Evergreen Collaborative: Recommendation

// BACK

Note: This is our recommendation of Evergreen Collaborative as it appeared in November 2022. Evergreen Collaborative was not included in Giving Green’s 2023 list of top climate nonprofit recommendations. That being said, it is our impression that Evergreen Collaborative continues to do strong work and has continued to produce impressive achievements. For donors interested in supporting US policy work, we still believe that Evergreen Collaborative would be an excellent choice.

The reason for removing Evergreen Collaborative from our 2023 list derives from a changing political landscape in the US and a shift in research priorities at Giving Green. We first recommended Evergreen Collaborative in 2021, primarily based on the strength of its contributions to federal legislation, during a time when Giving Green felt that there was a unique opportunity to pass federal climate legislation in the US. After the passage of major climate bills in 2021-2022 (IIJA and IRA), the legislative window for climate policy in the US seems to have mostly closed.

Therefore, many advocacy groups in the US (including Evergreen Collaborative) have shifted their strategies to center implementation, regulation, and state-level policy. While these are important activities, the landscape is different enough from federal legislation that evaluating effective nonprofits in this context would first require us to conduct new research to assess the general impact strategy. Although we considered conducting this research, our 2023 research prioritization moved us in a different direction, toward advocacy targeting specific sectors and technologies. Given that Evergreen Collaborative’s work does not fall into the impact strategies we prioritized in our 2023 research, we did not fully reassess it. Therefore, it was not included in our list of 2023 top climate nonprofits.

Evergreen Collaborative recommendation summary

Giving Green classifies Evergreen Collaborative as one of our top recommendations to reduce climate change. Evergreen Collaborative is a left-of-center insider policy advocacy group that was founded by former staffers of Washington State Governor Jay Inslee’s 2020 presidential campaign. Since its founding, Evergreen has focused its efforts on supporting policies that aim to power the economy with 100% clean energy, invest in jobs, support environmental justice, transition the US from fossil fuels, and influence US leadership to confront climate change.

Image: Senator Tina Smith speaking at a press conference for the No Climate, No Deal campaign. Courtesy of Evergreen Collaborative.

We first recommended Evergreen Collaborative in 2021, and focused our initial analysis on its federal legislative work. Evergreen successfully advocated for many initiatives that were included in the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) such as clean energy tax credits, the green bank, and environmental justice block grants. Following the passage of the IRA, Evergreen Collaborative is now planning to work on bill implementation, state-level policy, and influencing the Biden Administration and federal agencies to take further action on climate. We think Evergreen Collaborative will be impactful in these areas, given its track record of success, organizational strengths, strategic approach, and emphasis on aligning its work to what is most politically tractable. For more information, see our deep dive research report, as well as a summary below.

What is Evergreen Collaborative? Evergreen Collaborative is a left-of-center insider policy advocacy group that was founded by former staffers of Washington State Governor Jay Inslee’s 2020 presidential campaign. Since its founding, Evergreen has focused its efforts on supporting policies that aim to power the economy with 100% clean energy, invest in jobs, support environmental justice, transition the US from fossil fuels, and influence US leadership to confront climate change.
What does Evergreen Collaborative do? Evergreen Collaborative’s main strength has been in developing and advocating for climate policy, especially for the power sector and environmental justice initiatives. Moving forward, Evergreen has transitioned its strategy to reflect the climate policy landscape after the passage of the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA) and the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 (IRA). It has identified four major initiatives: (i) implementing the IIJA and IRA, (ii) pushing the administration to take further climate action, (iii) working on state policy and implementation, and (iv) remaining active in contributing to further federal legislative climate opportunities.
How could Evergreen Collaborative reduce greenhouse gases (GHGs)? Evergreen Collaborative reduces GHGs from the atmosphere by influencing policymakers and regulators via its policy workstream and coalition building.
What is Evergreen Collaborative’s cost-effectiveness? We have done a back of the envelope calculation to estimate Evergreen’s cost-effectiveness in the context of IRA implementation. We have low confidence in the ability of this model to estimate Evergreen’s general cost-effectiveness due to uncertainty regarding the scope and efficacy of Evergreen’s influence on IRA implementation; as a result we had to use too many highly subjective guess parameters. Overall, we think Evergreen Collaborative could plausibly be within the range of cost-effectiveness we would consider for a top recommendation.
Is there room for more funding? Evergreen’s 2022 budget is $5 million, but it would like it to grow to $7.5 million to increase capacity for its priority projects. In particular, it would like to expand its capacity to ensure that it can work closely with the Treasury on rulemaking. In addition, Evergreen outlined six ways that the Biden Administration could use executive actions, but it only has dedicated staff working on one of these pathways – the power sector. It would like to expand capacity to include more dedicated staff working on the other areas.
Are there major co-benefits or adverse effects? We think co-benefits include Evergreen Collaborative’s commitment to environmental justice issues. We are not aware of any adverse effects.
Key uncertainties and open questions: Given that Evergreen has mostly focused on federal legislative policy development and advocacy, we are uncertain about its efficacy regarding bill implementation especially on the state level. In addition, through conversations with Evergreen and other policy experts, we have understood small size and relative agility to be important traits behind Evergreen’s efficacy. We are uncertain if, or how much, growth of the organization will affect its nimbleness.
Bottom line / Next steps: We classify Evergreen Collaborative as one of our top recommendations. While we are uncertain how Evergreen’s work moving forward (e.g., bill implementation, regulation, state policy) will compare to its legislative work in terms of impact and cost, we believe that Evergreen is a highly effective organization given its track record, agility, policy knowledge, sphere of influence, and emphasis on calibrating its work to the political climate.

Donate to Evergreen Collaborative to help push corporations, states, & the executive branch to take full advantage of new climate policy. You can give to Evergreen Collaborative directly.

Evergreen Collaborative is a 501(c)(3) tax-exempt organization in the United States. As Giving Green is part of IDinsight Inc., which is itself a charitable, tax-exempt organization, we are only offering an opinion on the charitable activities of Evergreen Collaborative, and not on Evergreen Action. This is a non-partisan analysis (study or research) and is provided for educational purposes.