For decades, toxic lead cables lay like giant sea monsters snaking across the bottom of Lake Tahoe. Installed as early telecommunications lines and owned by AT&T, the abandoned cables contained over 100,000 pounds of lead and were slowly deteriorating, leaching contaminants into one of the most iconic lakes in the country. In 2021, the California Sportfishing Protection Alliance, or CSPA, filed a lawsuit to force AT&T to remove the abandoned lead cables. The multimillion-dollar litigation dragged on for over two years. Without sampling and scientific testing, it was difficult to make the case in court. Then Roland Peralta, the founder of a new non-profit called WHEN Justice, offered to provide $100,000 for the science needed to support the litigation. The case quickly changed course. With the new funding, scuba divers went down to the lake floor to collect samples that helped show that the lead in the cables was leaching into the surrounding waters. The crucial piece of missing evidence was found with lead isotopic testing, providing ‘fingerprints’ that showed the lead in the cables was the same as the surrounding contamination in the lake. Once the lead contamination was linked to the cables, AT&T settled the case in nine weeks and removed the cables within months. ‘That was the ‘aha’ moment, where we realized we could scale this model,’ said Peralta. An innovative pay-it-forward model WHEN Justice is built around a simple but deeply powerful idea: Strategic funding at the right moment in litigation can help public-interest cases win. The non-profit raises funds to help pay for the costly pieces of litigation at the intersection of environmental and human health — like scientific testing, expert analysis, and sampling — that smaller entities taking on massive corporations in court frequently cannot afford. Because environmental lawsuits often include cost recovery, WHEN’s donations can sometimes be used repeatedly, helping fund multiple cases from the same original donation. Building off the AT&T case success, WHEN was officially launched on Earth Day in April of 2026. ‘WHEN made a huge difference in the Lake Tahoe case,’ said Erica Maharg, the environmental attorney who represented the sportfishing group against AT&T. ‘Those funds provided us with the evidence we needed at a critical time in the litigation.’ Colin West, founder and CEO of the nonprofit Clean Up the Lake, sees that role as especially important for groups without deep legal budgets. ‘Being a smaller organization that is trying to step up and take on big litigation against larger entities is challenging,’ he said. ‘A group like WHEN Justice that has closing that funding gap as their core focus fills a need, and a role that others can’t.’ The litigation bottleneck Adequate funding is critical in today’s environmental justice landscape. Currently, much of the environmental law enforcement that forces powerful entities to clean up pollution is being done by individuals and nonprofit organizations. ‘We think of government and regulators as being the primary enforcement mechanisms. But in reality, many environmental cleanups happen because of the efforts of small organizations,’ said Maharg. For those groups, the main obstacle is usually not the legal standard, but the cost of assembling the scientific evidence needed to support the case. ‘If you’re going up against big companies, litigation is so expensive,’ said WHEN’s chief executive and legal officer, Jacqueline Biner. ‘The way the legal system is set up right now, it sadly is not always about the merits of the case. It’s often just about who has more money.’ WHEN’s model is designed to help remove that barrier. In another current campaign, the organization is fundraising to support scientific analysis and sampling in a lawsuit involving a long-closed hazardous waste disposal site located on the edge of the San Pablo Bay in California. The lawsuit alleges that toxic substances are now leaching from the landfill into the bay. Together, WHEN and the public are funding experts to conduct sampling and analyze the results, showing how the pollution is moving from the landfill toward the bay, grounding the case in science and data. ‘There are so many cases out there, like landfills that are leaching contaminants, or factory farms leaking manure and nitrates into water bodies,’ said Biner. She sees strategic, targeted litigation funding as a tool that could help fuel a sea change, showing large corporations that it’s more cost-efficient to clean up their own messes and address sources of harm, rather than fighting in court to try to evade responsibility. A new way to demand accountability A serial entrepreneur and the co-founder of wellness company Nutrafol, WHEN’s founder Roland Peralta initially envisioned giving back through traditional philanthropy. But he soon began to see an additional, larger opportunity: By directing strategic funding to organizations fighting expensive David-and-Goliath battles against large corporations, he could help create a healthier planet for future generations. ‘I kept asking myself, what kind of world will I leave for my son?’ he said. By helping cover litigation costs, WHEN can help smaller organizations pursue cases against much larger and better-resourced opponents. ‘The ability to access funding for litigation is really exciting, because it means that we can take on bigger cases,’ said Maharg. ‘Having a partner like WHEN that can help with fundraising key costs in the litigation makes all the difference in our ability to take on these well-funded polluters.’ Over the next several years, WHEN Justice aims to build an infrastructure for a new kind of corporate accountability — helping identify harmful corporate conduct before it becomes irreversible. They plan to give people a direct way to participate in the fight for transparency and justice through crowd-funding. Peralta and Biner envision an interactive platform, where donors can direct their dollars toward the fights that matter most to them. These funds would support both large, precedent-setting cases, and smaller, community-driven campaigns that help local residents confront injustices in their own backyards. Winning is not the only goal, said Biner. ‘We also believe it is ok to pursue a case that may lose if it will create momentum and pressure. If we educate the courts, place new accountability on corporations, and educate consumers, that moves the needle in a different way.’ WHEN’s goal is also to get the public involved. ‘We think there is so much more power in a million people giving a dollar than in a single person giving a million dollars,’ Biner noted. ‘We want people to become invested in these cases, to follow them, and to become more informed about the legal process.’ A call to action That sense of agency is central to WHEN’s purpose. At its core, the model is designed to give people a concrete, accessible way to respond to injustices that might otherwise feel too large or too entrenched to take on. For Peralta, that means creating a clear path that allows ordinary people to turn outrage into action. ‘Everybody’s angry and appalled about these massive environmental issues, but as an individual, it’s hard to know how to help,’ he said. ‘WHEN Justice is designed to be the call to action button that everyone has been longing for, to help individuals play a role in shutting this madness down by voting with their dollar.’ This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Funding the fight against corporate polluters on Jul 6, 2026.