Grassroots Social Justice Efforts, Peace Development Fund – Jan 31

Posted by Peace Development Fund on December 10, 2024

The Peace Development Fund (PDF) works to build the capacity of community-based organizations through grants, training, and other resources as partners in human rights and social justice movements.

The organization invites applications for its Community Organizing Grants program. The organization’s four pillars of grantmaking include:

Organizing to Shift Power: Includes groups that are creating a power base that can hold leaders accountable to the people who are affected by their decisions, groups that allow their membership or constituents to take the lead in collective action-planning and decision-making, and groups whose leadership comes directly from the people who are most affected by the issues you are organizing around.

Working to Build a Movement: Includes groups that organize in the local community but make connections between local issues and a broader need for systemic change; groups that provide a space for members to develop their political analyses while taking action for change; groups that break down barriers within the progressive movement by building strategic alliances between groups of different cultural or class backgrounds or different issue areas; and groups that explore the root causes of injustice and have a long-term vision for the kind of social change they are working for.

Dismantling Oppression: Includes groups and projects that are proactively in the process of dismantling oppression, confronting privilege, and challenging institutional structures that perpetuate oppression (both internal and external to the organization); and groups that are proactively making connections between different forms of oppression (racism, heterosexism, sexism, ageism, classism, ableism, etc.), and with injustice.

Creating New Structures: Includes groups that have alternative organizational structures that allow power to flow “from the bottom up” and efforts to create new, community-based alternative systems and structures (economic, political, cultural, religious, etc.) that are liberating, democratic, and environmentally sustainable and that promote healthy, sustainable communities.

The foundation notes that most competitive applications will deeply embody all these funding priorities.

Applicants must have budgets of at most $250,000.

Application deadline: January 31, 2025

Learn more.