This article originally appeared in Inside Philanthropy on October 21, 2019 and has since been updated.
Tech luminaries are rapidly changing the face of philanthropy, giving big across a range of issues. These wealthy change-makers command some of the world’s largest fortunes and many have signed the Giving Pledge.
The environment is among the areas where tech philanthropists have emerged as a greater force in recent years. And while some Silicon Valley green donors are hewing to traditional approaches to challenges like conservation and climate change, others are bankrolling new ways of tackling today’s growing ecological threats.
Below, we draw on five years of past Inside Philanthropy coverage to spotlight the top environmental givers from the tech sector.
Gordon Moore
No one from Silicon Valley has given more for the environment than Intel co-founder Gordon Moore, who established the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation in 2000 with a $5 billion gift to support scientific discovery and environmental conservation, as well as other issues. Since then, the foundation has given away more than $1.5 billion to environmental causes.
Most notably, Moore has been the world’s top funder of efforts to conserve the Amazon rain forest. Moore has partnered with local nonprofits to protect indigenous lands, reduce the impact of infrastructure development, and shift agricultural models in order to increase long-term sustainability. In light of recent events, the foundation certainly has its work cut out for it.
Moore’s other green grantmaking includes a $50 million grant to New Venture Fund in 2016, aimed at supporting oceans and coastal waters, as well as consistent eight-figure gifts to Conservation International and the World Wildlife Fund throughout the years.
At age 90, Gordon Moore has a net worth estimated at over $10 billion and is a signatory of the Giving Pledge. It’s likely that much of his wealth will eventually go to his foundation, which is set to operate in perpetuity. See our profile of Moore here.
Eric Schmidt
Schmidt, who served as CEO of Google from 2001 to 2011, and has a net worth estimated at more than $14 billion, has long been a major environmental giver. In 2006, he and his wife Wendy formed the Schmidt Family Foundation, which describes itself as “advancing the creation of an increasingly intelligent relationship between human activity and the use of the world’s natural resources.” According to tax data, the foundation had made nearly $90 million in grants to environmental causes as of 2017, including a $10 million grant to Climate Central and a $6 million grant to NRDC. It has given other six- and seven-figure grants to a range of environmental organizations.
Much of Schmidt’s environmental funding flows through The 11th Hour Project, which is led by Wendy and is working “at the nexus of energy, food and agriculture, and human rights.” The Schmidts are also among the many billionaire donors focused on the health of the oceans, and do much of their marine philanthropy through the Schmidt Ocean Institute, which works to “advance the frontiers of global marine research by providing state-of-the-art operational, technological and informational support to the pioneering ocean science and technology development projects at sea.” The assets of the institute stood at $44 million at the end of 2017. See our profile of Eric Schmidt here.
Ted Waitt
The co-founder of personal computing company Gateway, Inc., Ted Waitt has been a steady giver in the environmental space over the past two decades, with a focus on marine ecosystems. The Waitt Foundation describes itself as partnering “with governments to help them improve livelihoods and protect ocean resources by implementing sustainable ocean plans.” It reports that it has given away $70 million to 78 projects in 78 countries.
In 2016, the foundation partnered with the Wildlife Conservation Society, the Blue Moon Fund and the Global Environmental Facility to commit a total of $48 million for the expansion of marine protected areas around the world. Additional seven and eight-figure grants have gone to the Salk Institute for Biological Studies and the National Geographic Society.
Waitt also established the Waitt Institute, which—together with National Geographic Pristine Seas, Oceans 5, and Dynamic Planet—formed the Blue Prosperity Coalition. Blue Prosperity provides financing, expertise and operational capabilities aimed at protecting marine environments and supporting governments in sustainable oceans management. Read our profile of this environmentally minded tech billionaire here.
Bill Gates
You won’t find an environmental grantmaking program on the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s website. But in recent years, the foundation has steadily devoted greater attention to climate change. In 2017, it made a $300 million commitment to help the world’s poorest farmers adapt to environmental challenges, including rising temperatures and extreme weather patterns. Writing in the foundation’s 2019 “Goalkeepers Report,” Bill and Melinda said, “The climate is already changing. It is a terrible injustice that the people who suffer the most are the poorest farmers in the world. They didn’t do anything to cause climate change, but because they rely on rain for their livelihoods, they are at the front lines of coping with it. These farmers already have no margin for error.”
Meanwhile, outside the foundation, Bill Gates has become increasingly focused on climate change and the challenges of reaching zero-carbon-emission electrical energy generation, something he sees as crucial to solving the issue, as he discussed in an article on his personal blog earlier this year. So far, his work in this area has taken the form of impact investments through the Breakthrough Energy Ventures fund he founded in 2015, with the backing of a who’s who of billionaires.
Gates has even written a book on climate change, “How to Avoid a Climate Disaster,” which is due out in June of 2020. While the Gates Foundation hasn’t said anything about further elevating work on climate change in coming years, it’s a good bet that it will do exactly that, given how much this issue has come to preoccupy Bill and how profoundly climate change will affect the world’s poorest people.
See our take on the Gates Foundation’s 2017 climate commitment here and our analysis of the Breakthrough Energy Ventures Fund here.
Paul Brainerd
After founding a company that released the first desktop publishing application, Paul Brainerd formed the Brainerd Foundation, which focuses on the environment. For over 20 years, the foundation—which will sunset at the end of 2020—has been an active funder across a range of environmental issues in the Pacific Northwest, including conservation, energy efficiency and climate solutions.
The Brainerd Foundation isn’t the biggest funder around, giving out less than $3 million in a recent year, but its money has reached far and wide across the Northwest, as the foundation made a high volume of smaller gifts. Its largest gift through the end of 2017 was $125,000 to EarthJustice, a nonprofit dedicated to litigating environmental issues. Brainerd has also consistently given to WildSight, a Canadian natural resources nonprofit, and the Washington Environmental Council. Brainerd also launched IslandWood, a nonprofit environmental education organization that leverages experiential learning to make issues like climate change relevant to the next generation. You can learn more about Paul Brainerd’s giving here.
Marc Benioff
The Salesforce founder is well known for his philanthropy in the Bay Area, giving big for hospitals and homelessness with his wife Lynne, and promoting his 1+1+1 model of corporate philanthropy. But the Benioffs also care about environmental issues, and like many wealthy donors, have focused on ocean protection. The couple recently gave $1.5 million to the Sustainable Ocean Alliance, which leverages emerging technology like AI and machine learning to support clean oceans. The nonprofit also connects ocean-centric startups with the tools they need to succeed, and Benioff’s gift alone has tripled the number of startups in their accelerator to 15 total.
The Benioffs, who are signatories of the Giving Pledge, also formed the Benioff Ocean Initiative (BOI), a platform for crowdsourced ocean activism. Based on the BOI platform’s user-generated feedback, the organization committed $1.5 million to reduce collisions between ships and whales in its first-ever initiative.
Clearly, Benioff has a point of view about how emerging technology can be utilized to tackle large-scale environmental issues like ocean protection and climate change. And with a multi-billion-dollar fortune, it’s a good bet that we’ll be seeing more green giving from Marc and Lynne Benioff in coming years. See our profile of Benioff here.
Richard Leeds
A former Microsoft employee, Leeds founded CPI Corp., which developed conversation processing capabilities. That was in the mid-1980s. Fast-forward a few decades, and Leeds has been a big giver to the environmental space through the Kaleidoscope Foundation he runs with his wife Anne Kroeker.
The foundation operates through a pair of funds—Wildlife Forever Fund and Educational Legacy Fund. Wildlife Forever works with the Land Trust Alliance to conserve natural habitats across the Northwest United States.
Leeds and Kroeker like to partner with smaller organizations that have a local presence, and truly understand the challenges on the ground. They partnered with Conservation International and Eco-Viva, which support the flyway system of birds migrating from Alaska to Patagonia. And the couple has also donated to conservation efforts in his native Long Island and Willapa Bay, Washington. You can find out more about their giving here.
Laurene Powell Jobs
Steve Jobs’ widow inherited a vast fortune when the tech pioneer passed away in 2011, and since then, has been ramping up her giving and impact investing, including toward environmental causes. Her philanthropic vehicle, the Emerson Collective, is an LLC, so data on its grants and investments is hard to come by. But tackling environmental challenges is squarely on Emerson’s agenda: “We understand how threats to our natural world are deeply interwoven with societal challenges—inequity, polarity, economic instability and inaccessibility to technology,” the organization says on its website. Through its impact investing arm, Emerson is backing an “Earthshot” program that is backing dozens of startups—99 and counting—that are tackling the world’s most pressing environmental issues.
Powell, who serves on the board of Conservation International, recently made news by partnering with Leonardo DiCaprio and Brian Sheth to form Earth Alliance, a nonprofit aimed at protecting the world’s ecosystems and wildlife, as well as supporting renewable energy and indigenous lands. We covered Earth Alliance here, and also wrote about the organization’s first big move when it donated $5 million in rapid-reaction funding to fight the Amazon fires.
In explaining her involvement in Earth Alliance, Powell Jobs said, “All we know and love is threatened by the climate crisis, and each of us must ask ourselves and one another what more we can do to protect the planet we share. Earth Alliance is part of our answer.” Given her passion for environmental issues and a net worth estimated at $22 billion, it’s possible that Powell Jobs could emerge as one of the most prominent names in environmental giving in coming years.
Paul Allen
Although he died in 2008, the Microsoft co-founder left a powerful legacy of environmental philanthropy. His Paul G. Allen Family Foundation, and his company, Vulcan, continue that legacy with major gifts and hands-on problem solving.
Allen Foundation grants to environmental causes include a 2015 gift of $4 million to the University of Hawaii to support oceans and coastal waters, and a 2016 gift of the same amount to American Rivers, which supports water resources. The foundation has also pledged $8 million to Elephants Without Borders, and donated $1 million to the Jane Goodall Institute for Great Ape Conservation.
But as we’ve reported, it’s the work undertaken by Vulcan that may have the biggest impact. The company’s philanthropic arm leverages data science and new technologies to confront environmental challenges directly. For example, Vulcan has developed low-cost drones that help park rangers in African countries track illegal poachers, and it’s built a system that can identify illegal fishing vessels at sea. Vulcan famously launched The Great Elephant Census, which counted the number of African elephants left in the world by combing through aerial footage of 18 countries.
Paul Allen may be gone, but he left behind a fortune estimated at around $20 billion, and according to our reporting, his environmental philanthropy initiatives will live on well into the future. Read our full profile of Allen here, and of Vulcan here.
***
The philanthropy of tech winners continues to evolve rapidly, with major new donors emerging and existing givers stepping up their work. The list of Silicon Valley green donors presented here may well look quite different in a year or two, especially given the rising urgency around climate change and the loss of biodiversity.
Last week, for example, we reported on the new Bia-Echo Foundation run by Nicole Shanahan, the wife of Google co-founder Sergey Brin. Tapping Brin’s $55 billion fortune, the foundation says it plans to give away $100 million over the next five years. The environment is one of its three areas of focus. “Rising temperatures around the globe have created an urgent threat to life on Earth, from extreme weather to endangered coastal communities,” the foundation says. “The impending environmental crisis requires inventive solutions to preserve the livability of the planet.”
As a final point, it’s worth mentioning that today’s living tech donors are doing their environmental giving in a grantmaking space that’s been heavily shaped by earlier Silicon Valley wealth. The Hewlett and Packard foundations, which were created by the co-founders of Hewlett-Packard, rank among the largest givers to environmental causes.
