The Clara Lionel Foundation (CLF) was founded in 2012 by Robyn “Rihanna” Fenty in honor of her grandparents, Clara and Lionel Braithwaite.

CLF invests in climate justice initiatives in the Caribbean & United States and helps communities prepare for and withstand natural disasters.

Current programs include primary and secondary education programs in Malawi, Barbados, and Senegal; emergency response programs in the Caribbean and across the globe; and the Clara Lionel Foundation Global Scholarship Program.

We focus on combating climate change’s effects on the most marginalized communities by supporting climate resilience and climate justice projects.

We invest in partners who are climate resilience and justice leaders in their own communities. Over 95% of our partners are entities focused on and led by women, youth, Black, Indigenous, People of Color and LGBTQIA+ communities.

We advocate for policy and systems change to ensure our grantmaking ladders up to substantive systems change. We take an intersectional approach to grantmaking, working with the lens that categories like gender, race, and class are best understood as overlapping rather than isolated. Our grantmaking tackles multiple social inequalities whenever possible.