Matchmaker: Inside a Quest to Make Social Justice Funding Easier

Say you’re the executive director of a BIPOC-led nonprofit with a lean team and a tight budget, working on the ground to organize underrepresented people of color. You hear about the Emergent Fund, and it seems like a good fit. You decide to apply for a grant. That’s when you first encounter JustFund, an online portal that Emergent uses to manage its grants process, alongside a growing array of collaborative funds, donor networks and individual funders.

For the hypothetical nonprofit above, JustFund’s main advantage lies in its common proposal. Simple by design, the proposal is based around four core questions. And once a grantseeker uses it to apply for funding through the Emergent Fund, for instance, the same proposal can be used to apply for any funding opportunity that JustFund handles. The nonprofit’s ask also goes into an expanding library of projects and proposals for funders on the platform to browse.

“It’s about reducing the burden on organizations, taking a step toward democratizing philanthropy by democratizing the process of application,” said Iara Peng, JustFund’s founder. Since its launch in 2017, the platform has seen steady growth that really picked up steam in 2020. In its first year of operation, JustFund moved around $5 million to 200 organizations. Now that total is approaching $50 million, and nearly 900 organizations have received funding.

Though it doesn’t restrict its user base to a particular set of funders or recipients, JustFund’s origins and brand emphasize social justice, and it addresses some progressive critiques of philanthropy. Its goals are lofty. With a motto of “transforming philanthropy through technology,” JustFund offers not only what Peng calls a “soup-to-nuts process of grants management,” but also takes aim at the stubborn disconnect between elite funders and grassroots power-builders.

Starting Small

The idea for what would become JustFund first emerged circa 2017, when Peng worked as director of strategy and operations at the Solidaire Network. For Peng and her colleagues, handling proposals for Solidaire’s pooled funds came with some disconnect regarding values. Solidaire is a thoroughly progressive donor network committed in principle to reducing grantee burdens and resourcing the grassroots. And yet practical limitations placed the team in much the same position as countless other grantmakers: consigning most of the proposals they received to the trash can.

“It didn’t feel right on many levels,” Peng said. “There was nothing we could do to fund [many nonprofits], though their work was extraordinary.” To get around the problem, Solidaire Network members tried informal strategies like posting lists of their grantees and telling friends about interesting projects in the hopes that others would bite. But the challenge remained.

Eventually, a small group of funders—at the beginning, just Solidaire, the Emergent Fund and the Defending the Dream Fund—decided to try something different. Those three funders would adopt a common proposal template and find a way to get those proposals in front of all the individual funders in their networks. From there, the idea for a digital portal took shape.

As Peng describes it, a massive scale-up wasn’t JustFund’s initial goal. The platform began as a quiet experiment that most grantseekers would only encounter if they applied for funding from Solidaire, Emergent or Defending the Dream. Several funders from similar circles stepped in early to back the project, including Solidaire itself, Funders for Justice at the Neighborhood Funders Group (NFG), the Overbrook Foundation, the Marisla Foundation and the Unitarian Universalist Congregation at Shelter Rock.

JustFund has been fiscally sponsored by the Proteus Fund, and is now in the process of spinning off as an independent 501(c)(3). Peng and her team—which includes several other staffers—also have plans for a sister for-profit to channel support to 501(c)(4)s and other non-c3 destinations. “It’s important to me as the founder that we would get to a point where JustFund would be funded entirely by fees,” Peng said, referring to a fee funders pay. “It should go without saying that [grantseeking] organizations don’t pay to use the portal.”

An Expanding User Base

So who’s using JustFund now? On the funding side, most of the approximately $47.5 million moved through the platform to date has flowed through 15-odd funds that manage their application processes through JustFund. That represents a significant level of buy-in since those early days when Solidaire, Emergent and Defending the Dream were the only ones on board. A few recent examples include NFG’s Amplify Fund, the Ford Foundation’s HouseUS Fund, the Kresge Foundation’s CRUO Fund, the Arch Community Fund, Way to Rise and the Women Catalytic Fund.

In addition to social-justice-oriented collaborative funds and networks, JustFund has played host to a number of COVID-19 response efforts this year. For instance, the 25 family foundations that make up the Atlanta Emergency Response Collaborative have used JustFund’s common proposal to move around $4.5 million to over 150 service organizations across Metro Atlanta over the past five months.

Peng says the Atlanta collaborative’s members used JustFund not only to move money rapidly, but to foster trust and connectivity at a pace unavailable to them in the past. As Staci Brill, the collaborative’s program manager, put it for a recent post in Giving Compass, “Funders in our collaborative have formed a trusted peer network. The confidence in each other’s due diligence processes is translating into members making grants to organizations that were not familiar to them prior to the pandemic.”

The promise of a quick, hassle-free grants process, combined with relationship-building and discoverability tools, is JustFund’s main selling point. “Part of our goal is to move away from transactional philanthropy and toward relational philanthropy,” Peng said. “If we can use tech to streamline the process, suddenly, people have the time to build social capital. If we can free up people to be in closer relationships, we’ve done what we set out to do.”

JustFund’s features are designed to foster this “relational” approach, with options for funders to share their grantees, endorse proposals they’ve funded in the past, and review who else has funded specific proposals. On their end, grantseekers have up-to-date information about funding activity in areas of interest to them. Of course, this information can be accessed in other ways, but it often takes a lot more time and effort. JustFund’s argument is that a centralized platform makes it easier for staff with limited resources to see where money’s flowing and make more effective development decisions.

Next Steps

After several years of quiet activity, JustFund has now amassed a library of over 3,000 nonprofit proposals. That repository is key to what Peng sees as the next major step for JustFund: to dramatically increase the number of individual donors, family foundations and other solo funders using the platform. Cultivating a broad community of social justice donors was part of the plan from the start, she said, but right now, only several dozen individual donors have profiles.

The plan going into 2021 is to grow out that individual donor base, in part by deepening engagement with community funders like the East Bay Community Foundation and communities like the Donors of Color Network. Like other progressive funding projects we’ve covered, JustFund has also forged a partnership with the Amalgamated Foundation to leverage its administrative and technical capacity. With the system currently in place, grants can be out the door in as few as five business days—a far cry from months-long grant cycles.

A more public-facing brand may also be in the cards for JustFund. Peng ascribes the platform’s low profile not to any intentional secrecy, but to budget and time constraints. If the funds flowing through the portal continue to grow, JustFund may begin to loom larger in the progressive funding world. That’s why the team is investing heavily in technical capacity, including data and network security.

The Fruit of Disruption

At this point, JustFund is leaning into its tech identity as well as its social-justice-adjacent mission. Though she didn’t use the term, Peng seems keen to “disrupt” certain established norms in philanthropy, referencing “a lot of systems that probably aren’t necessary to move money.” She talked about process flow management, about identifying bottlenecks in grantmaking and eliminating them over time.

Recalling the mindset of left-leaning venture funding shops like New Media Ventures, JustFund’s tech-enabled philanthropic progressivism is another sign of the times. For a while now, social justice groups have called for things like more general and multi-year support for movement grantees, more equitable power dynamics and fewer grantee hurdles. But those calls have grown louder during the time JustFund has been in existence, and they’re near-deafening in 2020. Furthermore, they seem to be gaining a foothold among liberal philanthropy’s managers and technologists, where they were once the province of activists alone.

As much as progressive types might—with good reason—rail against the privilege and influence of wealthy elites, the fact is that this perilous moment has many more of them funding work they wouldn’t have considered before—things like ground-level organizing for racial and economic justice. At the same time, the social justice funding world’s infrastructure is getting more sophisticated as places like JustFund, Solidaire and the Movement Voter Project explore new ways to channel wealth to the grassroots. That seems like a promising equation for long-underfunded social justice groups.

Featured