Building Alignment to Shift Power
What We Do
We convene grassroots leaders, national environmental organizations, and philanthropy to build the political alignment needed to unlock funding, influence strategy, and build accountability across the environmental movement.
By breaking down long-standing silos, BEA builds trust and advances more collaborative, bottom-up approaches to philanthropy and partnership expanding what’s possible for environmental justice movements.
Why Alignment Matters
The environmental movement is not a single unified actor; it is a set of institutions with different incentives, timelines, and levels of power.
When coordination and political alignment are missing, policies are shaped without frontline priorities, funding outpaces accountability, and responses to emerging challenges- like artificial intelligence- risk reinforcing existing inequities.
Through structured dialogue and coordinated strategy, BEA creates the conditions for collective action, aligning priorities, building authentic relationships, and ensuring equity is a starting point, not an afterthought. This offers a model for meeting both present and future challenges with equity at the center.
Left Out By Design
Alignment In Practice
BEA’s Left Out By Design is a cross-sector effort to intervene in the trajectory of AI within the environmental movement.
What We’re Seeing
Artificial intelligence is reshaping how decisions are made across the environmental field, often concentrating influence within institutions while creating new and evolving questions around public accountability. At the same time, AI infrastructure is placing disproportionate burdens on frontline communities already navigating environmental harm.
As adoption accelerates, philanthropy and national environmental organizations are beginning to integrate AI into their work, opening up a call to build shared standards and guardrails, and a shared sense of purpose that advances equitable, field-wide alignment in how AI is developed and applied. This is a moment for the field to move together thoughtfully, collaboratively, and with frontline communities at the center of how decisions are shaped.
What We’re Building
BEA is building a process for alignment across the environmental movement, one that brings together grassroots leaders, national organizations, and philanthropy to navigate emerging challenges before decisions are set.
Our focus is governance and alignment: ensuring that frontline leadership and equity are not sidelined in funding decisions, infrastructure debates, policy development, or public narrative.
This work unfolds through a set of connected strategies. We convene sector-based working groups alongside cross-sector dialogue, creating space to surface tensions, build shared analysis, and move toward agreement. We ground these conversations in field research shaped by frontline experience, and we also host spaces that challenge dominant narratives and expand how the sector understands issues like AI.
Together, these efforts are designed to move beyond conversation and toward a long-term infrastructure for a more aligned and accountable environmental movement.
New Jersey Environmental Justice Alliance