by Joshua Amponsem, co-executive director at the Youth Climate Justice Fund and QCF Advisory Council member  

Philanthropy has a silo problem. The solution is not complicated 

Growing up in rural Africa, I never experienced social, ecological, or economic issues as separate problems. In the late 1990s, when malaria and cholera outbreaks took over my community, health agencies mobilised first. Sanitation projects followed to address root causes. A decade later, poverty entered the frame, while climate change was only formally recognised as a driver in recent years. 

But living through it, the connections were obvious. That experience still raises a question: if communities live in intersectional realities, why does philanthropy still struggle to fund intersectional solutions? 

Endowment > experience

In philanthropy,‘intersectionality’ is less of a practice and more of an aspiration. In reality, intersectional leadership recognises that people live at the intersection of systems, not issues. But funding practices still reward silos. This is not a failure of intent, but design. 

The gap is clearest at the grassroots. When I later fundraised for a community-based, intersectional waste management initiative, environmental funders framed it as a health issue. Health funders saw it as education, and education funders pointed to livelihoods. Within each portfolio, their responses made sense. 

But this dynamic forces intersectional initiatives to narrow their scope, fragment their strategies, or stall altogether while more narrowly defined, expert-led projects continue to attract funding. The result is a loss of momentum for work that reflects reality. 

Funding also shapes leadership. By rewarding issue-specific expertise, philanthropy quietly determines which forms of leadership are seen as ‘credible’ and ‘risky’, creating a self-reinforcing cycle: siloed funding produces siloed strategies, which then justify further siloed funding. Intersectional leadership does not disappear because it lacks value, but because it lacks institutional support. Over time, this distorts the field itself, producing leaders optimised for funder categories rather than for solving interconnected problems at scale. 

Climate reality is not siloed

The climate crisis does not respect thematic boundaries. Funding systems that require leaders to choose whether their work is about health, education, livelihoods, or food systems are misaligned with how harm and resilience actually manifest. When the COVID-19 pandemic pushed deep cross-sector inequalities into mainstream recognition, global climate movements adapted to explicitly recognise that climate justice could not be separated from democracy, migration, or economic systems. Philanthropy has been slower to adapt. 

The issues lie with assumptions about credibility and risk. Credibility is often equated with technical specialisation and alignment with clear-cut portfolios. Risk is associated with complexity, long-term horizons, and outcomes that resist neat attribution. Intersectional leadership disrupts both assumptions, working across systems, prioritising long-term change, and reflecting lived realities. 

The result is a paradox. Philanthropy calls for systems change while funding in ways that fragment systems thinking. Nowhere is this contradiction more damaging than for young people: when bold, systems-literate thinking is most needed, many are forced to narrow their ideas to fit funding guidelines that fragment, rather than support, interconnected solutions.  

What intersectional funding makes possible

The Youth Climate Justice Fund set out to address this. The 2025 Youth Climate Funding Study revealed a clear gap in resources for youth-led initiatives and the consistent call from young leaders for flexible, scalable support to address interconnected climate challenges. 

Three years on, the results illustrate what intersectional funding, paired with participatory grantmaking, makes possible. In Indonesia, improved access to education has limited reliance on unskilled logging labour, reducing deforestation. In Burkina Faso, girls 

in conflict-affected areas are gaining skills linked to renewable energy expansion. In Ecuador, transboundary communities are protecting rivers and forests through legal strategies rooted in cultural preservation. These outcomes reflect what happens when leaders are resourced to work across systems.  

The question is no longer whether intersectionality matters. It is whether philanthropy is prepared to fund the world as it actually is. 

 Achieving intersectionality is not a one-off shift. It’s a renewable commitment. It means funding across portfolios rather than within them, supporting multi-year and flexible grants, valuing lived experience alongside technical expertise, and resourcing collaboration as a core outcome. These shifts do not eliminate risk, but they better align funding with enduring change. 

Philanthropy remains one of the few forms of capital flexible enough to take this risk. Whether it chooses to do so will shape both the future of climate action, and who survives to lead it. 

The question is no longer whether intersectionality matters. It is whether philanthropy is prepared to fund the world as it actually is, recognising that young people bear the greatest cost of fragmented systems, yet remain our strongest source of imagination and power to reshape them.

Joshua Amponsem is a co-executive director at the Youth Climate Justice Fund.

This comment piece first appeared in Alliance Magazine