Updated: Aug 8, 2023
Bea Baquero (she/her) and Beverley Choo (she/her) are the co-founders of GreenCheck (@greencheck.earth), a donation and community-building platform led by youth allies around the world to enable grassroots climate action across Latin America and Southeast Asia. They are both from the Class of 2022 and majored in Global Affairs and Environmental Studies respectively.
Aleithia: Hi Beatrice and Beverley, I'm excited for our conversation about GreenCheck's work today! How about starting with introductions?
Beatrice Baquero: I’m Beatrice. I go by she/her pronouns. I’m from the Class of 2022, and majored in Global Affairs, and minored in Environmental Studies (ES). I usually say I’m a long-lost ES student at heart.
Beverley Choo: I’m Beverley. My friends call me Bev. I use she/her pronouns. I’m also from the Class of 2022, but took a semester off and graduated a semester after Bea, in December 2022. I majored in Environmental Studies.
Aleithia: Thank you for speaking with YNPACt today! Could you tell us more about GreenCheck and how you got started in climate philanthropy?
Beverley: In 2020, I was going through a phase of massive climate anxiety. I kept feeling like I wasn't doing enough, which is something many climate activists struggle with. When I found out about the Global University Climate Forum’s call for projects, I got a few people together – including Bea, Shikhar (‘20), and Josh and Ben from Yale – to start brainstorming. After several months of discussions and talking to climate activists, we decided to focus on redirecting resources to community-led climate action groups in most-affected regions. GreenCheck was thus born out of my own existential crisis, as well as our observations of a real need and gap.
Beatrice: To complement what Bev said, we had both been pretty active in green groups on campus. And as youths, we faced problems fundraising as we often don’t get taken seriously because of our age. We also saw a funding gap in the climate space, especially in Latin America and Southeast Asia, where we are from. I’m from Colombia, and Bev is from Singapore. So it made sense to start where we come from, and where we have bigger networks.
GreenCheck now supports six Partner groups which are youth-led, community-led grassroots organisations from Colombia, Guatemala, Haiti, Malaysia, Singapore, and the Philippines. We also work with Volunteers, and for some of them, this organisation has been their entry point to getting involved with climate work.
The third group of people we work with are Supporters. Our motto is: anyone can contribute. From financial resources to skills or network opportunities, everyone has a part to play. GreenCheck wants to be a hub to take people on a journey to learn where they fit into the climate crisis, and how they can contribute beyond a one-time monetary donation.
Aleithia: What gaps were you seeing in climate action and traditional funding that led to focus on community-led action, in most-affected regions? How does GreenCheck work differently from traditional philanthropy?
Beverley: A lot of philanthropy and charity work is rooted in colonial biases and practices, such as the “saviour complex”. By viewing communities that you try to help as victims in need of saving, you’re infantilising these communities. When funders and non-profits come in, they don’t often work with communities to implement solutions, but will prescribe and implement their own ideas. What about asking the communities, “Hey, what do you actually need?”
Donor relationships are also extremely imbalanced, which often entail a one-way allocation of resources, and then demanding to see results. Donors want to see numbers and reports, which aren't always representative the long-term sustainability of the solution they invested in.
Another issue is dependency created by funders, which further entrenches the power imbalance between funders and communities. Charities and philanthropies should work towards sustainable solutions that communities can sustain themselves so they can have ownership over the projects.
We thought a lot about power dynamics, and how resources can be exchanged between Partners and Supporters. Supporters don’t just donate money. They have a lot to learn from Partners, in terms of wisdom, knowledge and resources.
The second gap is the need for more people to get involved. We want to provide an easy entry point to anyone remotely interested in climate work. We have a very flexible volunteer programme that allows anyone from any background to start. Among our Volunteers, we have economists, engineerings, people in finance, architects and so on, all contributing their skillsets and knowledge to GreenCheck.
Anyone with any kind of resource can become a Supporter. If money is your main resource, you can donate. You can also contribute translation skills if you speak multiple languages, or lend your graphic design skills to a Partner.
What do we try to do when we talk about decolonizing philanthropy? ... We questioned our own positionality in the climate crisis. What privileges do we have? How do we come in and get involved in a way that does not replicate these exploitative practices?
Beatrice: To expand on the question – What do we try to do when we talk about decolonizing philanthropy? – we started with a lot of introspection, and asking ourselves questions of power, money, and how to work with groups that live in completely different contexts from us.
We ourselves aren't positioned to do the work that our Partners are doing in the Philippines, or in Colombia. So we questioned our own positionality in the climate crisis. What privileges do we have? How do we come in and get involved in a way that does not replicate these exploitative practices? Colonisation was about exploiting people, exploiting natural resources and oppressing especially Indigenous people, people of color and Black communities.
When we work with our Partners, we recognise them as equals and ask them, “What do you want? What is the right thing to do?” Our Partners have the knowledge and the solutions. They know what is best in their context. And we try to support them as best as we can, and create the conditions for change with the Supporters. When we work with our Partners, it's really an exercise of active listening, which is something people don't do enough. Very often, people do not listen to the communities that are going through so much loss and pain right now, because of the impact of the climate crisis.
Another important point is that our partnerships are long term, which is something a lot of development organisations do not do. We want to stay with our Partners and support them in the long term because we believe in their cause, and want to grow together. Our support is not project-based but for their work as a whole. We include our Partners in a lot of our decision-making processes. And again we're fully transparent about our work, how we use the funds, and we even decide together, if we can redistribute our internal funds to the Partners who are more in need of funds and have urgent projects, for example.
We’ve also worked with our Partners to design the Garden Methodology, which is our impact measurement methodology. It’s designed to be flexible, to take into account the contexts they live and work in.
Aleithia: Speaking of impact measurement, what are the kinds of knowledge that you value in your impact measurement framework, the Garden Methodology? What do you think GreenCheck's Supporters want to see?
Beatrice: We've thought a lot about what donors usually expect. That’s part of why we developed the Garden Methodology – to have the credibility that people are always looking for. Supporters do have expectations when they donate, and we want to be accountable with how we're using their support, so we offer regular updates, access to trainings and workshops with the GreenCheck team, and spaces where Supporters can speak with Partners. All of this goes beyond the typical donor-donee relationship. We really want to build communities of understanding, learning and care.
I think "care" is such an important word: we're all struggling and suffering so much, and I think we all just need a bit more care for ourselves and each other. This year, we're going to focus on engaging and connecting Supporters and Partners, and giving them more spaces for connection. We haven't been doing that too well yet, if I'm honest. But this is the year where we're starting to really foster these relationships deeply. So we're excited!
As for how the Garden Methodology was developed, as a team, we thought about what we wanted to do with the existing tools and criteria being used. We do need to report numbers, but people also want to hear stories and better understand our efforts in community building and decolonising philanthropy are. We’re trying to find ways to tell stories of impact differently, using different "languages", and new ways to measure impact.
We’ve been asking our Partners, “What came out of the event we did with you? What came out of this campaign we helped to create and design? Do you see that as impact?” The Partners decide what is impactful and if there's progress being made.
Our methodology involves the process of setting goals, though concrete goals don’t always work in the activism space, because what you do changes on a daily basis, based on things that happen and evolving crisis situations. If we can’t set concrete goals, we find different ways of tracking progress and measuring what we do. We have a lot of feedback mechanisms and calls with our Partners. We try to understand their needs as much as we can, and that guides our work and our input. Again, it's a lot of active listening and letting them decide what impact is.
Beverley: The main thing that makes our impact methodology different and unique is that we don't have a singular framework. We do have the traditional indicators (e.g. how many people showed up to an event) that we do measure. But we don't rely on a singular framework that applies to all Partners. For example, we have partners working in permaculture, or who do pro-bono litigation -- we can't measure impact the same way for both of them, so we work with them do develop an impact framework that is unique to them.
Gardening requires a lot of care, listening to the land, understanding, and learning from the land. The land changes, new things can pop up unexpectedly. Plants can and will die, but others flourish. As with a garden, our Partners are working in very dynamic spaces. You might say that the impact is the garden we create together, which can look very different at different points in time.
Beatrice: The whole document is based around the metaphor of a garden. Gardening requires a lot of care, listening to the land, understanding, and learning from the land. The land changes, new things can pop up unexpectedly. Plants can and will die, but others flourish. As with a garden, our Partners are working in very dynamic spaces. You might say that the impact is the garden we create together, which can look very different at different points in time
Aleithia: That’s beautiful. I was wondering if you could give an example of how you have developed the Garden Methodology with one of your partners? What is the process of determining what impact is to them, and what might we overlook as impact, if we were simply relying at the typical quantitative indicators?
Beatrice: One thing to clarify is that our Partners achieve a lot of impact in their own right, and the Garden Methodology is used to evaluate how we – GreenCheck – are collaborating with them. Our collaborations have included content design, translation, connecting them with new volunteers, and so on. This summer, one of our volunteers will be interning with a Partner and that’s really exciting! This is the kind of relationship we want to be building between our Partners and volunteers.
We have connected Partners with various networks and contacts, based on what they need, such as journalists, marketers, or people working in technology. We connected a Partner to an artist, to strengthen the partners’ brand, and we heard that they are now collaborating for an eco-festival!
It’s also worth mentioning that the impact is not immediate, and as we mentioned earlier, we think long-term when working with Partners. This means that we’re not tracking numbers month-to-month.
Beverley: Going back to what donors might expect to see, and what we count as impact: with the Partner and artist we put in touch, one might expect to see them put out a product together. A typical donor tracking impact might ask, “How many products did you sell? How much money did that product make?” But we consider the partnership itself as impact. The fact that they have built that relationship and decided to collaborate constitutes impact, because it contributes to building a larger ecosystem within the climate justice community. Creating more tight-knit relationships counts as impact, and that is something that other donors might not have taken into account.
Aleithia Low: Thank you for sharing that! Is there anything else you wanted our readers to know?
Beverley: We are looking for Volunteers and Supporters!
Beatrice: We're also trying to make ourselves really accessible as a team and as an organisation. We hold virtual office hours that we call “GreenCheck-ins.” Come to those and talk to a team member. We’re putting out so many initiatives for people to get engaged, because we know people want to be engaged.
We’d love for people to take the first step of reaching out to say, “Hey, I like your work. How can I get engaged?” That’s a big step for us, and we love receiving messages like that, because part of what we’re doing is to get more people involved in climate crisis work.
Another initiative we have is the “(Un)Learning Series” where we make academic research more accessible by reading, digesting and turning long papers into social media posts. A lot of academic research is not accessible or inclusive, and we wanted that knowledge to be shared, especially with our followers, who are mostly students and youths. So that is something else people get involved with: get in touch with us to share your papers or research so that we can share it with others!