What’s Happening
Here’s the latest in news and updates from North Star Fund, including previous and upcoming grants, our current programming and our work to change philanthropy. Be sure to sign up for email or follow us on social media if you want to get our news delivered directly to you.
Thank You for an Amazing Summer Social
We knew that it would be amazing and emotional to see our community in one space again after all this time. Hundreds of New Yorkers came together to celebrate the power of grassroots organizing and raise almost $300,000 for North Star Fund's programs. Thanks to all of...
Connecting Powerful Organizing Across Geography: El Encuentro
In June, 2022 North Star Fund invited and hosted Black, Brown, and Indigenous movement leaders from Chile for a transnational organizing exchange with our grantees. Why does transnational organizing matter? Why does transnational organizing matter? And why should we...
Our Early 2022 Rapid Response Grants
Sometimes an emerging crisis or an urgent change in policy or the legislature creates opportunities for communities to come together and launch a new project. We support these moments of urgent organizing with Rapid Response grants. The paperwork burden of these...
Our 2021-22 Giving Project Wraps Up With A Bang
Spring 2022 has brought another cycle of our People Power Giving Project to its conclusion. This year's cohort—the fifth Giving Project we have offered—wrapped up after moving more than $200,000 to North Star Fund and the Let Us Breathe Fund. This was truly people...
Tips for How To Apply, Spring 2022
Thanks to all the folks who joined us for our March 2022 "How to Apply" online meetings. We've posted the recording below, and here's a slidedeck to explain more about our application process. Here's the video from our March 2022 How To Apply Webinar. (Please note...
Meet Our Spring 2022 Let Us Breathe Fund Grantees
To open up our 2022 grantmaking, we're pleased to announce our Let Us Breathe Fund renewals totaling $700,000. These are the second $20,000 installments of two-year grants awarded to 35 groups by the Let Us Breathe Fund Community Funding Committee to support Black-led...
Our March 2022 Power Lunch Highlights
Well over 100 people came together on Zoom for our March 2022 Power Lunch, and it was so great to see your faces! We wanted to share some highlights from the last year and preview what's ahead for our community. We covered a lot of ground in a short time, so here are...
Welcome to Our New 2022 Grantmakers
In the fall of 2021, we opened up a process to welcome new members to each of our three Community Funding Committees (CFCs). We're proud to convene these grassroots committees to review and select the grantees that make up our grants slates. Our CFCs are made up of...
2022 New Year’s Revolutions: Focused Giving During Distracting Times
Thank you to all of you who signed up for our 2022 New Year's Revolutions workshop. This was the first year we offered it entirely online. Kofo Anifalaje and and Jillian White offered self-reflection questions and concrete tools to make the process of creating a...
Our 2022 Zine – Dreams of a Better Future
Dear community, Happy Valentine’s Day! We know this day is supposed to be about romance, but organizing is our love language. This year we’re thinking about Cornel West’s quote “Justice is what love looks like in public.” Also in February, we honor Frederick Douglass’...
What You Might Not Know About Our Giving Project
North Star Fund is a proud member of a national Giving Project collaboration. The Giving Project is an innovative model that is being used by community funds across the country to expand our reach among diverse communities of donors and distribute more money to social...
Top Ten North Star Fund Highlights from 2021
Yes, we had the biggest grantmaking year ever in our 2021 calendar year (as partially explained by Pearl the cat in this video), but in the same year, produced a lot of unique and useful resources related to our local movements for justice, how to responsibly resource...
Our Fall 2021 Grants – $1 Million for Organizing
In spite of some positive signs earlier this year, the COVID-19 pandemic isn’t over–especially not in its economic and emotional consequences. The advent of a new variant just highlights that our times of economic and political uncertainty are going to continue. We...
Keeping up the pressure to move money
When North Star Fund was founded in 1979, it was in response to the crisis of economic inequality in New York City with racism at its foundation. It's at the core of our community that we challenge the unequal distribution of wealth and power so that we can have a...
Harnessing the Power of the Electorate, our November 21 Conversation
On November 16, 2021, New York Foundation and North Star Fund hosted an online conversation about Harnessing the Power of the New Electorate, the second report in our Streets to Statehouse series looking at the critical role of hyper-local grassroots organizing in...