In 2025, our **in-person** Giving Project will be based in Seattle. It will start in February and focus on funding grassroots organizing in our five state region: Idaho, Montana, Oregon, Washington, and Wyoming. The issue area and specific dates will be announced in the coming months. Are you interested in learning more about this project and deepening your relationship to SJF? Fill out this form today and our team will be in contact soon!

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:

Community building, including personal storytelling and setting personal & collective goals.

1. Political education about racism, classism, Black liberation, Indigenous sovereignty, and the grantmaking issue area for the project (Environmental Justice).
2. Grantmaking training about social justice philanthropy, SJF’s grantmaking criteria, and decision-making processes.
3. Fundraising training focused on grassroots fundraising skills and learning how to make an ask.
4. Ongoing fundraising with support from SJF staff and other Giving Project members.
5. Reading and scoring grant applications.
6. Collective decision-making process to decide together which organizations will receive grants.
7. 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

Giving project structure