Emergent Fund, founded in 2016, is a national rapid response fund created to explicitly support Black, Indigenous, and people of color-led social justice movements. The Fund supports work grounded in movement values, power-building, and organizing in Black, Indigenous, and people of color communities.
Rapid response and emergent organizing grants are provided for movement and frontline communities responding to urgent and specific unanticipated crises or opportunities to build power.
From family separation to Muslim bans to continued violence against Black communities, the Fund's grantees are BIPOC organizers and directly impacted communities responding to the biggest crises of the times.
The Fund supports the following types of efforts:
- organizing that supports emergent strategies that help communities respond to rapidly changing conditions, including resisting new or amplified threats, building power to move a proactive agenda, and creating communities and cultures of care;
- organizing that leverages "moveable" moments to advance long-term social and economic justice in a political and social climate that seeks to dismantle such efforts; and,
- organizing seeking to dismantle, abolish, and replace systems of oppression and harm, driven by a clear intersectional power analysis and vision for collective liberation.
Organizations must have 501(c)(3) or 501(c)(4) tax status, or a fiscal sponsor, in order to be eligible.
Restrictions Details
Support is not provided to/for:
- applications on an annual or monthly basis for ongoing general operating support or supplemental funding to address budget shortfalls (including back-to-back, repeated proposals);
- government or state agencies;
- universities;
- direct services/community programming without an organizing foundation;
- religious institutions and affiliated programs;
- international work;
- for-profit business;
- social enterprise;
- start-up costs;
- capital-raising campaigns;
- individuals (activists, consultants); or,
- work or entities that promote or collude with systems of oppression and harm or that lack sound power analysis or understanding of collective liberation.
Application Procedures
Application guidelines are available on the Fund's website. Applications must be submitted online.