Emergent Fund is a rolling, trust-based, no strings attached, monthly rapid response and emergent organizing grant for movement and frontline communities responding to urgent and specific unanticipated crises or opportunities to build power. We explicitly fund rapid response and emergent organizing grounded in movement values and power-building led by frontline Black, Indigenous, and people of color.
“THE EMERGENT FUND SUPPORTS THE WORK OF COMMUNITIES UNDER THREAT TO BUILD THEIR OWN REALITY: THE ONE THAT WOULD EMERGE ON THE OTHER SIDE OF CRISIS; THE WORK THAT NOT ONLY REACTS TO CRISIS, BUT USES THE ENERGY OF THE MOMENT TO BUILD POWERFUL NEW VISIONS FOR WHAT COMES NEXT.”
Approach
Movements have long relied on creative collective responses to crises as strategic opportunities for visionary organizing. A nationally recognized philanthropy culture disruptor and praxis leader, Emergent Fund challenges power inwho we fund as well as withhow we fund.
Emergent Fund believes that the experts are, definitively, directly impacted communities themselves. Organizing is more art and alchemy than science, and expertise in communities and the best opportunities to help them require whole lifetimes of lived experience. Our grant decision-makers—all people of color and Indigenous organizers—come from directly impacted communities committed to building movement and transforming crisis into change. The Advisory Council are proudly immigrant, Latinx, Muslim, Black, Native, Asian and LGBTQ movement leaders, visionaries, well-trusted organizers from the communities that the Fund was created to serve.