Climate-activist group Rising Tide paddle kayaks to block Newcastle harbor, one of Australia’s largest coal export ports, on November 30, 2025. (Photo by Lee Illfield)
In 2022, three protesters entered London’s National Gallery and threw soup over the glass protecting Vincent van Gogh’s Sunflowers (1888), a painting valued at an estimated $95 million. The activists were members of Just Stop Oil, a nonviolent civil resistance group notorious for high-profile disruptions, including road blockades, spray-painting private jets, interrupting live sporting events, defacing Charles Darwin’s grave, and throwing orange powder on Stonehenge.
Disbanded in 2025, Just Stop Oil represents the radical flank of the climate movement, which uses provocative nonviolent civil resistance to draw attention to the climate crisis. The group was a key grantee of the Climate Emergency Fund, a nonprofit founded in 2019 to support disruptive climate action. Other grantees include Extinction Rebellion, Climate Defiance, and Scientist Rebellion.
The Climate Emergency Fund’s theory of change holds that “movements without a disruptive element are all too easily ignored.” From this perspective, nonviolent civil resistance functions as a strategic tool for securing media coverage and political leverage, even if it is often controversial.
Today, a growing body of research documents the measurable impacts of climate change, which are estimated to claim millions of lives each year. A report from the World Economic Forum projects that climate change could cause 14.5 million deaths by 2050 as a result of extreme weather events, including floods, droughts, heat waves, tropical storms, wildfires, and rising sea levels. Against this backdrop, campaigners turn to disruptive protest as a means of forcing change.
Interrupting Business as Usual
The Climate Emergency Fund doesn’t participate in protests or direct grantees’ actions but provides the resources that make their work possible. “We have a very specific role in the movement ecosystem, and that is to provide financial resources to these groups,” says Margaret Klein Salamon, executive director of Climate Emergency Fund and a clinical psychologist. Salamon is leaving her position in early March 2026 to assume the role of board chair and will be succeeded by Philip Eubanks, current deputy director.
What exactly is a disruptive protest? “Basically, it means intervening in some way in business as usual,” Salamon explains. Examples include campaigning with banners or interrupting a politician’s speech with chanting—any nonviolent action that can “hack the media ecosystem” to direct attention to events and issues that would otherwise be overlooked.
For Salamon, disruptive protest is critical to modern climate activism. “Disruptive protest does something unique that the others cannot do, which is set the political agenda, decide what is going to be talked about—what the issues are that politicians are going to take up and that the media is going to take up,” she says.
“For example, the soup protest, which was, you know, very controversial. Many people asked me, ‘Why did Just Stop Oil target a painting? Why didn’t they target fossil-fuel infrastructure?’” Salamon says. “And this was a very frustrating question, because only five months earlier they had been arrested hundreds of times, blockading fossil-fuel infrastructure.”
The Climate Emergency Fund supports grantees running effective climate-change awareness campaigns, distributing around $4 million in grants annually. Grants typically range from $50,000 to $100,000 and can cover 50-100 percent of a grantee’s total funding. According to Salamon, the funds are generally used for art supplies, banners, protest art, travel, mass trainings, insurance, bookkeeping, and even hiring full-time staff to coordinate the movement.
Although disruptive protests often spark public backlash, Climate Emergency Fund grantees have achieved significant policy wins. Direct attribution is difficult, but their campaigns helped push through the US Inflation Reduction Act, prompted Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport to ban private jets, and secured Just Stop Oil’s core demand: no new oil licenses in the North Sea.
Salamon notes that the fund uses Meltwater to track media mentions and found that its grantees account for 5 percent of total climate coverage. Similarly, Philip Eubanks, the fund’s deputy director and incoming executive director, estimates the advertising value of this exposure at $4 billion—an extraordinary return on an investment of just $12.8 million, highlighting the fund’s potential impact.
Eyes on the Climate Emergency
The Climate Emergency Fund was founded by Aileen Getty, a climate and conservation philanthropist and heiress to the Getty oil fortune; Rory Kennedy, a documentary filmmaker and daughter of former US Senator Robert F. Kennedy; Sarah Ezzy, vice president of the Aileen Getty Foundation and director at Global Philanthropy Group; and Trevor Neilson, an entrepreneur and CEO of WasteFuel.
The idea for the fund emerged after Rory Kennedy connected with Trevor Neilson in the aftermath of California’s 2018 Woolsey Fire to explore how to raise awareness of the climate crisis. “What we found is that you really didn’t have significant social change or policy change without people getting to the streets and there being some amount of unrest,” Kennedy says. The pair brought the idea to cofounder and founding donor Aileen Getty, who shared their concerns about the planet’s future and committed $600,000 to start the organization. “I think that at that time, I remember just doing a lot of reading and research on climate and feeling very overwhelmed by the future I was anticipating to see for myself, my children, [and] my granddaughters,” Getty recalls.
Getty and cofounder Sarah Ezzy had worked together in the climate space for many years and were “actively engaged in looking for ways to be as impactful as possible,” Ezzy says. In the process, the Climate Emergency Fund identified a gap in the climate movement, which has historically received just 2 percent of philanthropic funding, and created a way for funders to support climate activism indirectly.
“We sort of protect the funders, and then also we’re vetting the organizations and making sure that these people, the people we’re supporting, you know, are still going to abide by certain rules and not be violent,” Kennedy says.
Today, the Climate Emergency Fund has supported 158 organizations, trained over 100,000 climate activists, and generated more than 170,000 media mentions. Two standout grantees—Climate Defiance and Just Stop Oil—received roughly 90 percent of their first-year funding and 50 percent of their second-year funding from the organization.
In 2019, the climate movement was gaining momentum: Extinction Rebellion successfully pressured the UK parliament to declare a climate emergency, and Greta Thunberg addressed the UN Climate Summit and was named Time’s Person of the Year. “There was a lot happening, and so it felt like the right thing to support in those moments,” Ezzy says. Extinction Rebellion was one of the first groups the Climate Emergency Fund backed, working with several chapters. Ezzy notes that she and Getty “didn’t agree with every single thing that they did” but were impressed by the group’s results in Parliament.
Although Extinction Rebellion was a critical grantee, the fund didn’t limit its support to activists in the radical flank; it also sponsored broader forms of activism. “Things like Extinction Rebellion were very visible and, in the United Kingdom especially, were really having some impact, and so we wanted to help where we could on those things, but we were also looking at moms who care about their kids’ futures, all kinds of stuff,” Ezzy says.
For Getty, the Climate Emergency Fund was about supporting nonviolent disruptive gatherings, and any street-level assembly could be considered a form of nonviolent protest. “What we were really looking for,” Getty says, “was just to activate people.”
But when the fund began focusing on certain characteristics of activism, “it just didn’t align with my values,” Getty adds, noting a shift that appears to have contributed to her and Ezzy stepping down from the board in 2023.
This tension highlights a major challenge of disruptive protest: More radical activism can sometimes discourage broader public participation. Ezzy notes that the fund lacked a “collaborative design process.” While useful for maintaining distance from third-party protests, it led to hit-or-miss outcomes. The Climate Emergency Fund didn’t know the infamous soup-throwing incident was going to happen, Ezzy says.
Building an International Climate Movement
The Climate Emergency Fund appears poised to expand its support for climate activism in 2026 and beyond. Its largest initiative, the Climate Resistance Incubator, is modeled on a startup incubator and brings together philanthropic experts—including Varshini Prakash, executive director and cofounder of the Sunrise Movement; Paul Engler, founding director of the Center for the Working Poor and cofounder of Momentum; and Carlos Saavedra, founder and executive director of Ayni and cofounder of Momentum—to support emerging climate initiatives.
“It’s a group of experts who are offering coaching, mentorship, and [an] incubation process in which they are going to bring together core groups of activists to build the DNA of what we hope will be the next nationwide or international climate movement,” Salamon says. The incubator will provide free coaching, consultation, and mentorship to gather and strengthen activist groups and foster a coordinated national and international climate movement.
The project aims to provide strategic guidance and funding to younger activists, helping them campaign more effectively. Salamon observed that Sunrise Movement incubated for a year before launching with significant support from Momentum. The incubator offers a pathway for “intergenerational knowledge transfer” between established activists and less experienced climate protesters, she says.
Deputy director Philip Eubanks also expresses interest in scaling the Climate Emergency Fund. “We’re currently operating on about a $5 million budget annually. By our assessment, which we did last year, reaching $20 million annually could help truly build a climate movement on a global scale,” he says. “We don’t just want to launch one new group. We want to see multiple groups launching so that you don’t just see the rise of a new Sunrise, but you see something that is diverse, that looks like America, that regular everyday people can see themselves as a part of.”
Read more stories by Tim Keary.