AMHERST’S PEACE DEVELOPMENT FUND ANNOUNCES COMMUNITY ORGANIZING GRANT CYCLE.

The Peace Development Fund (PDF), based in Amherst, is excited to announce that the Community Organizing Grant Cycle for 2020 is now open for application and will close on December 30. ^. Every year, PDF receives hundreds of applications from a diverse range of peace-building and social justice organizations from across the country. Since 1981 it has provided more than $43 million in program services (including grants and training) to 2,658 social change groups. 

PDF supports organizations that are:

1) Organizing to shift power. Groups whose leadership comes directly from the people who are most affected by the issues they are organizing around.

2) Working to build a movement. Groups that organize in the local community, but make connections between local issues and a broader need for systemic change.

3) Dismantling oppression. Groups and projects that are proactively engaged in a process of dismantling oppression, confronting privilege, and challenging institutional structures that perpetuate oppression.

 4) Creating new structures. Efforts to create new, community-based systems and structures (economic, political, cultural, religious, etc.) that are liberating, democratic, and environmentally sustainable, and that promote healthy, sustainable communities

Other funding priorities include community organizations working on climate change issues at the local policy level; groups that have a genesis in Occupy, #MeToo, or Movement for Black Lives; collaborative peace initiatives led by women; or issues that are not yet recognized by progressive funders. For more details on PDF’s grant guidelines and application process, please look here. A comprehensive list of previous grant recipients can be found here. 

History
PDF was founded in 1981 by Bob Mazur and Meg Gage, who brought together a small group of donor activists with the common vision of funding social justice and peace through a public foundation. PDF was founded on the belief that lasting change will come only when a large number of people are well informed and empowered to make change. PDF has always believed that true democratic change must come from the bottom up. Throughout its history, PDF has looked at peace not just as the absence of war or militarism but as the presence of equitable relationships among people, nations, and the environment.

Organizations that received PDF support in 2019 include Springfield No One Leaves, People Helping People in the Borderzone, the Cooperative Economics Alliance of NYC, and the United Taxi Workers of San Diego.  One 2019 grantee, the Alliance to Mobilize Our Resistance based in Providence, Rhode Island, had this to say about receiving a Community Organizing Grant: “The support from PDF will allow us to hire new staff and will allow us to organize more workers, train more leaders, recover more stolen wages, get more people out of detention, stop more deportations, and deepen our ability to pursue systemic changes in the areas of economic justice, immigrant and human rights.”

The Current Campaign
Peace Development Fund is busy raising money to enable them to issue more grants to more organizations on the frontlines of the peace and social justice movements. You can support PDF’s 2020 Community Organizing Grant cycle by making a contribution to its end-of-year fundraising drive here.  If you are interested in supporting local community organizations, PDF invites you to get involved with the Pioneer Valley Community Advised Fund, a grant-making initiative geared specifically toward social justice organizations in the Pioneer Valley.  Together, we are supporting and promoting a broad-based, vibrant and engaged community organizing movement, rooted in local communities. When you partner with PDF, you are supporting the frontlines of the peace and social justice movement.

For more information, please contact Brennan Tierney at Brennan@peacefund.org.