The Fund to Build Grassroots Power is a New York City-based left-of-center donor fund that gives money to environmentalist organizations. It gives money to four activist organizations and their affiliates. The fund is operated by the JPB Foundation.

The fund is a fiscally sponsored organization of the Windward Fund. The Windward Fund is the environmentalist fiscal sponsor fund in the network of funds controlled by the for-profit organization Arabella Advisors.

The first call for proposals were closed in May 2019 with over a $1 million in grants eventually awarded. ¹

Overview

The Fund to Build Grassroots Power is a left-wing donor fund that awards grants to left-of-center environmentalist organizations. It does this by funding four networks of environmentalist organizations. ²

The four environmentalist networks are the Climate Justice Alliance, Partnership for Working Families, People’s Action, and the Environmental Justice Forum. The fund awards money to organizations that are members of those networks and their affiliates. ³

Organization Structure

The Fund to Build Grassroots Power is a fiscally sponsored organization of the Windward Fund. The Windward Fund is a left-wing fiscal sponsor that works mostly with environmentalist groups. The Windward Fund is the environmentalist fiscal sponsor of the Arabella Advisors network. The network of organizations run by the Arabella Advisors acts as a conduit for liberal “dark money” that allows left-wing funders to give unlimited amounts of money to causes without a detailed trail.  Among the donors to the Windward Fund are left-wing foundations including the Walton Family Foundation and the David and Lucile Packard Foundation among many others. ⁴

The fund is operated by the New York City-based JPB Foundation. The JPB Foundation and Arabella Advisors, which is the for-profit left-wing group that administers the Windward Fund, began working to create the fund in 2017. The two organizations saw a need to support the infrastructure of the targeted environmentalist groups. ⁵

The organizations saw that the needs of the groups could be different from the priorities of funders. For example, many funders may only want to fund environmental issues. Instead, the groups that the fund targets also work on left-progressive racial and social policy issues in addition to environmental issues. ⁶

First Round of Giving

The Fund to Build Grassroots Power awarded its first round of grants sometime after May 2019. The organization issued a request for proposals for awards that closed in May 2019. ⁷

The fund did not have an open proposal but was only open to members and affiliates of Climate Justice Alliance, Partnership for Working Families, People’s Action, and EJ Forum. The fund only awarded grants for organizations that did work inside the continental boundaries of the United States. ⁸

The first round of donations sought to fund a diversity of left-progressive organizations such as women, youth, the LGBT, and low-income communities. However, it prioritized organizations run by illegal immigrants, refugees, African Americans, and Native Americans. ⁹

The group also had a geographical priority of the Southeast and Midwest. Forty-eight percent of all grants went to groups based in the Southeast and Midwest. ¹⁰

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