Build Healthy Places Network’s Virtual Summit brought together leaders across community development, health, philanthropy and government to answer one question: what does multisector, community-led climate resilience actually look like? At the summit, Kresge Health Program Managing Director Monica Valdes Lupi discussed philanthropy’s role in addressing climate-driven disasters and funder strategies for building community resilience.

In communities around the country, climate change looks like a child’s asthma attack on a smoky afternoon in Fresno. It looks like heat stress at an unshaded bus stop in Miami and floodwater in a New Orleans living room, not to mention the accumulating anxiety of families who have evacuated their homes more times than they can count.

This is the lived reality of low-wealth communities and communities of color who have been on the receiving end of generations of disinvestment. And it is the reason philanthropy can no longer afford to fund climate over here, public health over there, and equity somewhere else.

At The Kresge Foundation, our Climate Change, Health and Equity initiative, known as CCHE, is our attempt to purposefully connect those dots. We are entering a second five-year phase, working with twenty-five community-based partners and seven national partners across the country. The premise is simple: The communities living closest to climate harm are also the ones with the clearest analysis of what needs to change and the deepest relationships to make that change stick.

Place-based strategies

Community-led work shows up in different ways depending on the place. In Fresno, our partners are training young people to use citizen science and air quality monitoring to influence land use, transportation and environmental justice decisions in the Central Valley. They are now fighting the build-out of data centers in their communities, the latest in a long line of extractive industries that promise jobs and deliver pollution.

In San Diego, the Environmental Health Coalition built a coalition that brought residents, youth and city leaders together around a shared transit agenda, including youth opportunity passes, safer streets for pedestrians and bikers, and a vision for free transit by 2030.

In Springfield, Massachusetts, the Public Health Institute of Western Massachusetts partnered with Live Well Springfield to bring residents, city staff and the city council into alignment on Community Choice Energy, which the city adopted in 2022.

None of these wins began with a foundation strategy memo. They began with residents who refused to wait, and with trusted local organizations serving as the bridge between lived experience and the institutions that hold the levers of policy, planning and investment.

But all too often I hear from peers in philanthropy that community-led work is too local, too specific and too hard to scale. I understand the instinct, but I think we are framing it wrong.

At Kresge, we believe that local leadership is the foundation for systems change, not a barrier to it. Scale does not have to mean copy and paste. It can mean amplifying bright spots, investing in national networks that connect them, and scaling the things that actually drive durable change. Power. Trust. Governance. Accountability. Better climate and health practice. Those are the conditions that travel.

Narrative and culture travel too, and we have come to see them as core strategies rather than communications add-ons. Through CCHE, we are partnering with colleagues from our Arts and Culture Program to support cultural strategy, place keeping and movement building alongside policy advocacy.

When communities can name what they are experiencing and connect it to climate, individual stories become collective action. That is how power gets built.

What does philanthropy need to do differently?

I will offer three things to my fellow funders on what philanthropy needs to do differently:

First, share power. That means letting communities set the priorities, define what success looks like, and tell us what progress feels like on the ground. It means evaluation approaches that value trust building and emergent learning, not just outcomes we can put on a presentation slide.

Second, fund the way communities actually work. Flexible, multi-year, general operating support is the floor. Simpler applications, faster decisions and responsive funding pools that grantees can tap when conditions shift, those are the difference between a partner who can pivot in a crisis and one who cannot. At Kresge, we have pooled funding across five programs, so CCHE grantees have somewhere to turn when the ground moves under them.

Third, invest in community-led work. Local work shapes national policy, public health systems, infrastructure and the built environment. Fund the connective tissue between communities and institutions and then hold ourselves accountable to the partners doing the hardest work.

The climate crisis is not coming. It is here, in our cities and neighborhoods, impacting the people we care about. The good news, and there is good news, is that the people closest to the harm are already building the response. Our job as funders is to make sure they are not building it alone.