Building power in communities that have been historically marginalized by systems of oppression requires significant financial scale and collaborative efforts. Common Counsel Foundation specializes in working with a variety of stakeholders, including donors, institutional funders, and grassroots organizations to design, manage, and evaluate multi-million dollar collaborative pooled funds tackling a range of intersectional social justice issues. We have a track record of developing community- and movement-led collaborative grantmaking vehicles at scale.

Our community of grassroots leaders, nonprofits and funders are committed to pursuing transformative approaches that will achieve well-being and housing for all in California.

Through investments, strategic coordination, growing and strengthening connections within and across movement, we support communities gaining control of the land on which they live – not just for profit but for the well-being of the people that live there.

Through the COCP Fund, we will grow the capacity of community ownership groups to acquire, govern, and maintain their own community spaces as well spearhead the creation of an integrated capital acquisition fund of at least $100 million, the state’s first to be governed directly by communities.

Native Voices Rising is a research, donor education, re-granting, and capacity-building collaborative created and led by Common Counsel Foundation and Native Americans in Philanthropy. Native Voices Rising is designed to support organizing, advocacy and civic engagement in American Indian, Alaska Native, and Native Hawaiian communities.

Common Counsel’s Grassroots Exchange Fund (GXF) is a rapid response small grants program designed
to support networking and collaboration between grassroots social change organizations throughout the
United States.

GXF grants help small community-based organizations to engage in collaborative campaigns, strengthen cross-region and cross-sector movements, and participate in organizing, training and technical assistance trainings.

Community-based organizations have steadfastly built the people power needed to win, and are poised to mobilize in support of democracy, resilience, and power-building efforts. In a rapidly changing social and political landscape, grassroots organizations are at the front lines, protecting and supporting vulnerable communities, such as immigrant, Black, Arab and Muslim, Native-American, women, working-class, and LGBTQ communities. Philanthropy needs to move flexible, responsive funding for equitable community priorities and needs that support democracy, resilience, and community-led power.

What makes Still We Rise unique:

Community-Informed Grantmaking – grassroots leaders inform the grantmaking process, priorities, and decisions

Responsive, Flexible Funding – grant awards can be quickly deployed to support ongoing and planned efforts, with grants reviewed and deployed on a weekly basis

Streamlined Proposal/Reporting Requirements – minimizing the proposal and reporting process to maximize the impact of funding dollars

The Still We Rise Fund is currently not accepting applications.

Common Counsel Foundation helps build the capacity of social justice organizations. We provide fiscal sponsorship and operational support so organizations can continue to deepen and expand their organizing and movement building work.

Color Congress is a national collective of majority people of color (POC) and POC-led organizations aimed at centering and strengthening nonfiction storytelling by, for and about people of color across the United States and territories. We do this by supporting, resourcing, and connecting these organizations and building their collective power so they can be a more powerful force for change.

Color Congress is supported by the Ford Foundation JustFilms, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, and the Perspective Fund.

The Movement for Black Lives (M4BL) formed in December of 2014, was created as a space for Black organizations across the country to debate and discuss the current political conditions, develop shared assessments of what political interventions were necessary in order to achieve key policy, cultural and political wins, convene organizational leadership in order to debate and co-create a shared movement wide strategy. Under the fundamental idea that we can achieve more together than we can separately.

The Movement for Black Lives is an ecosystem of over 150 organizations that provides the infrastructure for Black-led movement building across the country. M4BL works to create a shared movement-wide strategy for how to improve the lives of all Black people. M4BL’s ecosystem represents organizations that coordinate actions, messages, and campaigns across the United States. This movement is driven by leadership anchored to eight tables that help coordinate members and recommend strategy: 1) Policy, 2) Organizing & Base Building, 3) Electoral Justice, 4) Cross-Movement & Multi-Racial Solidarity, 5) Resource, 6) Abolishing Patriarchal Violence, 7) Mass Engagement, and 8) Strategy.