Kataly Foundation
/OVERVIEW: The Kataly Foundation is a progressive funder that works toward “a world in which Black and brown people have the resources, power, and agency to execute their own visions for justice, well-being, and shared prosperity within their communities.” Core programs and funding areas include environmental justice, healing justice, reproductive justice, closing the racial wealth gap, and capacity building.
IP TAKE: Backed by a Pritzker family heir, the Kataly Foundation is an important funder to know about for BIPOC-led community organizations working in Kataly’s focus areas with a clear power-building lens. Kataly is a spend-down funder that intends to give its endowment rapidly within a loose ten-year timeframe. Known for its unique approach to funding, Kataly pursues different forms of participatory grantmaking, and views its grants, loans and impact investments as part of an overarching goal to democratize and redistribute wealth. In an interview with Inside Philanthropy, Kataly executive director Nwamaka Agbo clarified that to achieve this goal, Kataly empowers “practitioner funders” who have experience with on-the-ground movement work to help select grantees, develop programs, and more generally to “figure out how to resource projects accordingly over the time it actually takes to create real change.”
Kataly is transparent and approachable, with information about its current grantees and program officers available at its website. It does not, however, accept unsolicited grant applications, and each of its four core programs has a different practice for selecting grantees and partners, as we explore below. Kataly often provides “large, multi-year grants to organizations as their first grant […] because we are not hedging our bets.” For interested grant seekers, patience pays off here in terms of reading through Kataly’s grantee list and numerous Medium articles about its approach, which you can find at the bottom of every Kataly program page.
PROFILE: Established in 2018 by Regan Pritzker and her husband Chris Olin with $445 million in assets, the Kataly Foundation is a spend-down foundation committed to social justice and racial equity. Regan Pritzker is the daughter of Nicholas and Susan Pritzker, whose Libra Foundation has emerged as a leader in progressive philanthropy. In an IP interview, Regan Pritzker said she set out to establish a foundation that functions differently than the philanthropic status quo. “It feels a little different than having a very top-down mandate with a mission that’s then carried out by people slotted into very particular roles,” Pritzker said. “It’s really a collection of activists who have found a home together for a period of time… to make the change in the world we’re all trying to accomplish.”
Kataly’s mission is to move resources “to support the economic, political and cultural power of Black and Indigenous communities, and all communities of color.” Believing that philanthropy’s responsibility involves far more than just moving dollars, Kataly’s CEO, Nwamaka Agbo, who also serves as the Managing Director of the Restorative Economies Fund, offers some clarity: “Ultimately, philanthropy’s responsibility to social movements isn’t just to move money — it is to be specific and measured in moving resources to those that are building power for impacted communities and creating systems rooted in justice, equity, and liberation.”
Grants for Economic Equity and Community Development
Kataly’s Restorative Economies Fund is an integrated capital fund that combines grantmaking with loans, capacity building and operational support. It works to “close the racial wealth gap and transform [the] financial system by strategically reinvesting resources into community-owned and governed projects that create shared prosperity, self-determination, and build collective political, economic and cultural power.”
Grants through this Fund support a range of sub-areas, including land and housing access, political and economic power building, policy advocacy, infrastructure support including renewable energy, and capacity building.
The Restorative Economies Fund or REF is an “integrated capital fund, which means the Fund combines grants with non-extractive investments (loans, loan guarantees, or lines of credit, etc.) and non-financial support including technical assistance or strategic advice.”
Past grantees through REF include Black Farmer Fund, Right to the City Alliance, Repaired Nations, and Kibilio Community and Farm. The complete list of past grantees is available here.
Kataly’s Funder Readiness Checklist is of particular note here.
Grants for the Environment, Climate Change and Women
The Environmental Justice Resourcing Collective supports “work that builds power in communities of color, champions underserved communities, grows progressive movements for racial, social, economic and environmental justice, and is led by and for the communities most impacted by environmental racism and unjust economic, social, and political systems.” As in other areas of its work, Kataly shares reflections on its environmental justice work, which may help prospective grantseekers better understand how Kataly thinks about environmental justice.
The EJR Collective refers to a group of “nine women of color environmental justice movement leaders” that formed in 2020 to build “power in communities of color, and grows movements for racial, social, economic, and environmental justice. This work is led by and for the communities most impacted by environmental racism, climate change, and unjust systems.”
While the Collective largely focused on the environment, its work is underpinned by the overlap between reproductive justice, economic justice, gender justice, healing trauma and more.
Through a participatory process, the Collective has chosen to prioritize the following in their grantmaking:
Collective healing
Community infrastructure and collective land strategies
Strengthening movement power
Common funding interests include: building alternative and sustainable food systems, regenerative agriculture, and land stewardship.
Grassroots community power is strengthened through: integrated voter engagement, leadership development, and advocacy to win transformative policy at local, state, and national levels.
Previous grantees include STAY Together Appalachian Youth Project, United Tribes of Bristol Bay, Indigenous Climate Action, Maria Fund, and Gulf Coast Center for Law & Policy, all of whom received grants of at least $500,000. The foundation also gave $1,750,000 through this program to Indigenous Environmental Network in 2021.
More grantees are available here.
Grants for Health, Criminal Justice, LGBTQ and Social Justice
Not quite a health program or one focused fully on the LGBTQ or immigrant communities, the Mindfulness and Healing Justice (MHJ) program addresses the needs of several oppressed communities to engage them in supporting forms of “mental decarceration” necessary to create a form of “collective liberation” that is cross-sectional and inherently intersectional.
The Mindfulness and Healing Justice program “supports community-based mindfulness programs, teacher trainings, and restorative practice retreats led by and for BIPOC communities—all with a focus on expanding the opportunities for people most impacted by systemic oppression to access the power of mindfulness and to use it to broaden their leadership capacity and skills.”
MHJ conducts the above work by:
Building and strengthening Black, Indigenous and people of color-led “mindfulness and healing justice organizations working within communities most impacted by systemic oppression. We are prioritizing Black and Indigenous communities, working class communities impacted by incarceration, criminalization, and deportation, youth, and queer, trans and non-binary communities.”
Deepening the leadership pipeline for mindfulness teachers and healing justice practitioners from Black, Indigenous and all communities of color, … as a tool for building power and collective liberation.”
Land liberation, rematriation and capital projects aimed at creating “Black, Indigenous, and people of color-led spaces for mindfulness, healing and transformative practice.”
Previous program grantees include Peace At Any Pace, Shelterwood Collective, Buddhist Peace Fellowship, and BIPOC Youth Justice and Healing Fellowship. Other past grantees can be found here.
Grants for Racial Justice, Equity and Indigenous Rights
The Kataly Foundation conducts all of its grantmaking through a racial justice and equity lens, so expect each issue that it funds to be refracted through this framework. Grantseekers can find funding for related areas including sustainable farming, economic development, the environment and health. Though the Foundation does not have dedicated programs for women, the LGBTQ community, displaced persons and immigrants or trans and non-binary individuals, all funding can be applied to benefit such groups across Kataly’s programs and Funds.
Examples of past grantees here include a $20 million gift to the Sogorea Te’ Land Trust to reclaim land in the San Francisco Bay Area for the Lisjan (Ohlone) tribe.
Other grant opportunities:
Kataly’s Capacity Building program works to increase its movement partners’ ability to embrace and manage change, as well as their capacity for adaptation.
The foundation also ran a rapid response grantmaking program in 2020 to mitigate the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic and to respond to the summer of protests in the wake of the George Floyd murder in Minneapolis. Grant amounts through this program ranged from $20,000 up to $375,000. Past grantees include Jubillee Justice, Restorative Justice for Oakland Youth, Black Alliance for Just Immigration, and National Bail Out Collective. More grantees are available here.
The Kataly Foundation also gave $40 million to Impact Assets in 2019.
Important Grant Details:
Grants range widely from about $10,000 to $40 million, but most grants average between $25,000 to $500,000.
The Kataly Foundation does not accept unsolicited proposals or requests for funding. However, grantseekers can contact the foundation at info@kataly.org with general questions and review the foundation’s previous grantees here to get a better sense of the types of organizations Kataly supports.
PEOPLE:
Search for staff contact info and bios in PeopleFinder (paid subscribers only).
LINKS:
