Catalyze Fund Grant

Overview

_NOTES: Please note that due to our grantmaking capacity, Catalyze Fund's acceptance rate currently stands at 1-2 new organizations per cycle. Pillars team reads every submission, but we may not have time to respond to each one individually. We will follow up with you if we have questions or request additional information. If you have any additional questions and are interested in connecting further, the team would be happy to make time for a pre-application call._

Focus Areas

Through our Catalyze Fund, Pillars invests in a vibrant network of Muslim leaders who are developing thoughtful, multidisciplinary approaches to complex challenges of inequity and injustice and, in doing so, catalyze just public policy and social change. For this RFP, we are searching for Muslim-centered, justice-focused organizations whose missions and programs fall within one of the following three focus areas:

Reimagining Public Safety

Everyone deserves to feel safe in their homes, schools, places of worship, workplaces, and beyond. Too often, our communities experience racial and religious profiling and targeted policing in these spaces, jeopardizing our safety in our own communities. As a society, we must divest from harmful practices and invest in services and programs that promote individual and collective well-being. At Pillars, we support Muslim leaders and organizations who are working to end the unjust criminalization of our communities and who are promoting community-driven solutions that protect us all. Grantee partners reimagining public safety are organizing around mass surveillance, racial and religious profiling, immigrant detention and deportation, promoting prisoners' rights, and money bond/bail.

Promoting Mental Health and Wellness

Access to adequate health care—including mental health care—is a basic human right. Yet barriers to access prevent Muslims from receiving the mental health support they need, even as the demand for it grows. We need to build an infrastructure that reimagines what healing and holistic care can look like for our communities. At Pillars, we support the promotion of healthy communities and spiritually and culturally relevant mental health resources designed with Muslims in mind. Grantee partners promoting mental health and wellness are organizing around mental health awareness and education; public events and campaigns; coalition building; mental health research; spiritual abuse; and suicide prevention.

Building Civic Power

A true democracy demands transparency and fully informed, engaged citizens. However, entrenched inequality in the United States has kept many communities out of critical decision-making processes that have real-life consequences. We need to create more opportunities for full participation at all levels of civic life and to build the power necessary to reshape systems for the greater good. At Pillars, we support Muslim leaders who are organizing communities, creating timely and relevant civic media, training potential candidates, mobilizing voters, ad demographic and issue area research, and ultimately transforming our democracy to one that serves us all.

If you have any questions or concerns, check out our FAQ page.

Eligibility

_You can learn more about this opportunity by visiting the funder's website._

* To be considered for a Catalyze Fund award, organizations should:
* Center justice through racial equity and systems change lens. 
* Deeply center the expansiveness of Muslim communities
* Have direct alignment with one of our three focus areas