A calendar of grants, resources, and funding opportunities listed by application or inquiry due date and tagged in various categories. For more information about grant, foundation, and other resources contact Laura Hennighausen at lhennighausen@purposepossible.com.
Dept. Of Justice: The Second Chance Act Community-Based Reentry Program
The Second Chance Act Community-Based Reentry Program seeks to help community-based nonprofit organizations and federally recognized tribal governments to enhance or implement evidence-based responses to improve reentry, reduce recidivism, and support successful transitional planning for individuals who are currently, or were formerly, involved in the criminal justice system. Supports and services can include, but are not limited to, service coordination and tracking; gender-specific and trauma-informed programming and services; individual or group mentoring; peer support; educational, literacy, and vocational services; substance use and mental health disorder treatment and recovery services; connections to physical healthcare; services to support family reunification and restoration; assistance in providing or making referrals for safe and affordable housing; civil legal services; and staff training.
Grants.gov deadline: April 29, 2024
JustGrants deadline: May 6, 2024
New York Life Foundation: Aim High
Grant amount: 20 one-year grants of $15,000 and 20 two-year grants of either $25,000 or $50,000 per year will be provided.
The Aim High grant program, funded by the New York Life Foundation and administered by the Afterschool Alliance, provides support nationwide for out-of-school time programs serving middle school youth. The aim is to support local community-based after-school and summer learning programs in providing the foundational skills and guidance that middle school students need to be prepared for the transition into high school.
For 2024, twenty one-year grants of $15,000 each will be awarded: ten for programs’ efforts around racial equity and social justice and ten for programs’ efforts around youth entrepreneurship. Twenty two-year grants of either $25,000 per year or $50,000 per year will support programs in enhancing direct service activities, technical assistance, capacity building, and their efforts in continuing to serve youth while facing the challenges of the pandemic and beyond. Funded programs must serve a high percentage—at least 75 percent—of low-income youth.
Peace Development Fund: Community Organizing Grants Program
Geographic scope: United States, including U.S. territories, Haiti, and Mexico
Grant amount: Grants average $5,000.
The Peace Development Fund believes that the change in values needed to establish a more just and peaceful world can come about only if it is strongly rooted in local communities that value the importance of building movements to create systemic social change. The Fund’s Community Organizing Grants support community-based organizations in the U.S., Haiti, and Mexico that are working for social justice.
Funding is provided in the following areas: organizing to shift power, working to build a movement, dismantling oppression, and creating new structures. Nonprofit organizations with budgets under $250,000 that are directly engaged in community organizing are eligible to apply.
Southern Black Girls and Women’s Consortium: Black Girls Dream Fund
Application deadline: The 2024 cycle is open through December 4, 2023, and several grantseeker workshops will be offered from November 14 through November 28, 2023.
Geographic scope: AL, AR, FL, GA, KY, LA, MS, NC, SC, TN, East TX, WV, and VA
Grant amount: The average grant is $35,000.
The Black Girls Dream Fund, an initiative of the Southern Black Girls and Women’s Consortium, seeks to channel greater resources toward organizations that are intentionally supporting and empowering Black girls and women in the South.
For 2024, the Fund is providing general operating grants to support the capacity of organizations that care for Black girls. Black women-led and girl-led nonprofit organizations and fiscally sponsored projects within Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, East Texas, West Virginia, and Virginia are eligible to apply. Support is provided in five categories: education, health and wellness, economic opportunity, social justice, and leadership and empowerment.
A.J. Muste Memorial Institute: Social Justice Fund
Grant amount: Up to $5,000
The A.J. Muste Memorial Institute’s Social Justice Fund provides grants for grassroots activist projects in the U.S., giving priority to those with small budgets and little access to more mainstream funding sources.
The Fund is especially interested in supporting efforts to end the violence of borders and the criminalization of immigrants; abolish prisons and dismantle and redefine systems of policing and criminal justice; confront institutionalized violence against racial, ethnic, gender-based, and LGBTQ communities; put an end to economic exploitation, class stratification, and systemic poverty; and stop the war machine, end state sponsored terrorism, and expose the dangers of nuclear power.
Priority is given to direct grassroots activism and organizing and groups with diverse, representative, and democratic leadership structures.
American Bar Endowment: Opportunity Grant Program
Application deadline: September 1, 2023, for letters of inquiry, and October 6, 2023, for invited applications
Grant amount: Typically $25,000 or less
The American Bar Endowment’s Opportunity Grant Program provides funding for new and innovative law-related projects and programs of importance to the public and the legal profession in the United States.
Funding focus areas include:
Enhancing access to justice, especially for vulnerable and underserved populations using innovations to legal services delivery, capacity-building, or pro bono service
Improvement of the justice system, including ensuring equal justice and elimination of bias
Increasing public understanding of legal rights and responsibilities so people can recognize legal problems and know how to address them.
Examples of funded efforts include projects that build organizational capacity to serve clients better; develop tools, technology, or approaches that the broader legal community could use; launch a new law-related program; or document or prove a best practice.
Learning for Justice Educator Fund
The Learning for Justice Educator Fund, a program of the Southern Poverty Law Center, supports educators who embrace and embed social justice, anti-bias, and anti-racist principles throughout their classrooms and schools. Educators across the U.S. may apply, with priority given to proposals in Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, and Mississippi. All projects must incorporate at least one Learning for Justice resource, framework, or publication and must also address one or more of the following key outcomes: restorative discipline, youth civic engagement, and dismantling oppressive narratives. Classroom level grants ranging from $500 to $2,500 are available to individual educators or small peer groups, while school level and district level grants ranging from $2,500 to $25,000 are provided to educator networks and school or district leadership teams.
AMS Foundation/ACR Initiative for Students and Youth
The JAMS Foundation/ACR Initiative for Students and Youth provides funding for conflict prevention and dispute resolution programs for pre-K-12 students and for adults working with youth populations in ways that directly transfer conflict resolution education skills from adults to youth. The 2023 funding track will focus on efforts to increase the resiliency skills in children (ages 5-11) by using conflict resolution education and training to increase their ability to cope with crisis, stress, and lack of hope in the future. The focus is on conflict resolution practitioners and organizations working with child-based community organizations which provide full childcare for working parents, guardians, or other caregivers, or to organizations providing before- or after-school programming. Grants will range from $20,000 to $40,000. The deadline for submitting initial project idea descriptions is January 9, 2023; invited applications will be due May 19, 2023. (An informational conference call will be held on November 21, 2022, and attendance is strongly advised.) Click here for more.
The Joyce Foundation
The Joyce Foundation funds efforts to address state and local public policy to advance racial equity and economic mobility for the next generation in the Great Lakes region, defined as Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Minnesota, Ohio, and Wisconsin. (National public policy efforts designed to have an impact on the Great Lakes states may also be supported.) Support is provided for policy research, development, and advocacy in the program areas of culture, democracy, education and economic mobility, environment, gun violence prevention and justice reform, and journalism. Letters of inquiry are accepted throughout the year; the upcoming deadline for formal proposals is December 1, 2022. Visit the Foundation's website to learn more about the program areas and application process.
Public Welfare Foundation (Rolling)
The Public Welfare Foundation supports efforts to advance justice and opportunity for people in need. The Foundation's grants support nonprofits in the United States that are advancing a new, transformative system of justice with the core values of racial equity, economic well-being, and fundamental fairness for all. Current focus areas include 1) developing innovative, transformative approaches to youth and adult criminal justice reform in the states of Oklahoma, Michigan, Georgia, Colorado, and Louisiana, the cities of Jackson, MS, and Milwaukee, WI, and the district of Washington, DC; 2) community-based solutions that reduce the over-reliance on mass incarceration; and 3) reframing the narrative and fostering greater transparency and urgency around the U.S. criminal justice system through storytelling, journalism, and other targeted efforts. For Fiscal Year 2023, the Foundation is also exploring investments focused on dismantling the incarceration of women and women-aligned people, reducing harm and violence using community-centered interventions, and supporting the development of formerly incarcerated and justice-impacted leaders in the field. Letters of inquiry are accepted on a rolling basis from nonprofit organizations with 501(c)(3) status. Guidelines for submitting the online letter of inquiry are available on the Foundation's website.
LOIs are accepted on a rolling basis.
Haymarket People's Fund
Haymarket People's Fund is committed to strengthening the movement for social justice in New England. Sustaining Grants of up to $15,000 support grassroots, social justice organizing work in Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, New Hampshire, and Vermont. Support is provided for community organizing efforts that are led by those most affected by injustice, focus on the root causes of the problem and changing the institutions and structures of power that keep injustice in place, have anti-racist and anti-oppression values and practice, and demonstrate a commitment to movement building. Haymarket focuses on both urban and rural organizing, and supports startup and emerging organizations as well as groups that have a long history of grassroots organizing. Both general operating and project support are provided. For applicants that have not been funded by Haymarket in the past three years, the first step in the application process is to contact the Haymarket office to speak to a staff person. The 2022-2023 Sustaining Grant deadline is November 30, 2022. Click here for more.
The Wallace Foundation
The Wallace Foundation's mission is to foster equity and improvements in learning and enrichment for young people, and in the arts for everyone. The Foundation is currently seeking expressions of interest from groups of organizations that are working together in formal or informal partnerships to support adolescent youth development at the local level in the United States, District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, American Samoa, the Northern Mariana Islands, the U.S. Virgin Islands, and Guam. The Foundation seeks partnerships working at the systems level, i.e. working across sites or programs in a cross-sector partnership that includes public or private entities, business organizations or coalitions, nonprofit organizations, neighborhood development corporations, higher education institutions, community organizers, and school districts. In addition, partnerships should already be in place; have an existing or emergent strategy focused on adolescents (defined roughly as youth aged 11 to 19), especially those who face systemic or structural challenges such as poverty, homelessness, and physical, mental, or behavioral disabilities; and focus on learning and development opportunities for youth beyond the traditional classroom. Each group of organizations selected will receive grants averaging $200,000 for a year of work, as well as access to other supports such as peer learning and technical assistance. The deadline to submit expressions of interest is November 4, 2022. Details on the funding opportunity are available on the Foundation's website.
Borealis Philanthropy: Communities Transforming Policing Fund
Grassroots Organizing Groups Addressing Police Violence and Discriminatory Policing Funded
Borealis Philanthropy: Communities Transforming Policing Fund (CTPF) is a donor collaborative supporting local grassroots organizing groups in the United States that are led by and for communities most impacted by deadly and discriminatory policing practices. The CTPF has launched a request for proposals to support rapid response and emerging learning opportunities for organizations addressing police violence and criminalization, campaigns to invest in communities and divest from policing, and building community-based safety strategies. Eligible applicants include nonprofit organizations, or groups that are fiscally sponsored, that have a 2022 annual operating budget of $750,000 or less; are grassroots organizing groups working authentically with communities most impacted by policing and incarceration; have an explicit commitment to racial, disability, and gender justice; and include a power building and leadership development strategy that centers those most impacted by policing. Priority will be given to work in historically underfunded geographic areas such as the South, rural areas, U.S. Territories, etc. Applicants can request up to $30,000, with an average award of $25,000. Proposals received by October 28, 2022, will be considered for grant approval in November. Visit the CTPF's request for proposal page for details.