DOI
10.9707/1944-5660.1778
Key Points
Climate Breakthrough makes one-time, multi-million-dollar, multi-year, flexible grants to climate strategists. The portfolio is collectively aimed at achieving an outsized emissions reduction goal. There are no strategy pillars, and grantees are from across the globe. This model, paired with Climate Breakthrough’s guiding values, opens the door for impact and learning work focused on iteration and learning.
In practice, grantees identify a small set of key performance indicators themselves; they share emissions reduction estimates for their work that are important but not dominant; they have abundant impact and learning resources; and the funder gains a wealth of data from which to learn.
Two lessons from Climate Breakthrough’s impact and learning journey are particularly relevant to other climate funders: 1) Funders should appropriately resource a broad toolkit of grantee impact and learning work; and 2) To understand the breadth of a grantee’s work, funders should take in a broad set of grantee-defined data about grantees’ projects, beyond a single emissions-focused outcome.
Climate Breakthrough is eager to share this work and invites dialogue with others, particularly those in the climate philanthropy ecosystem, regarding shared issues within the broader context of philanthropic practices around impact and learning; Climate Breakthrough hopes to continue to engage in this work in an iterative and collaborative way.
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.
Recommended Citation
Deich, O. (2026). Climate Breakthrough's Impact and Learning System: A Case Study. The Foundation Review, 18(3). https://doi.org/10.9707/1944-5660.1778
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