North Star Fund

Many of the organization’s funding decisions are delegated to volunteer “community funding committees” of activists, rather than to the fund’s staff or board of directors. The organization also hosts more than 50 donor-advised funds and acts as fiscal sponsor for outside advocacy campaigns, including Communities United for Police Reform. It has received institutional support from the Ford Foundation, the Jerome L. Greene Foundation, the NoVo Foundation, and the Surdna Foundation. ^{2 3 4 5 6 7}

Background

The North Star Fund was organized in New York City in 1978 by Martin Bunzl and a group of 26 young people with inherited wealth. The foundation was originally formed as a New York City-centric community foundation. Its funding has also focused on left-of-center grantmaking in areas including racial and gender issues and LGBT causes. By its own accounting, it had awarded roughly $146 million to more than 3,000 organizations through June 2025. ^{8 1 9}

North Star Fund is the fiscal sponsor of Communities United for Police Reform, a left-of-center coalition that opposes New York Police Department practices with a focus on alleged “abusive and discriminatory policing.” The fund’s fiscal year 2025 return reported paying that coalition’s executive director $112,000. ^{3 1}

Activist-Controlled Grantmaking

The North Star Fund is unusual in that it delegates grantmaking decisions to committees of grassroots organizers, artists, and movement leaders rather than to paid staff or directors. In fiscal year 2025, four committees with close to 40 members allocated more than $3 million. ^{10 11 2}

North Star Fund also participates in the trust-based philanthropy movement, under which grant recipients face reduced reporting and transparency expectations and, in the movement’s own formulation, “alleviates power imbalance by putting the onus of due diligence on the grantmaker.” In 2025, the fund signed on to the Trust-Based Philanthropy Project’s “Meet the Moment” initiative. ^{12 13}

Organizations associated with the fund’s committee and board members have received grants through this process. Its disclosures for the fiscal year ending June 2018 reported “transactions with interested persons,” among them a $122,000 grant to Make the Road New York, where fund board member Kesi Foster was then an organizer, and a $50,000 grant to the National Day Laborer Organizing Network, whose regional coordinator, Gonzalo Mercado, also sat on the North Star Fund board. ^{14 15} Kesi Foster joined the administration of New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani (D) in 2026 as director of co-governance in the newly created Office of Mass Engagement. ¹⁶

Activities

The Let Us Breathe Fund, created in 2015 after the death of Eric Garner, restricted its grantmaking to Black-led organizations and had awarded more than $6 million as of June 2025; it moved $1.2 million to 63 grantees in fiscal year 2025. The fund’s New York City program moved $2.2 million to 91 grantees that year, and its Hudson Valley program $860,000 to 43 grantees. ²

The Statewide Power Fund, formed in 2023, awarded its first slate of grants in 2024: $1 million in two-year grants to seven left-of-center coalitions, among them Housing Justice for All, the Fund Excluded Workers coalition, the People’s Campaign for Parole Justice, and Invest in Our New York, which campaigns for higher state taxes. ^{17 2}

North Star Fund issued 86 rapid-response grants totaling $395,000 in fiscal year 2025. Recipients included National Students for Justice in Palestine, the Palestinian Youth Movement, the Palestinian Feminist Collective, Christians for a Free Palestine, the New York chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, and Make the Road New York. The fund added the Palestinian Feminist Collective and the Palestinian Youth Movement to its New York City grantee roster the same year. ²

The fund directs Community Food Funders, a network of regional grantmakers underwritten in part by the Surdna Foundation, and in 2021 partnered with Change.org to move $5.5 million to 35 Black-led nonprofits nationally. ^{7 10}

North Star Fund granted $25,000 to New Yorkers Defending Democracy in fiscal year 2024. That group, a 501(c)(4) and registered ballot-initiative committee, financed the No Power Grab NYC coalition, which campaigned against five 2024 New York City charter amendments advanced by then-Mayor Eric Adams (D). ^{18 19}

The fund made a further rapid-response grant to New Yorkers Defending Democracy in fiscal year 2025, and its annual report for that year presented the November 2025 mayoral election won by Zohran Mamdani (D) as a demonstration of what grassroots organizing and “solidarity” could accomplish. ²