Craigslist Charitable Fund

Background

In 2009, the Craigslist Charitable Fund was founded by Craig Newmark, owner and founder of the classified advertisements website Craigslist.

The organization previously funded groups that promote human rights, “justice,” education, the environment, transportation, non-violence, world peace, veteran’s issues, nonprofit journalism, open source, and the Internet. ² But as of 2026, the group has shifted its focus to almost exclusively fund animal rights groups and groups opposed to modern animal agriculture. ¹

Donations

Journalism

The Craigslist Charitable Fund has backed multiple journalism initiatives. In 2018, it teamed with the Knight Foundation to provide $1.2 million to the Duke University Reporters’ Lab to create a fact-check app called FactStream, to provide real time fact-checking. The information is drawn from three left-of-center journalism outfits: the Washington Post, Factcheck.org, and PolitiFact, a project of the Poynter Institute for Media Studies. ³

Among other nonprofit journalism outlets, the Craigslist Charitable Fund has made more than $125,000 in donations to the left-leaning ProPublica, at least $70,000 to the center-left Center for Public Integrity, at least $50,000 to the liberal Free Press organization, more than $25,000 to the Center for Investigative Reporting, at least $25,000 to the left-wing Center for Media and Democracy and at least $25,000 to Democracy Now, a left-wing media production outfit. ³

The Craigslist Charitable Fund says it also gives to several left-leaning journalism organizations, such as Alternet, the media watchdog Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, Mother Jones, and Pacifica Radio. It also funds the Poynter Institute, OpenStreetMap.US, Sunlight Foundation, and Skeptical Inquiry. ⁴

It gave $250,000 to the Wikimedia Foundation in 2017 to launch an initiative to combat harassment and toxic behavior on Wikipedia. The Craig Newmark Foundation gave another $250,000 to the effort. The grants were set to be used for developing tools for volunteer editors and staff to block harassers for the user-content-generated online encyclopedia. The focus was to be on detection and prevention, helping victims of harassment report, and blocking harassers and making it difficult for people to engage in trolling and doxing. ⁵

Policy Advocacy

The Craigslist Charitable Fund has financed several gun control organizations, such as the Brady Campaign, Stop Gun Violence, the Gun Safety Fund, and the Center to Prevent Gun Violence. ⁴ It also funds the anti-war group the Center on Conscience and War.

The Ploughshares Fund, a grant-making foundation dedicated to stopping nuclear weapons that was integral in the Obama administration’s Iran deal “echo chamber,” received between $25,000 and $99,000 from the Craigslist Charitable Trust, according to the Times of Israel. ⁶

Craigslist Charitable funds the left-of-center voter outreach group Voto Latino, the far-left think tank Demos, atheist groups Freedom from Religion Foundation and the Council for Secular Humanism, and large environmentalist groups such as the Sierra Club and the Union of Concerned Scientists. ⁴

The fund has given more than $375,900 to the Brennan Center for Justice, a left-of-center legal advocacy group from 2010 through early 2017, according to the Center for Public Integrity. The Craigslist Charitable Fund and the John D. and Catherine MacArthur Foundation were the largest donors to the League of Women Voters Education Fund. ⁷

Craigslist Charitable Fund also donates to the group Critical Resistance, which supports prison abolition, according to Politico. ⁸

Animal Liberation

Craigslist Charitable Fund has established regranting partners, through which it distributes funds. Among the regranting partners are ProVeg Grants, which intends to reduce meat consumption by 50 percent by 2040. Another partner is ACE Movement Grants, which funds “promising, early-stage, and underrepresented animal advocacy projects to gain new evidence about which interventions work best.” Another partner is Thrive Philanthropy, which works to eliminate modern animal agriculture. Another partner is Kickstarting for Good, which has a 15-week incubation program for new animal rights groups. Another partner is the Open Wing Alliance, which opposes modern chicken agriculture. Another partner is Animal Alliance Asia, which supports work in seven Asian countries. Another partner is the EA Animal Welfare Fund, which has used Craigslist Charitable Fund support to steer an additional $20 million in grants to CCF grantees. Another partner is The Pollination Project, which provides seed funding to groups, not just to animal rights groups. Another partner is Animal Advocacy Africa, which opposes modern animal agriculture. Another partner is Reporters for Animals, which reports on and exposes cases of animal cruelty. Another partner is Who Let The Docs Out, which funds documentary films with a focus on environmental and animal rights issues. ¹

In February 2026, supporters of Oregon’s Initiative Petition 28, which would ban nearly all hunting, fishing, pest control, and livestock slaughter in the state, announced that the campaign had received $30,000 from the Craigslist Charitable Fund, which was the largest single contribution from a group to the ballot measure. The initiative supporters said that the contribution would go to collecting signatures to get on the ballot for November 2026. ⁹

Team

Jim Buckmaster is the president of the Craigslist Charitable Fund. He is also the Craigslist CEO. He was formerly homeless, subsisting on a food budget of $1 a day. He is a vegan. ¹⁰

Annika Joy Quist is a philanthropic advisor to the Craigslist Charitable Fund. She became interested in animal-rights activism at the age of eight when she developed moral objections to eating meat. After becoming a vegan for eight years, she placed her plant biology Ph.D. at the University of California, Berkeley on hold to become a full-time animal rights and vegan activist. ¹⁰

David van Beveren is a philanthropic advisor to the Craigslist Charitable Fund. He is the founder and president of Vegan Hacktivists, a global network of vegan technologists building capacity for hundreds of organizations and activists across the animal protection movement using design, development, and data. He also co-founded Violet Studios, which helps with messaging and design services for animal rights activists, and manages the FAST Network, which is an anti-modern agriculture group. He also moderates major vegan-interest groups on Reddit. ¹⁰

Funding

The Craigslist Charitable Fund spent down its assets in 2020 and transferred $26,700,000 to the Fidelity Charitable Gift Fund. In that year, the group’s largest donations were $100,000 to the Electronic Frontier Foundation and $52,500 to Vegan Outreach, Inc. The group has not filed an independent tax return since 2020. ¹¹