Lord Mayor’s Charitable Foundation is a large community foundation in Melbourne, Australia, with an endowment of Aus $255 million. We hold strategic and donor advised funds and aim to respond to the changing needs of the community. In Melbourne, our priorities are lack of affordable housing, growing wealth inequality and most importantly climate change.
The WINGS network hopes these promising new practices will help development funders of all types to deepen their impact on people’s lives and reduce communities’ dependency while strengthening local and national organisations to design and lead their own work.
Too often, resilience is defined as people’s capacity to endure human-built structures of oppression, such as colonialism, white supremacy, extractivism, and capitalism. In this context, we risk normalizing these structures, rather than dismantling systems causing the harm.
CRF’s mission is to address the disconnect between the rapid onset of climate-related impacts and our collective lack of capacity to proactively prepare and build resilience in both human communities and natural systems. For that reason, CRF and its partners (including federal agencies in the U.S.), have been working over the past six years to build and support an emergent sector of climate services professionals who can help communities better understand their climate risks and how best to respond.
On the simple side, climate resilience relates to the capacities that are needed to respond to or minimize the impacts of climate change. The complicated element is that these capacities and starting points vary greatly.