Blog Post
Resetting Philanthropy Together
Dear JustFund Community,
When I started JustFund back in 2017, there was one goal in mind: to move more money to movements. Back then, I was working at Solidaire Network, a community of donor organizers mobilizing critical resources to the frontlines of intersectional movements for racial, gender, and climate justice.
We, like many other donor networks, collaborative funds, and funders had relationships with dynamic, frontline groups and learned about innovative and critical work taking place in communities around the country. Because of our intentional relationships with organizations on the frontlines, we would often receive hundreds of applications every time we issued a Request for Proposal. This led us to consider:
What if we could make it easy for these groups to apply to all funds like ours? What if we could share these applications and our decisions with all of our members and beyond our network? What if we could track organizations’ financial needs in real time and work together to meet those needs?
Those early dreams are now a reality at JustFund.
We work with nearly 75 funds, networks, funders, and donors who are committed to changing how philanthropy works. As a result, thousands of organizations use JustFund to apply to a fund – and while they are at JustFund, they can use their common grant application to apply to any other fund. Long gone are the days when it takes an organization 40 hours to apply for funding. We make sure organizations can spend their time on mission-advancing work, not on tedious applications.
And, what happens to those grant applications? Do they go into the trash can after the grant cycles are closed? No. They move into JustFund’s common portal where our growing network of hundreds – soon to be thousands – of individuals with Donor-Advised Funds, philanthropic advisors, foundation staff, and donor networks can find and fund these organizations.
Why make grantmaking hard? It doesn’t have to be that complicated. When grantmaking is simple and easy, more money can move to movements.
Don’t wait on the sidelines for philanthropy to change – if you are engaged in any type of grantmaking, sign up for a demo today to learn how JustFund can help you center equity in your giving.
Let’s reset philanthropy, together.
Warmly,
Iara Peng, Founder & CEO
