Funding Climate Action at Historic Sites

At Historic New England, climate action is part of our core preservation mission. Caring for our historic sites has always meant thinking about the long term, which now also means engaging seriously with a changing climate and what it will take to keep these places resilient. In recognition of Earth Month, we asked Katherine Pomplun, one of our institutional giving officers, to reflect on what she has learned about funding this kind of work—particularly how climate-related projects can be supported through philanthropic partnerships when they are clearly connected to core mission and site-based stewardship.

Like many in the preservation field, we’re working through these questions in parallel with peer organizations facing similar challenges and opportunities and learning from emerging approaches across the field. This is evolving work, and much of it is still taking shape. In that spirit, we are sharing our experiences not as a model or prescription, but as part of an ongoing exchange with others doing similar work.

In 2022, the Center for Effective Philanthropy surveyed the CEOs of 188 grantmaking foundations on their knowledge of climate change and its impacts on their areas of interest. Overwhelmingly, the respondents reported that the climate crisis is an urgent problem and an existential threat—but many also reported that they are not currently addressing it through their grantmaking. To these funders, climate change is perceived as an abstract challenge, something beyond their primary focus, or a problem that is simply too big to attempt to solve. Understandably, they direct their resources where they feel the impacts are most tangible.

Like most nonprofit museums, Historic New England relies on external fundraising support to deliver our mission, pursue capital projects, and launch new initiatives. We have navigated this philanthropic gap in support for climate-related work since adopting our institutional climate action goals in 2023, and we have learned that traditional arts, culture, and preservation funders are supportive of our site-specific climate action planning efforts, resiliency improvements, and mitigation measures when we clearly convey the work’s connections to our core mission. The following strategies have helped us define our climate action work in this context, and we hope that other stewards of historic places might find these strategies useful while planning and fundraising for their own resiliency improvements and decarbonization goals.

Discuss Your Primary Audience

Technical metrics are often the most easily quantifiable outcomes of a climate action project—but funders who don’t explicitly support climate action might not be compelled by anticipated reductions in greenhouse gas emissions or other statistics that demonstrate a project’s impact and effectiveness.  To emphasize a project’s relevance to your core mission, discuss the people you serve. Does your audience (or site community) represent demographics disproportionately affected by climate change? Do they live in Environmental Justice (EJ) communities? How will this project help you serve these audiences and further your mission?

Highlight Compliance Requirements

Cities nationwide are increasingly advancing their own climate goals by enforcing ordinances that require non-residential buildings to meet reduced emissions targets or face heavy fines. Are there any external factors like these that make your project urgent and necessary? If you don’t reduce your building’s emissions, how would the financial penalties impact you or the delivery of your organization’s mission?

Translate ROI

Many mitigation and decarbonization projects—such as the replacement of fossil fuel-powered equipment or the conversion of an inefficient heating system—anticipate cost savings in addition to emissions reductions. What will you do with any cost savings realized? To help the funder understand the benefit to your larger mission, describe how the project’s return on investment could be allocated to core programming or specific mission-focused activities.

Demonstrate Alignment with Community Goals

Climate action projects are never implemented in a vacuum—their effects can always be measured and gauged in relation to the greater good. How does your project align with any broader community commitments on climate or sustainability? Review your town’s Master Plan, Comprehensive Plan, or Climate Action Plan; and/or your state’s renewable energy targets. How does your project advance or contribute to larger community goals?

Written by Katherine Pomplun, Institutional Giving Officer

This post draws from a webinar on the same topic available via GreenerU for those who would like to explore in more depth.