Dear Partners and Friends of Justice Climate Fund,
Every institution is defined less by its easy years than by what it chooses to do in its hard ones. By that measure, 2025 was a defining year for Justice Climate Fund. It was not a year of large numbers, and I will not pretend otherwise. It was the year we built the institution that will produce them. We enter 2026 with our platform in place, our mission fully intact, and a clearer conviction than ever about the role we are built to play. Our purpose is to move capital into the communities the market reaches last and asks to wait longest.
If you take a single idea from this letter, let it be this. The foundation is built, and capital is now the catalyst. What follows is an honest account of the year behind us, a candid view of the environment we work in, and a direct explanation of where we are taking this organization and why I am confident it will work.
We Built the Platform
A community climate finance system does not begin with a loan. It begins with the institutions, standards, and infrastructure that make sound lending possible at scale. In 2025, that is precisely what we built.
In our first national application cycle, we received 94 applications for clean energy financing from community lenders and advanced 35 of them into capitalization and technical assistance. These are not abstract counts. They are 35 mission-driven institutions, serving urban, rural, and Tribal communities, that will originate clean energy financing in places national capital rarely reaches. Choosing them well, and preparing them to lend responsibly, was the most consequential work we did all year.
Behind that cohort we built the technical assistance ecosystem that supports it. Working with U.S. Green Bank 50, the Sorenson Impact Institute, and Mission Driven Finance, we developed the shared infrastructure that lets dozens of independent lenders operate to a common standard. That infrastructure includes a centralized resource hub and member portal, standardized pipeline-intake and underwriting frameworks, and the data and reporting systems that make outcomes measurable. This is unglamorous work. It is also the difference between capital that moves and capital that stalls.
With the Sorenson Impact Institute, we built a rigorous impact measurement and management framework, so that we track what actually matters. That means lower household energy costs, the number of low-income households and small businesses served, and reductions in pollution and energy burden. We would rather be measured by honest numbers than flattered by vanity ones.
It is worth being concrete about what this capital ultimately funds, because the abstractions of finance can obscure it. We are talking about a heat pump that lowers a family’s winter heating bill, rooftop and small-commercial solar that cuts operating costs for a neighborhood business, battery storage that keeps the lights on through an outage, and the efficiency upgrades that make older homes cheaper to live in. The work is technical, yet the result is deeply human. It is a lower bill, a healthier home, and a community better able to weather what comes.
We did this as part of a national network that now exceeds 400 community lenders, green banks, Community Development Financial Institutions, Minority Depository Institutions, developers, and state and local partners. We convened more than 100 of those leaders in national forums. We partnered with Ceres to confront, candidly, the gap between institutional capital and community investment. And at Climate Week in New York, we brought funders and practitioners together with partners including The Kresge Foundation and the Nonprofit Finance Fund to meet the moment directly. Across the country, we have identified more than one billion dollars of shovel-ready projects waiting on capital. I want to be precise about that figure. It is a pipeline, not a promise. Demand has never been our constraint. Capital is.
A Candid Word on the Environment
2025 tested the conviction of everyone in climate finance. Funding environments shifted, timelines stretched, and capital that communities were counting on grew harder to move. I will not spend this letter assigning blame for conditions beyond our control. Blame is not a strategy, and it does nothing for the people we serve.
What I can tell you is how we chose to respond. We treated the uncertainty not as a reason to retreat, but as a mandate to build, and to build in a way that depends on no single source of capital and no particular political season. An institution that succeeds only in fair weather is not built to last. We intend to be resilient and mission-intact in every season, and every choice we made this year was made with that durability in mind.
What Makes Justice Climate Fund Different
We are not a grantmaker that writes checks and hopes. We are an intermediary and a catalyst. We build lending capacity where it is thin, we set the standards that let capital trust the system, and we use catalytic and credit-enhancing capital to make private investors comfortable going where they have not gone before. Our product is not a single transaction. It is a durable, community-based lending system designed to outlast any one program or cycle of funding.
That distinction matters more than any figure on a page. Sophisticated capital does not underwrite a track record of deployment that no one in this field yet holds at scale. It underwrites the engine that is ready to deploy, meaning the originator network, the credit-enhancement architecture, the measurement discipline, and the pipeline. We spent this year building precisely that engine. The network is our moat, and it deepens with every lender, every standard, and every dollar of shared infrastructure we add to it.
The mechanics deserve plain statement, because they are the heart of the model. Most private capital does not avoid under-resourced communities out of indifference. It avoids them because it cannot price the risk. Our role is to make that risk legible and bearable. By taking a measured layer of first loss with catalytic and credit-enhancing capital, we give private and institutional lenders the confidence to participate. In that way, a single dollar of mission capital can responsibly move several dollars of private capital into projects that would otherwise never reach close. That is leverage in its truest sense. It is not financial engineering, but a structure that turns conviction into participation.
Our Strategy for 2026
Our plan for the year ahead is place-based and deliberate. In every region the goal is the same, which is to bridge the climate financing gap where it is widest. In the Midwest, we will scale our model beginning with a statewide partnership in Michigan, expanding technical assistance and supporting projects that lower energy costs and strengthen local economies. Across the Southeast, we will deploy credit enhancements and flexible capital to reduce the risk that keeps sound projects from reaching close. And in Native communities, we will strengthen Native-led clean energy through direct lending and trusted local partnership, grounded in solutions that communities design for themselves.
This is also the year our model matures. We are evolving from an organization that stood up a national program into a mission-driven asset manager and credit-enhancement partner, diversifying our capital base toward private and philanthropic sources, and putting the platform we built to work. The work of standing the program up is largely behind us. The work ahead is to operate that platform with the discipline of an asset manager and the patience of a community partner, two instincts usually held in tension, and that we are deliberately building to hold together. The platform is built, and capital is the catalyst. That is not a slogan. It is the operating plan.
What I Worry About
Candor cuts both ways, so let me be clear about what keeps me focused. Intermediaries fail when they grow faster than their discipline, so we will scale at the pace our standards can support, and no faster. Capital availability remains uncertain, and we will not assume a friendlier market than the one in front of us. And as we become more institutional, the deepest risk is a quiet one. It is that in learning to speak fluently in the language of capital, an organization can forget whose problem it exists to solve. We will not. We would rather under-claim and over-deliver, and we will measure ourselves by what reaches households and small businesses, not by what reads well in a report.
Our People, Our Partners, and Our Board
None of this is the work of one person, or one organization. It is the work of a team that spent the year doing hard, often invisible, foundational work, and of a board whose governance and judgment steadied us through a demanding period. It is the work of our technical assistance partners, U.S. Green Bank 50, the Sorenson Impact Institute, and Mission Driven Finance, and of the funders and philanthropic partners, including The Kresge Foundation, the Nonprofit Finance Fund, and Ceres, who chose to invest in this work when it was hardest. I want to single out Hive Fund in particular. As conditions grew most difficult, they held steady, backing the credit-enhancement work at the center of our 2026 strategy and committing to stand with us through the year ahead. Conviction like that from an investor partner is rare, and it is exactly what this moment asks for. And it is the work of more than 400 lenders and partners who make up our network. Partnership is not adjacent to our model. It is our model.
On the Future of This Work
A final word about our field, because Justice Climate Fund does not succeed alone, and does not wish to. Community climate finance has reached an inflection point. The first chapter of this work was written largely in public capital. The next will be written in private and blended capital, and it will be won on credibility, on whether institutions like ours can underwrite, measure, and report to a standard the most sophisticated investors recognize on sight. Our field does not lack conviction. It has that in abundance. What it needs is discipline, shared standards, and infrastructure that lets capital move without fear. That is the standard we intend to set, and to hold ourselves to first. If our work makes it easier for the next dollar of private capital to reach a community that has waited too long, whether or not our name is on it, we will have done our job.
In Closing
We are a catalyst for change, and a catalyst is defined by what it makes possible in others. 2025 was the year we built the capacity to make far more possible. 2026 is the year we put it to work. To everyone who stood with this organization through a hard year, and to the communities who place their trust in this work, thank you. We exist so that the communities reached last are no longer asked to wait. That is the work, and we are grateful to do it with you.
With determination and gratitude,
Amir Kirkwood
Chief Executive Officer
Justice Climate Fund
This material is for informational purposes only and does not constitute an offer to sell or a solicitation of an offer to buy securities. This communication has not been reviewed or approved by any regulatory authority. Recipients should conduct their own due diligence and consult with their financial, legal, and tax advisers before making any investment decision. Justice Climate Fund does not provide investment advice and does not act as an investment adviser to any recipient of this communication.