Blog Post

Blog-Header-Newsletters-e1667941515928.jpg

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

Iara Duarte Peng

Iara Duarte Peng

Iara Duarte Peng is the Founder and CEO of JustFund.

Related Articles

February 28, 2022

Funding Historically Excluded Organizations

Dear JustFund Community, JustFunders are off and running in 2022 as they center equity in their grantmaking and work to move more resources to historically…

Read More
December 9, 2021

What a year 2021 was…

Dear JustFund Community, I continue to be struck by the exclusionary and expensive nature of traditional philanthropy, which makes funding accessible to only select nonprofits…

Read More
wooden stick figures around a roll of money
November 15, 2021

Challenging Inequity: Collaborative Funding and Participatory Grantmaking in Action

Read More
November 9, 2021

Philanthropy Built on Trust

Dear JustFund Community, JustFund was developed a few years before the revolutionary trust-based philanthropy movement came to be, as a way to operationalize best practices…

Read More
$100 million moved and counting...
October 12, 2021

We’ve Reached A Major Milestone! 🎉

When we first launched JustFund in 2017, our mission was to simplify grantmaking and build a solution rooted in equity, trust, and transparency. By disrupting old models of giving and offering new…

Read More
September 30, 2021

The Mission to Reset Philanthropy

Dear JustFund Community, At JustFund, we understand the systemic problems in philanthropy that prevent money from moving to the chronically underfunded— like the $141.95 billion…

Read More