.png)
Is coordination our comparative advantage?
A recipe for building trust, sharing credit, and winning together.
Launching the Bridge Grant Program
In April 2025, The Navigation Fund opened applications for a new program: “Climate Change Bridge Grants: Leveraging Federal Government Expertise for Climate Impact.” Affected federal public servants could apply for six months of funding to work on a climate project of their choice and support their transition to continued high-impact work.
We set up a low-overhead process: soliciting one-page proposals and quickly narrowing to the top 10% of applications for a deeper dive. Applications closed on April 30, and by June 11, money was on its way for eight awards totaling over $1M.
The final projects have just concluded, and we’ve been thrilled with the results. For example:
- Two teams did deep dives to learn from the Biden administration's successes and failures using industrial strategy and tax incentives for clean energy policy, respectively. Both teams built close relationships with partners helping shape future Democratic policy, meaning many of these lessons can be translated into better climate policy in the future.
- The Climate Endurance project went on to raise additional funds to invest in building bipartisan support for climate action, one of the most neglected areas of climate philanthropy.
- Monica Bansal and Hadas Kushnir conducted a massive review of cancelled USAID projects and catalyzed $14M in funding to high-quality vetted projects.
A more extensive list of project outcomes and coverage is available at the bottom of this post.
We expected one to two awards to fail outright and another one to two to be valuable but not achieve their goals. In large part this assumption was based on the knowledge that some projects’ deliverables were mostly under their control while others’ success was dependent on external factors (like further fundraising).
We would classify seven of the eight projects as clear successes, including two that led to unexpected career pivots that kept the recipients working on the cutting edge of important issues. Two more face an uncertain future after their outputs did not attract additional funding.
Lessons Learned
This was new for us. Our Climate Change program is focused on climate stabilization—figuring out how to predict and prevent the catastrophic risks facing an overheating Earth - and on supporting organizations addressing specific scientific or policy gaps. It wasn’t immediately clear what The Navigation Fund’s role should be in responding to these cuts, especially in areas that fall outside of our overall strategy.
What was clear was that we would have regretted doing nothing to respond to this generational loss of talent if we waited too long. We knew we had enough resources to do something impactful, the flexibility to move money quickly (thanks to a rockstar Ops team that was up for the challenge), and the confidence that we would find great people to run great projects even if we didn’t know their field that well. That was enough for us to make an exception to our strategy and try something new.
We learned a lot from this progress. If someone wanted to run a similar program in the future, this is what I’d tell them:
Ask for ambition.
Many grant applicants are used to asking for as little money as possible. Instead, we encouraged a few applicants to expand the scope and ambition of their final proposals relative to their original pitches. This improved the proposals markedly. In the future, we want to better prompt grantees to consider what they could do with more resources, though our own limited funds always require us to strike a balance.
Trust your people.
We had reservations about granting to individuals without oversight rather than organizations, but meeting the applicants put those to rest quickly; policy nerds who have committed their lives to public service can be trusted to work independently.
People want to work together.
Dozens of people asked if they could apply in teams, and we made half of the final awards to collaborations of two or three people, which did require us to increase the program budget. We should have anticipated this, and if we ran this program again, we would focus more on keeping whole teams working together.
People need more than money.
The "money + trust" model worked well for self-sufficient grantees who knew their ecosystem and could open their own doors. It worked less well for projects building something new in underfunded spaces with weaker networks. TNF is actively building the capacity to offer better non-financial support, and this program made clear the value of such infrastructure.
Do more outreach.
Our applicant pool was strong, but the final cohort skewed toward people already in TNF’s orbit - something we only noticed after selections were made. A future version should invest more up-front effort to cast a wider net.
We were too slow to launch.
About a month passed between when we first discussed the idea internally and when we posted the call for applications, but we could probably have launched in one or two weeks. I also spent too long worrying about the potential for negative attention on TNF from the administration, which in retrospect was silly but seemed like a real risk at the time.
Diversify project outputs.
Most projects defaulted to a report format because it provided a tangible deliverable. While grantees worked to ensure their reports wouldn’t just gather dust on a shelf, we should have experimented more with different end products.
Our partners at the Energy for Growth Hub, whose own bridge grant program we supported, raised an additional lesson:
The transition from government is a culture shift.
Even without the volatile circumstances imposed by DOGE, leaving government is a significant transition. Adjusting to creative, self-paced, exploratory projects from the reactive, task-oriented, risk-averse approaches common within government bureaucracies can take time, even for the most competent people. But it's worth investing in this transition because government experience can translate into amazing insights that outsiders won’t have.
[[divider]]
We don’t plan to run this program again—it was designed for a particular moment in time, and that moment has passed. But as one of the first projects within our nascent climate change program at TNF, it got us used to a grantmaking approach that puts trust over process and allows us to comfortably make bets on the ability of great people to meet the moment. I’d love to run more programs like this one—drop us a line if you’re interested in collaborating.
