Expert Sessions | Movement Building with Ellen Dorsey
Earlier this year, we hosted a series of expert learning sessions to help shape a long-term strategy for Work on Climate—one that’s grounded in the realities of an ever-evolving political, social, and economic landscape. These sessions brought together practitioners who have driven real impact by building climate-focused ecosystems, communities, and workforces across a range of sectors and scales.
Our fourth expert, Ellen Dorsey, brings deep experience in aligning finance with climate justice. As Executive Director of the Wallace Global Fund, she was a key architect of the fossil fuel divestment movement—including the widely influential Divest Invest Initiative. Her leadership helped shift trillions in capital away from extraction and toward solutions, demonstrating how philanthropy and finance can be powerful levers for systemic change.
What was the inception of this initiative like – how did you get from the point of “someone must do something” to the point of being confident about specific first steps?
First, let me say that the global movement of people calling for divestment from fossil fuels and investment in climate solutions is just that – a rare global social movement made up of individuals and a loose network of distributed groups aligning to advance a set of objectives to unlock profound social or environmental change, taking action with common strategies that help build power and create momentum.
Ultimately movements operate in a kind of hydro-headed way. Movements have many origin stories, and movements have many mothers. Movements can’t really be created, but fertile ground can be created and innovative strategies and dedicated organizing can help lead to a movement. I give that context because it is important to understand that this is a global social movement.
At the inception of this initiative from my perch at Wallace Global Fund – the Climate, Democracy and Justice funder – remember back in 2009/2010 Copenhagen failed, Waxman-Markey, other efforts at US policy failed, policy was failing around the world.
Why? Well, corporate capture of the government was primarily the reason why. We didn’t have a real climate movement – just pockets of advocacy, NGOs and leaders.
Climate advocacy was focused on educating about the science, fighting the impacts of climate change, and often busing students down to DC to lobby for the failed public policy of the day. So it was important to focus on the fossil fuel industry. Students should be kicking stuff up on campuses in ways that lead to pretty significant change – because it always has. That’s always been a necessary ingredient.
… we didn’t just have a moral imperative to divest, we had a financial imperative to divest.
So we began to have internal discussions at our foundation that maybe we could take a play from the anti-apartheid playbook – that we could turn to divestment as a people’s tool for going after industry rather than legislation. To do it as a moral or ethical imperative starting with universities, that you can’t invest in the companies with your endowments that you’re training and educating your students on while sprinkling in a little bit of campus clean stuff – that is a profound contradiction. That divestment activism is an animating way to engage students to go after industry.
So we began to discuss how we could test and experiment and look at bringing students together. That was happening at the same time as our own foundation was experimenting with our own investment portfolio, and we began divesting from fossil fuels and mining, investing in climate solutions that center communities and doing shareholder engagement to decarbonize all the rest.
Who were the first stakeholders you brought on board? What were you asking of them, and how did you in general approach designing CTA’s that are compelling and practical for your movement members?
So we were already funding some student climate advocacy. We had been funding other efforts at analyzing the financing of fossil fuels, but we began to research whether there were any groups going after the financing of fossil fuels as a dedicated strategy. We identified a group of student environmental leaders and also campus campaigns on coal. There was an organization that supported student endowment campaigns not related to climate or fossil fuels.
We discovered that the students and one faculty member at Swarthmore were starting to talk about a divestment campaign. So we convened a meeting in 2011 at our offices agreeing that we’d walk out of that meeting and test divestment on eight campuses starting that school year. Some would lead with coal divestment, some would lead with fossil fuels divestment, some would lead with the invest side to see if that would be a more compelling way to test what would work.
The campaign started on eight campuses in September and by the end of that academic year there were 40 campaigns with very little work actually to get there. And then during 2011, Carbon Tracker Initiative published their unburnable carbon report about stranded asset risk in investment portfolios.
If you don’t know about this, it says that 80% of the fossil fuels that companies have in their reserves are unburnable. They’re stranded assets to investors if we’re going to stay below two degrees. So Naomi Klein and Bill McKibben kind of married up this divestment stuff brewing on campuses with carbon trackers analysis. And now we didn’t just have a moral imperative to divest, we had a financial imperative to divest, which really strengthened the case.
So at that point, we had the seeds of the most powerful arguments to begin to mobilize what led to this global movement.
What did your day-to-day work of cultivating this movement look like in the first couple of years?
Wild, because we didn’t expect to get in the center of what became a global movement.
We seeded for needed research; we funded various organizations that brought specific skills to support the activism with training or skill development; we created new hubs of organizing to take the activism out to new sectors.
It started to explode globally. We created hubs of organizing in Europe and Australia with funders in Europe, Australia and Asia.
We seeded new investment products so that there will be fossil free funds. We organized philanthropy as actually a sector of the movement – “Divest, Invest, Philanthropy.”
We sent letters to the top 3000 foundations in the US saying ‘if you own fossil fuels, you own climate change. Divest, invest.’ It took me a year, we got 17 foundations to agree to come together and announce they were doing it.
We thought it was important that philanthropy was organized as a sector of the movement, because we can move quickly, put wind at the back of the sails of the students, create demand for fossil free investment products, and then hold up our portfolios and say, ‘see, you can do it.’
We created a network to help coordinate the movement: leadership trainings, a state of the movement report, press conferences where new announcements of new divestment commitments were made – whether it was the Rockefeller Foundation or the World Council of Churches.
We did that all at key moments to try and have maximum political influence, build the momentum of the movement, and begin to put pressure on governments to pull away from fossil fuels.
If individuals see their own agency and create pathways for action – organizing others to come with them – a movement will build.
Wild stories. We were a small foundation going: “okay, go to the Vatican, we’ve got this process going,” or “let’s get the UN to bring divestment in as one of its formal commitments.”
But most importantly, we followed behind the exploding activism. We were trying to assist the leaders, help support opportunities that were created, troubleshoot problems that came up, or try and raise resources for the movement to continue its explosive growth.
Over time the movement developed distributed leadership not dependent on a single entity operating it. How did you cultivate potential movement leaders and how did you balance staying aligned vs. allowing distributed leaders autonomy and flexibility?
Initially, we did help identify leaders and cultivate them. But mostly, over time, the leaders self-identified. Our role was to support, create connective tissue between them. and provide resources.
It was so explosive in growth and truly hydra-headed, that alignment was remarkably strong. There was so much innovation and creativity. At that point, it was about helping coordinate and pivot to new strategies, like going after banks and insurance companies.
There were strong identified leaders out there (students leaders, Bill McKibben, prominent faith leaders, mayors, etc), but really it was the unknown individuals who were driving the movement and their autonomy is a measure of success.
If individuals see their own agency and create pathways for action – organizing others to come with them – a movement will build. And it did.
After 11 years seeing it in action, what specific design choices ended up the most consequential in enabling impact?
We invested in youth leadership as the force to launch a campaign which became a movement. Second, bringing it out to leaders and organizations in other sectors. And organizing philanthropy to be a sector of the movement – that was a debated decision in our foundation but in retrospect, it was important.
Then, creating conditions for the success: state of the movement reports, press events, to amplify the power and momentum.
We were utterly committed to projecting the power of the movement.
To wrap up, what began in 2011, and led to the first big state of the movement report – $52 billion in assets under management divested in 2014 – has now grown to $41 trillion divested.
Investing in the very first student activists led to the creation of the Sunrise Movement. Many of those activists met through the divestment movement, which led to the Green New Deal, then to political pressure for Build Back Better and ultimately the IRA.
The IRA wasn’t everything we wanted, but it was politicians legislating on climate. Ultimately, that was the goal of the movement.
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