Funds put $3 million on the table for climate change help – and invite others in

Atlassian Foundation has committed $US1 million (roughly $A1.4 million), which has been matched by PRF’s Impact First Fund.

But the two foundations see this investment as only the beginning of a much bigger pot of money devoted to supporting organisations that help communities facing challenges arising from climate change.

“This partnership is a first of its kind in Australia, and it gives the Atlassian Foundation a way to support genuinely catalytic investments in climate resilience here at home,” said Atlassian Foundation’s director of operations, Farzad Yazdanparast. “It aligns closely with our collective action strategy – we know the challenges facing communities at the intersection of climate and community are too big for any one funder to take on alone.

“We’re really proud to be a founding partner and see enormous potential for this to scale and bring other funders in alongside us. We’re hopeful this is the start of something big.”

PRF’s director of investment and impact capital, Ben Smith, said he hoped the partnership would “open the door” for other funders to back opportunities “that are too early, complex, small or uncertain for conventional finance”.

“Our aim is to support First Nations and community organisations operating at the intersection of climate and community and unlock more capital for their work,” he said.

The partnership will concentrate on three overlapping areas of perceived need, Smith told the Community Advocate.

“For us, it’s about care for country,” he said. “It’s looking at the intersection between climate and First Nations economic development, which might be around clean energy. It’s also about community climate mitigation and adaptation, and community preparedness; thinking about areas like heat resilience and flood resilience.

“I think it’s so inherent that the climate and social [issues] completely intersect and are interlinked, and you can’t do one without the other.”

Smith said Atlassian Foundation and PRF had been building a relationship for more than a year.

In his role as chair of the Foundations Group for Impact Investing (FGII), hosted by Philanthropy Australia, Smith looks to explore collaborations between the group’s 64 members, made up of charitable foundations and funders, he said. “Atlassian first approached us through FGII because they had an idea to explore impact investing, but they didn’t really know where to start. They now have an allocation to impact investing but didn’t have the internal capacity to be able to deliver. We spoke about sharing due diligence and were inspired by a fund in the UK, run by the Esmée Fairburn Foundation, called the Environmental Finance and Learning Fund.”

That fund, which Smith helped create while working for the Esmée Fairburn Foundation, had identified that in the United Kingdom, as in Australia, there were many individuals, family offices or foundations that were keen to invest for social or environmental impact, but didn’t have the internal capabilities to identify and manage those investments. Instead, the fund takes contributions from these groups, matches them with its own money and then manages the investments and their governance, aiming to increase their impact by bringing the funding together under a common strategy.

FGII is intentionally agnostic about areas of need. “It’s a peer network, and is very much about education, and creating an opportunity for foundations to talk to one another and ask the potentially silly questions that they might not be comfortable asking elsewhere,” Smith explained. “It’s about building relationships, and that’s how this work with Atlassian emerged.”

Paul Ramsay Foundation has a history of partnering with other major funders to aim for greater change together. “We think a lot about systems change, but equally we know that we can’t do that by ourselves, nor should we,” he said. “Working with others and pooling resources is really when we can establish the impact that we want to achieve.”

Smith said the partnership between Atlassian and PRF had deliberately not set a goal for the amount of funding it was hoping to attract beyond its starting point of roughly $3 million in combined capital.

“We’re really open and looking to work with as many others as possible,” Smith said. “We’ve quite intentionally not created a cap, a limit or a target, because this isn’t about the amount of capital that we raise, it’s much more about the number of organisations that we can partner with and the impact we can make.”

The charity sector has seen growing interest in collaboration as a way to increase impact, whether through charities merging or funders pooling their resources. But Smith emphasised that collaboration was only one way to increase effectiveness.

“I never say that there’s only one way,” he said. “I think what’s really important for philanthropy is that we approach impact creation with several tools in the toolbox, and different types of impact lends itself to different types of models.

“For sure, we [PRF] are big advocates and believers in the fact that impact investing and partnerships are a good and credible way of being able to generate the impact that we want to see, but equally it’s not the only way.”