The Connecticut Roundtable on Climate and Jobs (CRCJ), a nonprofit that combined labor unions and environmental activist groups to advocate for growing jobs through building Connecticut’s green infrastructure, announced that it would begin layoffs for its small staff of four, according to an announcement by Roundtable Board Chair John Harrity.

“After extensive discussion and careful review of our current financial realities, we have made the difficult decision to initiate staff layoffs effective December 5, 2025,” Harrity wrote on the organization’s website. “This is not a decision we came to lightly. As a small nonprofit committed to climate justice and worker justice, we take seriously the responsibility to steward our resources with transparency and integrity.”

Reached for comment, Harrity said CRCJ primarily relied on grants that have dried up in the current political climate, particularly after billionaire Bill Gates’ foundation pulled back on funding organizations focused on climate change; it had a trickle-down effect to smaller organizations like CRCJ.

“It’s sort of a chain reaction. One organization depended on climate safety grants, for instance, from Bill Gates as part of their funding to fund state groups, and Bill Gates has withdrawn most of his funding from climate change organizations,” Harrity said. “The grants ran out and unfortunately in the current climate there’s less money available for social justice organizations and there’s nothing from the federal government that’s helpful at all, so we just didn’t have the money to sustain staff.”

Earlier this year, Bill Gates, whose philanthropic activities have largely subsidized climate-related organizations and activities, announced in an essay that he no longer believed that climate change alarmism is working and should, instead, “put human welfare at the center of our climate strategies.”

Harrity said another organization out of Cambridge, Massachusetts, on whom they relied saw their funding reduced and had to make some hard decisions; “Unfortunately, we didn’t make the cut.”

The CRCJ began in 2012 as a project of the CT AFL-CIO, an umbrella organization for trade unions and public employee unions, and the Inter-Religious Eco-Justice Network (IREJN) “to educate and strengthen collaborations between labor, religious, environmental, and community leaders concerned about the challenge of mitigating climate change while creating good-paying jobs as part of a sustainable economy,” according to their website.

The Roundtable has focused on green energy jobs that involve organized labor to shift away from fossil fuels, advocating for, among other things, project labor agreements (PLA) for large-scale green projects which ensure the project employs unionized labor. 

In particular, CRCJ advocated for the Revolution Wind project off the coast of Rhode Island for which the State Pier was redeveloped, and Senate Bill 999 in 2021, which established prevailing wage rates for contractors working on any renewable energy project over 2 megawatts, unless the project was covered by a PLA, and pushed for Connecticut to declare climate change an emergency. 

The group has been active in state politics and legislation for more than a decade, with past and present members testifying on bills and serving on climate-related committees and sub-committees, like the Governor’s Council on Climate Change, according to the Department of Energy and Environmental Protection.

According to CRCJ’s 990 tax forms, the organization, which lists only five staff members on its website, grew from $121,421 in revenue for 2018 to $370,329 in 2023, with a high-water mark of $420,968 in 2020. 

Nevertheless, in 2023, the organization showed a loss of over $25,000 for the year and reduced their net assets to only $45,000. Although staffing salaries and benefits took up only $283,000 in 2023 – roughly $87,000 less than the organization received in contributions – the remainder of the budget was consumed by other expenses, which totaled $107,000 that year.

2023 was the third year in a row the organization showed a loss on its tax forms. In 2021, CRCJ showed a loss of $97,946 and in 2022 it showed a loss of $131,451. 

The organization’s 2023 policy statement indicates the organization supported strong environmental regulations, supported climate justice initiatives due to the “disproportionate impact of climate change” on “marginalized groups,” opposed any new fossil fuel infrastructure, and that project labor agreements and labor peace agreements create “equitable access to jobs for those underrepresented in the relevant industries.”

Despite the losses of grant funding and having to reduce staff, Harrity says CRCJ is not calling it quits and hopes to rebuild.

“We have a voluntary board which continues to meet and we’re gonna figure out what we can do,” Harrity said. “People are committed to continue to work on the fight for climate safety and we know there’s interest out in the community and in the labor movement on the issue, and we used to be the voice for a number of different groups, particularly in labor.”

“Through the use of volunteers and volunteer labor we think we might be able to have some impact on the legislative process and state policy and possibly rebuild in the future,” Harrity said. “That’s what we’re committed to.”

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