Climate SMILE
RFCC serves as Climate SMILE's fiscal sponsor, providing critical infrastructure to support their operations.
Strengthening the climate philanthropy ecosystem by connecting practitioners, generating and sharing knowledge, and developing tools that enable funders to collaborate more effectively and invest with greater impact.
The Climate SMILE (Strategy, Monitoring, Impact, Learning, and Evaluation) Community of Practice is a global community for SMILE practitioners working at the intersection of climate and philanthropy.
Its goal is to strengthen the connective tissue of the evidence, knowledge, and learning ecosystem in climate philanthropy, which will accelerate innovation, scaling, and collective impact at the pace that is needed to address the climate crisis. It does so by amplifying learning opportunities, reducing duplication of evidence generation efforts, and increasing access to existing knowledge for better collective action. The community also aims to advance thinking and practice in this field, providing spaces for peer support, exchange, and trust-building.
The Climate SMILE Community of Practice responds to broader ecosystem needs including deep collaboration, developing SMILE systems that improve on status quo beliefs about measurement and impact, and work with more attention to the global majority. Climate SMILE serves a diverse community of climate SMILE-ers, with a vision toward a “big tent” that works well together toward an ultimate goal of addressing the climate crisis. This work is emergent, shaped by the community, and does its best work in collaboration with others across the field. It aims to be at the vanguard of SMILE in climate; to that end, invites partnership and debate.
The community was formally launched in March 2023. Since then, it has rapidly grown, and it currently brings together over 130 members from 70+ climate philanthropies from all over the world.
Its four strategic goals include:
- Enhance collaboration in climate philanthropy by facilitating spaces for Climate SMILE practitioners to connect, learn from peers, foster relationships with related networks, and facilitate resource and opportunity sharing.
- Offer professional development opportunities for emerging climate SMILE practitioners by granting access to facilitated peer learning spaces, skill building workshops, book clubs, and more.
- Advance current measurement, evaluation, and learning practices in climate philanthropy towards systemic, equity-focused, complexity-aware, and transformative ones.
- Establish a shared knowledge base and learning processes in climate philanthropy by mapping information needs, identifying gaps, and promoting collaborative evaluation, measurement, and analysis among funders.
Learn more about their work:
- Blogs on Medium
- The Climate Impact, Measurement and Management Playbook (upcoming)
