We are Harvard alumni who believe the urgency of the climate crisis demands immediate action from our university. To complement organizing from our student and faculty allies, we are building an alumni community calling for transformative change within the institution so it does not exacerbate the climate crisis but instead is committed to climate adaptation, mitigation, solidarity with frontline communities, and a just transition.

A (Very Brief) campaign History

Writing letters, fundraising, and sleeping in tents in Harvard Yard during Heat Week, alumni have supported the Divest Harvard campaign (now Fossil Fuel Divest Harvard) since its inception in 2012.

In 2019, a group of high-profile alumni called the Ad Hoc Committee came together to write a series of letters to the Harvard administration advocating for divestment. They raised funds to hire organizers to lead the Divest Harvard campaign.

Alumni and former student organizers Canyon Woodward and Chloe Maxmin (both Harvard College ‘15) led the campaign and brought on nearly 100 volunteer organizers to lend alumni muscle to the fight for divestment, then in its seventh year.

Canyon and Chloe left the campaign in 2020 and a team of committed volunteers led the organization through the pandemic. In September 2021, Caleb Schwartz (Harvard College ‘20) was hired to coordinate the alumni campaign just eight days before Harvard made its historic commitment to divest its endowment from fossil fuels. Alumni celebrated alongside student, faculty, staff, and community allies who had spent nearly a decade organizing to reach this victory.

But the work wasn’t over. Alumni saw the fossil fuel industry’s outsize influence over key institutions in government, finance, business, and — importantly — academia. Seeing troubling signs of the industry’s invisible colonization of academia, alumni regrouped and got to work.

Who funds your work?

Financial transparency is core to our work, so we want to be straightforward about our own funding. 

Prior to September 2022, Fossil Fuel Divest Havard Alumni raised money from several foundations (The Grantham Institute, The Rockefeller Brothers Fund, Wallace Global Fund, and Winslow Foundation) to support three part-time organizers who contributed to the campaign between 2019 to August 2022. We also recently received a grant from the nonprofit Foundation for Civic Leadership, which we are distributing to support student-led organizing efforts.

Our 2023 white paper and the months of campaign organizing that led to its release were volunteer efforts. No one was financially compensated for their work on the white paper or campaign from September 2022 to the present, although campaign leadership has discussed retroactively providing a small stipend to alumni who have put considerable time and energy into the report. 

The vast majority of our campaign’s work is not and has not been compensated. Rather, it comes from dozens of alumni volunteers who care deeply about climate justice and Harvard’s future.