The 2024 Giving Project will focus on Environmental Justice, making grants to support organizing work that aims to achieve equitable access to a clean and healthy environment for frontline communities most impacted by the climate crisis, environmental racism, and environmental injustice. The money raised by this Giving Project will fund rural and urban organizations working at the intersection of environmental, racial, and economic justice to create sustainable, self-determined and just communities. Environmental justice work can include, but is not limited to, access to clean and healthy food, water and air; just transition and climate resilience work; affordable and healthy housing; addressing neighborhood blight, etc.

The “environment” in the context of the environmental justice movement is defined as the spaces where we live, work, learn, play, pray, and heal. The Environmental Justice Giving Project learns about and supports organizations that:

• Are community-based and led by the people who are most disproportionately affected by environmental justice issues in the midst of a climate crisis;
• Strive for equitable access to a clean and healthy environment; and
• Work for sustainability, including racial and economic justice.

For examples of the work we’ve funded, take a look at our Environmental Justice grantees from 2017 and 2019.

Members of the Environmental Justice Giving Project will learn about and have a concrete impact on a wide variety of environmental justice issues — from the climate crisis to healthy and sustainable homes to food sovereignty — while developing their leadership, building community, gaining analysis, and learning new skills.

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What is a Giving Project?

Giving Projects are a unique, participatory model of funding that provides significant financial resources to grassroots organizing for long-term progressive social change. Giving Projects bring together a diverse group of people of varied class identities who are passionate about social change and want to strengthen their skills in fundraising, grantmaking, and community building. Participants work together to deepen their understanding of social justice principles and engage in collective giving and fundraising to support grassroots organizations.

• Cohorts consist of a cross-class, multiracial group approximately 15 volunteers who commit to the entire process.
• Each person makes a meaningful gift — whatever that means for you.
• We develop a shared analysis of race, class, and the issue area of this Giving Project (Environmental Justice) through workshops and trainings.
• Each person commits to fundraising within their community, including friends and family. Giving Project facilitators will train you in grassroots fundraising and support you along the way through regular 1:1 coaching sessions.
• Participants will be trained on Social Justice Fund’s democratic grantmaking process. You will read and score proposals, make collective decisions, and grant money to some of the most inspiring, effective social change work in the region.

All Giving Projects follow roughly the same process:

1. Community building, including personal storytelling and setting personal & collective goals.
2. Political education about racism, classism, Black liberation, Indigenous sovereignty, and the grantmaking issue area for the project (Environmental Justice).
3. Grantmaking training about social justice philanthropy, SJF’s grantmaking criteria, and decision-making processes.
4. Fundraising training focused on grassroots fundraising skills and learning how to make an ask.
5. Ongoing fundraising with support from SJF staff and other Giving Project members.
6. Reading and scoring grant applications.
7. Collective decision-making process to decide together which organizations will receive grants.
8. Celebration of our successes and evaluation of the process so the next Giving Project will be even better.

What kind of organizing do Giving Projects fund?

The Giving Project participants will use Social Justice Fund’s grantmaking criteria to select grantees. We fund grassroots community organizing led by the people most impacted by injustice and working for systemic change. Giving Projects fund organizations throughout SJF’s funding region: Idaho, Montana, Oregon, Washington, and Wyoming.

More specifically, we give grants to groups that:

• Are led by the people most directly affected by the issues the organization is working on
• Continually build leadership from within their own membership, base, or community
• Work to understand and address the root causes of the issues, not just the symptoms
• Bring people together to build power they wouldn’t have individually
• Use that power to create systemic change, which includes altering unjust power relations
• See themselves as part of a larger movement for social change, and works towards strengthening that movement

Schedule