The US Human Rights Fund (the Fund), a collaborative fund comprised of nine national and regional donors, is pleased to announce $650,000 in grants to be awarded to ten domestic social justice organizations for their work to promote human rights in the United States. The Fund provides strategic, field building support to U.S. human rights organizing and advocacy, and seeks to increase overall awareness of and resources for this work amongst its members and other donor partners. In its June 2007 docket, the Fund made grants in the areas of human rights education and training and strategic thought and advocacy. A grants list is attached.

Over its initial two dockets, the Fund made significant investments in cross issue and introductory human rights trainings. The Fund’s June 2007 docket builds on these areas of work, and provides support for human rights education and training programs within specific issue areas that enable individual organizations to carry out related human rights advocacy campaigns. Grants will support training and education initiatives within the areas of racial justice, immigrant rights, housing, and health and reproductive rights, and will include participation by national, state and local advocates. The docket also features two strategic thought and advocacy grants that support state based human rights campaigns to eliminate juvenile life without parole policies. In this area, the Fund prioritized collaborative projects that engage policy and grassroots constituencies and that also meaningfully use and refer to human rights in order to advance key advocacy objectives.

The Fund aims to complete its fourth docket in January 2008. It will consider proposals that focus on coordinated communications work and messaging of domestic human rights, as well as human rights training and education initiatives with a specific focus on grassroots, and legal and policy sectors. The docket will be a closed application process, and the Fund will be in direct contact with those organizations from which it seeks to receive a proposal.

The next open Request for Letters of Inquiry is expected to be released in December 2007, for grants to be awarded in June 2008. Although the Steering Committee has yet to make a final determination of the focus and priority areas for this docket, it anticipates inviting applications to support strategic thought and advocacy work. The docket will be highly competitive. The Fund expects to make no more than ten or eleven grants for its June 2008 docket.

The Fund is housed at Public Interest Projects and was launched in July 2005. Its Steering Committee is comprised of members from contributing foundations, including The Atlantic Philanthropies, the Ford Foundation, The Libra Foundation, the Mertz Gilmore Foundation, the Otto Bremer Foundation, The Overbrook Foundation, the Shaler Adams Foundation, the Starry Night Fund of the Tides Foundation, and an anonymous donor.