg Foundation) on how their work benefits from connecting with and learning from peers.
Next was a panel featuring Libia Bianibi (BEA Fund), Omar Carrillo Tinajero (Center for Community Investment), Gail Francis (RE-AMP Network), and moderator Alejandra Hernandez (The Kresge Foundation), examining funder strategies, initiatives and investments across three areas: narrative and storytelling, mobilizing around AI and data center development, and new financing and ownership models in the face of public funding reversals.
This set up an afternoon of funder-led small group deep dives on those same topics — another chance for funders in the room to have candid, frank conversations and get to the heart of issues without the pretext of formal presentations.
With Gratitude to Those Who Make This Work Possible
To our planning committee — Treye Johnson, Alejandra Hernandez, Dominique Mack, Joe Heitz and Paula Sammons — thank you for your time, energy and guidance in shaping this convening.
And to our sponsors — Just Communities / Partnership for Southern Equity, The Kresge Foundation, Community Foundation of Greater Dubuque, and William Penn Foundation — thank you for making this gathering possible.
A New Approach to Gathering & See You Soon!
We've heard from our members that smaller, issue-based and geographically focused gatherings create meaningful opportunities for deeper connection and learning, and that's exactly what we set out to do with our Cleveland Fall Convening and gatherings earlier this year.
Whether you joined us in Sacramento, Houston or Cleveland, we hope you've valued TFN's evolving approach to convenings — one that balances more intimate learning spaces throughout the year with larger moments to come together across the full network.
The next of those larger moments is TFN's 2027 Conference in Oakland, CA, March 15-17, 2027. We hope you'll join us there!
Check out more highlights from our Fall Convening by clicking through the slideshow below ⤵️
Know Your Network: James Hardy on Inclusive Economies, Community Health and Finding Hope in Small Cities
Welcome back to Know Your Network, TFN’s blog series highlighting the people making an impact across our community of funders, partners and allies — and beyond.
For this latest installment of KYN, we sat down with James Hardy — a Senior Program Officer, Strategic Portfolios at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, based in Akron, Ohio. James also serves as co-chair of TFN's Inclusive Economies working group.
Read on to learn more about James's take on the structural forces shaping community health, why small and mid-sized cities are laboratories for innovation, and where he's finding hope in these challenging times.
TFN: Hey James! Your work at RWJF spans housing, community development and economic development. What does your work look like today, and what feels most important about it in this moment?
JH: So RWJF is a national funder but my work is currently regionally focused on a few different but mutually reinforcing areas. I steward RWJF’s work in small and mid-sized cities impacted by significant economic difficulties. I work in the affordable housing space, and I also partner closely with local and regional funders in economic justice in the American South. We consider not just the historic injustices the area faced, but more importantly, how that history continues to show up today in the economic and community development practices in the region. We explore how to back the leaders and nonprofits working to replace extractive economic practices with ones that are more inclusive and healthy for communities.
TFN: You've described economic development as a key driver of health outcomes. What's a lesson you've learned about the relationship between economic opportunity and community health that you wish more people understood?
JH: A good job is preventative medicine for an individual or family. I think that has been proven for decades. And when I say a "good job," I mean a job that offers a family-sustaining wage with benefits that allows the family to thrive.
But what’s less proven, and what we’ve been working to change, is the connection at a community level. All of the conditions that build a community — the built environment, transportation systems and water systems and affordability of housing — contribute to community health and are inherently economic investments.
Same goes for how mayors, city councils and county governments engage in community and economic development. Their priorities ultimately impact the larger regional economy. Elected officials, nonprofits, and community members have some level of control locally, but these issues are all connected to the national and global economy.
And then there’s the structural issues in our economy that reward certain cities at the expense of others. The most recent example is AI data centers being rolled out in communities across the country with little consideration of community health outcomes.
Environmental and systematic choices have a greater impact on family and community health than individual choices. And so in my work, I try to bring that lens to my colleagues — reminding them that economic decisions, at every level, shape what people are able to do for their health. And so we’re working on all of those factors to ultimately support thriving communities from a health perspective.
TFN: A lot of your work focuses on small and mid-sized cities. What are you seeing in those communities right now that larger national conversations might be missing?
JH: In my opinion, small and mid-sized cities have a scale that makes innovation much more possible than you might find in the larger metros. People know one another and see their neighbors at the grocery stores. You can access the decisionmakers quicker, and connect with them more effectively.
These cities are great laboratories of new and innovative economic development and policies, and they’re also dealing with the same challenges that larger metros are. Every city has a housing crisis, there’s no jurisdiction immune from it, and we’re all feeling the acute diminishing of public resources with which to respond to those challenges. The bread and butter resources that small and mid-sized cities relied on in the past are in real jeopardy, and so these smaller cities are responding to the same crises with a lot less support.
The other thing I would say about small and mid-sized cities that I think a lot of folks miss is that about a quarter of the country lives here, and they’re not interested in leaving. The notion of picking up and moving for a good job isn’t working anymore. People are much more fixed to place.
They’re not trying to be the next Silicon Valley, but they would like for their people to live outside of poverty and to be able to raise a family, to have a tax base that can support their schools, transit, and public investments.
The fact that we have a structure and system right now that is making it really difficult to do that is often left out of the larger economic development conversation. People don’t want to move; they want there to be better opportunities in the places they already live.
TFN: From your vantage point, what does it really take to build more inclusive economies, and where do you see the greatest opportunities for funders to support that work?
JH: Well, this is the $64,000 question, right? The real answer is there is no one way to do it. Local and regional context matters, but economies don't stop at the municipal boundary line. An essential piece of building an inclusive economy is collaboration, coordination, and alignment of local assets across a whole suite of actors.
And broadly, we are in dire need of new economic policy. New ideas for how to address inequality at the household wealth level and also between communities. What might have made a lot of sense in the 1960s doesn’t necessarily work in a 21st century context, so we need new tools and policies to address the challenges of our current system. Things like universal basic income, which is something RWJF and other funders at every level have been funding and evaluating for many years now.
We’ve seen lots of ideas being pitched in the most recent election cycles and from think tanks around new tax credit programs and incentives. I think it’s still too soon to tell what lessons we’ll gain from those, but that’s the exact kind of experimentation that funders need to be looking at.
Whether you're a community foundation or a national funder, we all have a role to play in incubating these new ideas that tax dollars are too risky for. Innovation needs space and freedom to think, and funders can create that space.
As a co-chair of TFN's Inclusive Economies working group, what feels most urgent for funders working to advance inclusive economies right now?
JH: Like I said experimentation is definitely something we’re working on, but we can’t forget that basic needs are strategic too. I worry about this greatly in the philanthropic sector, especially for those of us that see ourselves as strategic funders. We overthink it and forget that people need help now.
It doesn’t matter what program or policy you put out; it’s going to be difficult for households to take advantage of it unless a basic level of human service is met. So even if we’re place-based or don’t have a basic needs line item in the budget, we have to ensure we’re not forgetting the basics.
Because there’s also a trust component to basic needs. If you don’t respond to the wildfire fallout, how can a community trust that you have their best interests at heart when you come in with a new strategic program around inclusive economic development?
And while we can’t replace government, philanthropy needs to continue to advocate on behalf of our communities and our constituencies. I personally reject the notion that there's nothing we can do, and I see my colleagues all across TFN and the country in philanthropy responding in inspirational and innovative ways to try and stem the impact of this decline in basic needs in our communities.
TFN: Looking ahead to TFN's 2026 Fall Convening, what are you most excited to learn from or explore with fellow members?
JH: TFN gatherings are the best professional development opportunities I get in philanthropy. The peer-to-peer learning, the insights from the sessions, but especially the informal connections that occur with peers working in similar spaces or on similar topics.
And oftentimes, these conversations are ad hoc, even though they end up being some of the most generative conversations I get to have around my work.
Getting together at a TFN event is also a great way to get out of my bubble and hear what my colleagues at the state and local level are facing. I have yet to leave a TFN event without a new idea or additional clarity!
TFN: Zooming out a bit, what's shaping your perspective these days? What's giving you energy and hope right now?
JH: In addition to my work, I’m currently in a master’s program at Starr King School for Ministry, focused on faith-based organizing and theories of praxis around social change from a faith-based lens. It’s given me so much hope and connected me to millennia of examples of eras and seasons where humanity has faced significant challenges, and how we have emerged from those challenges with all kinds of art, music, philosophy, and ideas that have propelled humanity forward a little further down the arc of justice.
So it’s really dark right now, but I continue to be buoyed by the energy, innovation, and commitment of not only our grantees but my classmates and professors. It can be really hard to watch the news, but it can be so inspiring to volunteer. There’s such a response happening all across the country to meet this moment, and it really does lift my spirits.
James, his wife Chrissy, and their kids Will and Sophia helping to move Sophia into her college dorm room.