Foundation News

On our first day of meetings, Director Allison Chin joined TSCF Executive Director Peter Martin for a special session on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). The Sierra Club Board of Directors adopted a DEI Plan in May 2015 that sets DEI as a top priority in Sierra Club’s work and workplace and guides the organization on the journey to becoming more diverse, equitable, and inclusive. At this meeting, The Sierra Club Foundation Board formally voted to endorse the Sierra Club’s DEI Plan and determined next steps for developing TSCF’s own plan.

We then spent most of the morning discussing the Forward Fund, TSCF’s clean energy innovation fund; its mission and objectives; and how it can help foster the transition to a clean energy economy. It was enlightening to focus on a few specific grants, including the Sierra Student Coalition Seize the Grid Campaign and the Clean Energy Works Campaign, and to see how driving the climate change discussion toward solutions and opportunities is critical to encouraging greater engagement and to building a broad, deep, and energized climate change movement.

In the afternoon, we took a tour of the Method Soap Factory on Chicago’s South Side – one of only two LEED Platinum certified industrial plants. The plant includes a two-acre hydroponic farm on its rooftop, operated by Gotham Greens, that will provide locally grown produce to local area food companies, farmer’s markets, and communities. We walked away feeling inspired that corporations are seeing the environmental and economic benefits of becoming more sustainable and taking the initiative to reduce their environmental footprints by utilizing energy-efficient production methods, while providing good paying jobs to local community residents. These are essential elements of much of the work The Sierra Club Foundation is currently funding.

The day concluded with a dinner event with local donors, where speakers Karen Weigert, City of Chicago Chief Sustainability Officer; Sister Dawn Nothwehr, O.S.F., Ph.D., Catholic Theological Union’s Erica and Harry John Family Endowed Chair in Catholic Theological Ethics; and Michael Brune, Sierra Club Executive Director, engaged in a conversation on grassroots efforts to move the world toward a more sustainable future as we approach the United Nations Climate Conference in December 2015 and beyond.

The second day of meetings reconvened with Sierra Club Executive Director Michael Brune joining us to talk about the Club’s priority setting process for 2016, including a group exercise that produced a high level of consensus among us regarding the most important objectives for the coming year.

We then engaged in a discussion with Michael on how to better harmonize and coordinate a Clean Energy Campaign. Traditionally, the Sierra Club has been very successful at stopping dirty energy through projects like the Beyond Coal Campaign. Beyond Coal has been pivoting its focus toward replacing coal power with clean energy and is doing this in a collective effort with other Sierra Club projects like California My Generation, Clean Energy Works, and the Electric Vehicle Initiative. The Forward Fund has seed-funded many of these projects. We discussed how to ensure coordination between these projects and how to package them into a comprehensive narrative about how we can actually achieve 100% clean energy and how we can make what might appear implausible to some seem inevitable to most.

One of our last topics was on investing in climate solutions. In 2013, our Board elected to divest holdings in fossil fuel companies and reinvest those assets in holdings promoting climate and clean energy solutions. A year later, we had almost completely divested from fossil fuel holdings. At this meeting, our Board approved a revised Investment Policy with an addendum for investing up to twenty percent of our portfolio in climate solutions. In the next phase of our divest/invest commitment, we will seek innovative technology companies and clean energy investments that offer potential solutions to accelerate a transition to 100% clean energy.

By early afternoon, our official Board of Directors Meeting was adjourned and some directors stayed to explore the city of Chicago and its waterways and on the next day, to volunteer at a Montrose Beach Clean Up event sponsored by the Sierra Club Chicago Group before heading back home.

I want to thank all of our directors for volunteering their experience and expertise to enhance the performance of the Sierra Club and the Foundation and to advance our strategic goals. Looking forward to getting together again with this committed and talented group for our next quarterly meeting in November in San Francisco.