Want climate news in your inbox? Sign up here for Climate Fwd:, our email newsletter.

Another of the founders is Rory Kennedy, daughter of Senator Robert Kennedy and Ethel Kennedy. “I’m very excited about it,” she said. “In the history of our country, major social shifts have really happened, starting out, on the streets. We’re very much running out of time here — we need to help people understand we need a radical change in direction.”

And while she said that it was unwise for any member of the Kennedy family to speak of the family “as a unit” since “there are a lot of us,” she said that her support for these organizations was consistent with their values. “As a family, we have appreciated, over the years, the importance of protest,” from the civil rights movement on. She recalled being arrested, at the age of 13, protesting apartheid at the South African Embassy in Washington. “My mother drove me down to get arrested,” she said.

Aileen Getty, the third founder and granddaughter of the oil magnate Jean Paul Getty, gave $600,000 to the group. She said she has redirected the bulk of her philanthropic giving, which has for years provided housing support for the homeless, paid for AIDS research and supported parks and green spaces, to climate issues. “As long as our energies are focused on all of these other issues, as pressing as they are, we’re not looking at the most pressing issue of all,” she said.

The grants have been welcome, said Roger Hallam, a co-founder of Extinction Rebellion, in a telephone interview from England. “My understanding is, unsurprisingly, some of the rich people are intelligent enough to do the basic maths and realize we’re heading toward extinction.” Climate change, he said, makes strong protest reasonable, even necessary.