1.5°Climate Strategies Group Projects - Member View

Clean and Prosperous California

$40,000 Match Remaining

California faces severe climate impacts and risks falling behind on its climate targets while withstanding federal challenges. Cap-and-trade’s contribution is unique—no other policy delivers cheaper reductions, generates revenue, and drives innovation. But cap-and-trade isn’t a blunt tool running on autopilot; it has dozens of features that need thoughtful stewardship. We do not have time for wrong answers to fundamentally economic questions like how cap-and-trade can meet aggressive targets, protect consumers from price increases, and decarbonize industry. Economists are often disconnected from policy, leaving crucial insights untapped to society’s detriment. CapCA provides an unparalleled strategic platform for economic expertise to inform policy, address people’s needs, and meet climate goals.

Geography: California

Funding Type: c3

Contact: Clayton Munnings, Executive Director

Presentation Date: 05/15/2025

Extreme Weather Survivors

$78,810 Raised | $10,595 Match Remaining

Extreme Weather Survivors (EWS) is a national network of people directly impacted by wildfires, floods, hurricanes, and other climate-fueled disasters—92 million Americans each year. Despite this escalating crisis, climate change remains dangerously underestimated by the public and under-prioritized by policymakers. EWS is changing that. Their work expands the reach of the climate movement by engaging people far beyond its traditional base and by ensuring those with lived experience help shape the policies that affect their communities. By empowering survivors as trusted messengers through trauma-informed support and advocacy training, EWS is building a powerful force for change—one that shifts public perception, drives bold policy, and brings new voices into the climate movement. EWS is seeking support for their work to make polluters pay in California.

Geography: California

Funding Type: c4c3

Contact: Sierra Kos, Co-Founder and Co-Director | Chris Kocher, Co-Founder and Co-Director

Presentation Date: 04/25/2025

| Lobbying

California Environmental Voters

$63,210 Raised | $18,395 Match Remaining

EnviroVoters is seeking support to pass a number of urgent climate bills that would make Big Oil pay for the damage their pollution has caused, including disasters like the LA wildfires. These bills shift financial responsibility from frontline communities to corporate polluters and mark a bold step toward long overdue climate justice. This is part of our larger effort to build momentum for polluters pay efforts including insurance affordability and cap and invest. With a proven track record, including the success of SB 253, EnviroVoters brings deep policy expertise, strong coalitions, and a clear strategy to win.

Geography: California

Funding Type: c4c3

Contact: Mary Creasman, CEO

Presentation Date: 04/25/2025

| Lobbying

Stopping Bad Bills in Texas

$128,300 Raised | Fundraising Goal Achieved!

Legislation has been introduced in Texas that would thwart renewable energy and promote fossil fuel development in a state where the impacts could not be more consequential. In recent years, the plummeting costs of wind and solar have allowed renewables to compete with fossil fuels in a state that is the largest emitter of greenhouse gases in the country – and Texas now generates more renewable energy than any other state by a long shot. The Texas Advanced Energy Business Alliance and Texas Consumer Association are leading efforts to block the ideological attacks on renewable energy and move forward bills that will help consumers and increase grid reliability.

Texas Advanced Energy Business Alliance (TAEBA) is the Texas chapter of Advanced Energy United is deeply involved in efforts to stop bad anti-renewable bills while also promoting transmission expansion and energy waste reduction.
Texas Consumer Association and the Consumer Fund of Texas are consistently providing focused research and advocacy showing how anti-renewable bills would hurt Texas consumers. Two new studies are in the works to come out in the next few weeks; TCA will use support here to make sure people see the research and understand the negative impacts.

Geography: Texas

Funding Type: c4c3

Contact: Sandie Haverlah, ED of Texas Consumer Association | Trish Demeter, Managing Director of Advanced Energy United

Presentation Date: 04/11/2025

| Lobbying

Additional 2024 Winning Elections for Climate Investments

$1,759,833 Raised | Fundraising Goal Achieved!

In addition to Winning Election for Climate 2024 investments listed on other dedicated pitch cards, 1.5°CSG also helped move member and aligned entity investments into the following geographies and Organizations working within them:

Colorado - $70,000

- - New Era Colorado - $10,000
  - OneColorado - $10,000
  - Mainstream Colorado - $20,000
  - Conservation Colorado - $30,000

Georgia - $210,000

- - Black Male Voter Project - $110,000
  - EcoWomanist Institute - $15,000
  - Atlanta Glow - $10,000
  - AAPI Victory Fund - $50,000

Nevada - $100,000

- - Nevada Alliance - $50,000
  - Make the Road Nevada - $50,000

North Carolina - $253,000

- - North Carolina Democratic Party - $200,000
  - El Puente - $25,000
  - BluePrint NC - $25,000
  - MekDems - $3,000

Michigan - $105,000

- - Michigan LCV - 50,000
  - AAPI Victory Fund - $30,000
  - Raising Voices for Asian Families - $20,000

Montana - $31,000

- - Montana Conservation Voters - $31,000

Ohio - $576,000

- - Ohio Organizing Collaborative - $325,000
  - Greater Cleveland Congregations - $150,000
  - Young Latino Network -$51,000
  - Ohio Alliance for Community Education - $50,000

Texas - $52,631

- - Indivisible Texas - $52,631

Wisconsin - $330,000

- - WI Conservation Voters - $200,000
  - Forward Together WI - $30,000
  - Wisconsin Dems - $50,000
  - 350 Wisconsin - $25,000
  - Workers Center for Racial Justice - $25,000

Multi-State - $57,000

- Future Now - $25,000
- BlueFuture Micro Grants - $32,000

Geography: Colorado, Georgia, Nevada, North Carolina, Michigan, Montana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas, Wisconsin

Funding Type: c4c3

Presentation Date: 11/05/2024

Additional 2024 Winning Elections for Climate Investments

Empower Project

$685,000 Raised | Fundraising Goal Achieved!

Empower has introduced an innovative digital promotion and micro-payment scheme that significantly enhances relational organizing—the gold standard in text communications. This approach enables Empower to achieve remarkable scalability that dramatically surpasses previous organizing efforts in this space. For every $100,000 invested, Empower generates on average 50,000 additional relational conversations in Presidential battlegrounds. This pay for action program recruits individuals to message their friends, family, and colleagues about the importance of voting in this election cycle. With the inundation of TV ads, mailers, texts, digital ads, and more in battleground states ($15B total spend estimated for the 2024 election), this is a tactic that can break through the noise and create a real impact in the presidential race.

Geography: Pennsylvania, Nevada, Georgia, Arizona, North Carolina, Michigan, Wisconsin

Funding Type: c4c3

Contact: Mike Pfohl, Executive Director

Presentation Date: 10/13/2024

Contribution Info

Project Narrative

Texas Grassroots Powerbuilding - Part 2

$634,360 Raised

Texas’s rapidly changing demographics warrant significant long-term power-building investments, while the positive polling trends for 2024 indicate a promising path to a potential Allred victory in Texas that could deliver Senate and trifecta control. In response, 1.5°CSG, in collaboration with Way to Win, Texas Future Project, One for Democracy, and Movement Voter Project, is excited to announce our second $500,000 matching funds challenge. Contributions to any of the three featured organizations will be matched dollar-for-dollar, doubling the impact of your support.

Rise AAPI uses direct mail, phonebanking, ethnic media, and digital campaigns – including in-language content – to engage AAPI Texan voters to boost progressive turnout among the AAPI community. Contact: Nabila Mansoor
Planned Parenthood Texas Votes Victory Fund targets low-propensity voters through field outreach, phone banks, digital efforts, and social pressure mail, leveraging data to maximize voter activation. Contact: Drucilla Tigner
Common Defense mobilizes veterans using veteran-to-veteran outreach through relational organizing, direct mail, texting, digital ads, TV, and earned media. Their messaging is tailored to resonate with the military community and boost support for Colin Allred. Contact: Alex McCoy

Geography: Texas

Funding Type: c4c3

Presentation Date: 10/08/2024

Working America

$2,225,862 Raised | Fundraising Goal Achieved!

Working America brings together over 5 million people without union representation to fight for fair jobs, a just economy, and a democracy that works for all. Their voter contact programs are rigorously tested using randomized control trials, ensuring they deliver Net Democratic Votes at highly cost-effective rates. Through these efforts, Working America has been instrumental in electing fair-minded leaders, defeating anti-worker legislation, and building grassroots power for working people across the country. 1.5°CSG played a leading role in fundraising for Working America's programs in Ohio, Montana, and Nebraska, while also helping to close critical gaps in Presidential battleground States prioritized by Focus For Democracy.

Geography: Montana, Ohio, Nebraska, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Georgia, North Carolina, Arizona, Nevada

Funding Type: c5

Contact: Matt Morrison, Executive Director

Presentation Date: 09/24/2024

Texas Grassroots Powerbuilding

$1,210,500 Raised | Fundraising Goal Achieved!

Texas’s rapidly changing demographics warrant significant long-term power-building investments, while the positive polling trends for 2024 indicate a promising path to a potential Allred victory in Texas that could deliver Senate and trifecta control. In response, 1.5°CSG, in collaboration with Way to Win, is excited to announce our largest-ever $500,000 matching funds challenge. Contributions to any of the three featured organizations will be matched dollar-for-dollar, doubling the impact of your support.

Communications Workers of America (CWA) which leads the “Fight for Democracy” program, focused on mobilizing Black and Latino voters in Texas' five largest counties through canvassing, calling, texting, and paid media. Contact: Derrick Osobase
Texas Organizing Project’s (TOP) voter contact program engages voters with canvassing, calls, texts, relational outreach, mail, and digital. They focus on empowering Black voters through organizing in key Texas counties. Contact: Brianna Brown
Texas Freedom Network (TFN) is a leading voter engagement model, targeting young Texans through comprehensive GOTV efforts including canvassing, digital ads, and campus outreach events across the state. Contact: Val Benavidez

Geography: Texas

Funding Type: c4c3

Presentation Date: 09/17/2024

Community Change Voters

$114,000 Raised

All data points show that hard-to-find & reach Black, Latino, Native, AAPI, women, and young voters will need additional engagement to turn out for values-aligned candidates. One way to motivate turnout is through layered canvas mail: a personalized mail touch will increase voter turnout, influence voter behavior, and decrease canvas decay. Through a partnership with WorkMoney we will be adding QR codes and pathways to connect voters to government resources that put money directly in their pockets. We know these voters feel economic anxiety and believe no one cares about their pain. The care and IRA benefits framework is an antidote to apathy so that voters can make a direct connection between their power at the voting booth and governing process. This is our opportunity to shift the political calculus -- and ensure voters aren’t isolated from the safety net.

Geography: Nevada, Arizona, Michigan, Ohio, Georgia, Wisconsin

Funding Type: c4c3

Contact: Grecia Lima, Executive Director

Presentation Date: 07/09/2024

Red Wine and Blue

$32,000 Raised

Red Wine & Blue is a grassroots community of over half a million diverse suburban women working together to defeat extremism, one friend at a time. They provide a welcoming pathway to political engagement for women, including many who have never been political before, to organize in their communities. To complement their full-time teams in MI, NC, PA, and OH,they are raising funds to hire additional GOTV organizers focused on converting their members into relational volunteers who mobilize their friends, family, and neighbors to vote in critical federal battleground areas. This is a rare relational field program targeting what has consistently proven to be one of the most important and moveable groups of voters - suburban women.

Geography: Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan, North Carolina

Funding Type: c4c3

Contact: Katie Paris, Founder & CEO

Presentation Date: 05/14/2024

Sister District Project

$31,500 Raised

Sister District mobilizes their national network of grassroots volunteers around the most strategic opportunities to win elections and build power in state legislatures. In 2024, they are driving make-or-break field and fundraising capacity to state legislative races in battlegrounds ― AZ, GA, MI, NC, NV, PA, WI. Sister District is closing narrow vote margins, helping Democrats win key seats, shifting the balance of power in entire chambers, and advancing policies on climate change, democracy, and more. Funding will allow Sister District to implement their proven volunteer-powered field strategies and tactics in these seven target states, and expand their work into MN and NH.

Geography: Arizona, Pennsylvania, Nevada, Michigan, Wisconsin, North Carolina, Georgia

Funding Type: c4c3

Contact: Lala Wu, Co-Founder & Executive Director

Presentation Date: 05/14/2024

Save our Schools

$100,000 Raised | Fundraising Goal Achieved!

Save our Schools is organizing around protecting public school funding, an issue that has allowed them to recruit and maintain 16,000 volunteers statewide. They are currently raising funds to expand their volunteer coordination staff from 8 to 16 expanding the reach of their already cost effective volunteer powered voter registration program. Save our Schools has been uniquely successful at reaching, registering, and turning out voters in non-urban parts of Arizona with a special focus on competitive state legislative races, many of which are nested within the States’ competitive congressional districts.

Geography: Arizona

Funding Type: c4c3

Contact: Beth Lewis, Executive Director | Nicky Indicavitch, Outreach Director

Presentation Date: 04/30/2024

One Fair Wage

$200,000 Raised | Fundraising Goal Achieved!

One Fair Wage Action is mobilizing hundreds of thousands of new and unlikely voters, especially youth and people of color, in MI, OH and AZ using a peer-to-peer voter engagement model focused on the priority issue for those voters this election cycle: the cost of living. They are registering tens of thousands of new voters more cheaply and effectively as part of signature gathering for minimum wage ballot measures that will raise wages for 3.5 million workers and mobilize a minimum of 350,000 new, unlikely voters, with significant impact on Presidential and Senate races this fall.

Geography: Arizona

Funding Type: c4c3

Contact: Saru Jayaraman, President

Presentation Date: 04/30/2024

Student PIRGs

$154,000 Raised | Fundraising Goal Achieved!

The Student PIRGs are a national network of student-run non-profits that have recruited, trained, and mobilized college and university students to win on public interest issues since 1971. The organization helped pass the first GHG reduction bills in the 2000s, won commitments for 100% renewable energy at the campus, city, and state level accomplished with a Boards of Directors made up entirely of current college students. This spring, the Student PIRGs aim to leverage their year-round infrastructure on campuses in Arizona, Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and Georgia to educate young people about how their network and families can save money and save the environment through new programs and tax incentives created by the Inflation Reduction Act. StudentPIRGs IRA education program triages interested parties to WorkMoney's resource center to streamline each individuals enrollment process.

Geography: Arizona, Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Georgia

Funding Type: c4c3

Contact: Dan Xie, Political Director

Presentation Date: 02/20/2024

Somos Votantes

$206,500 Raised | Fundraising Goal Achieved!

Somos Votantes has initiated a field program with seven canvassers dedicated to Nevada and another seven in Arizona, with a focus on educating Latino communities about the opportunities provided by the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA). Through a comprehensive approach involving canvassing, community events, mail programs, digital advertising, and local radio, Somos Votantes casts a wide net to inform Latinos about the economic opportunities brought to them by the Biden administration's IRA. Those who they encourage to access these financial benefits are seamlessly connected with WorkMoney, which takes the lead in facilitating their enrollment in IRA programs.

Geography: Arizona, Nevada

Funding Type: c4c3

Contact: Melissa Morales, Founder & President

Presentation Date: 11/07/2023

Arizona Coalition for Change

$180,000 Raised | Fundraising Goal Achieved!

The Arizona Coalition for Change (C4C), a 501(c)3 Black-led community organization focuses on community empowerment and civic power-building including advocating for progressive policies like voter justice, economic and environmental justice, and youth justice in marginalized Arizona neighborhoods. Notably, they've launched the Clean Energy Clear Lungs (CECL) campaign, promoting clean energy and reducing air pollution in marginalized communities through education and resources while leveraging Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) benefits. This campaign also nurtures lifelong advocates for environmental justice at both state and federal levels. C4C's education program triages interested parties to WorkMoney's resource center to streamline each individuals enrollment process.

Geography: Arizona

Funding Type: c3

Contact: Reginald Bolding Sena Mohammed, Founder Executive Director

Presentation Date: 09/26/2023