Planet Visionaries – Ep 2: Power to the People with Honnold Foundation’s Emily Teitsworth

Alex Honnold (0:04)

Emily Teitsworth has spent the past two decades on the front lines of change, working across Central America, Sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia and the US to build organizations that put power where it belongs, in the hands of communities themselves.

Her work spans gender equity, public health and grassroots development, but always with one guiding belief, that the people closest to the problem are closest to the solution.

We actually met about four years ago when Emily was in the final rounds of interviews to become executive director of the Honnold Foundation. What stood out immediately was that she didn't come from the energy world at all. She came from human rights, from listening. Whereas Emily puts it, financial resources are not more valuable than lived experience. That perspective is exactly why this work matters to me. When I started the Honnold Foundation back in 2012, it was about the simple idea that clean energy can transform lives, if it's built with people, not for them. Today, Emily leads a global network of more than 100 grassroots organizations across more than 30 countries, using community scale solar to expand what energy access can look like. And the results are incredible. In one indigenous community in Brazil, for example, a solar project didn't just bring electricity, it reversed climate migration, reconnecting young people with their homes and their future. In this episode, we'll dig into that story and many others. I'm Alex Honnold, professional rock climber and founder of the Honnold Foundation. And this is Planet Visionaries, where we share stories of people tackling the world's biggest environmental challenges in partnership with the Rolex Perpetual Planet Initiative. This is Planet Visionaries.

Hi, Emily. Welcome to Planet Visionaries.

Emily Teitsworth (1:46)

I'm so excited to be here. Thanks for having me.

Alex Honnold (1:48)

So let's talk about your work.

Emily Teitsworth (1:49)

You might know I'm the executive director of the Honnold Foundation.

Alex Honnold (1:52)

Indeed, I do.

Emily Teitsworth (1:53)

Yeah. I've been coming up on five years, which is kind of amazing.

Alex Honnold (1:57)

Actually, talk about where the Honnold Foundation was when you joined the team five years ago, because I feel like you've really overseen a period of tremendous growth and change.

Emily Teitsworth (2:06)

Our annual budget was something like 1.7 million the year I joined and it'll be 10 this year. So just by the numbers, we've grown a lot. We will have supported 650,000 people, advanced conservation of 15 million hectares of rainforest over the last five years. So the growth in terms of numbers and just partner stories is incredible.

In philanthropy, sort of the old school way of doing things was a philanthropy or the funder comes up with a solution.

They fund an organization or community to do the work, and then they're the ones that decide what the impact should be and whether or not it worked. The way that we do things is finding community organizations with great ideas and then giving them the money and capacity building support and resources that they actually need to make their ideas a reality. And that is flipping the way that philanthropy is traditionally done.

Alex Honnold (3:00)

Yeah, that was something when I started the Honnold Foundation in 2012 that I thought about because the world's undergoing this transition or renewal. It's kind of like, oh, that's amazing. But at the time, there was something like a billion people on Earth without access to power, and now I think it's only 800 billion.

So at least that sort of access to energy is improving globally, but you're still kind of like, well, those 800 million people don't have power now. Even if the whole world transitions to 100% renewables, they still won't have power. And so, yeah, it seems like there's a lot of space left for philanthropy.

Emily Teitsworth (3:34)

And something like 45% of the world still lives in energy poverty. So they have a little bit of access to energy, but not enough to really do anything meaningful. So I think the gap is huge, and we've been doing a lot of work in Cambodia over the last five years, and we're growing that work now, which is really exciting. One of the partners there, the Lake Clinic, has been building this network of floating health centers and solarizing them. And the work is amazing because it is reducing the impact on the environment because they're using less diesel, they're transitioning to solar-powered boats, and then they're supporting health care access, like incubation for newborns and light at night to perform procedures.

Alex Honnold (4:14)

Having light in your hospital makes sense.

Emily Teitsworth (4:17)

It's pretty important, it turns out.

Alex Honnold (4:18)