The Fund for Nonviolence cultivates and supports efforts to bring about social change that moves humanity towards a more just and compassionate coexistence.

 

The Fund for Nonviolence, founded in 1997, is a non-endowed private foundation based in Santa Cruz, California. We currently have three primary grantmaking programs operating under the foundation’s overarching lenses of dismantling structural racism, challenging state violence, and promoting active nonviolence.

Main program areas:

  1. Reimagining Public Safety
  2. Death Penalty Abolition
  3. Reparations, Accountability & Healing

FNV also supports a set of continuing grantees through its Legacy Fund and is growing an Opportunity Fund to respond to urgent needs in additional areas.

Philosophy

Universal justice and peace are essential conditions for realizing individual and collective human potential. Violence is a dehumanizing obstacle to human potential. We recognize that violence can be direct or indirect, overt or built into social structures. Moreover, all forms of violence are interdependent and are best addressed in relation to one another.

We believe in the transformative power of nonviolence as a means of inspiring progressive social change.

By nonviolence, we mean a process of change that reflects today the new relations/new society that we seek to create in the future. This future is one of justice and peace, inseparable and for everyone. For us, the practice of nonviolence recognizes the interconnectedness of all beings, acknowledges the humanity of any opponent, and honors the spiritual dimension of human experience.

Grantmaking Priorities

We focus on social justice for marginalized communities and, in particular, on elevating the voices and leadership of people from those communities.

Because we believe that how we do our work fundamentally influences the results, we seek and encourage proposals that not only further our programs’ missions and goals but also come from organizations that:

  • pursue structural changes to root causes of race, class, and gender injustice
  • value the active involvement of members of the communities most impacted by the violence and social injustice being addressed
  • understand and articulate the impact of their work on women, nonbinary, and trans people and promote their leadership within the organization
  • work through networks, coalitions and alliances
  • reflect the spirit of nonviolence in their organizational relations, structure, and process
  • demonstrate the capacity to reflect on their experience and adapt to lessons and insights