Women- and Indigenous-led community funds are rewriting the rules of US philanthropy

Large foundations still set the terms of American giving. Yet beside them, a quieter set of institutions has been working on another model for decades: women’s funds, giving circles, and funds led by Indigenous communities. They differ in size, budget and politics, but what they share is a belief that decisions about money should be made by, and with, the people those decisions affect.

In Boston, for example, a grassroots organization can receive money from the Boston Women’s Fund without ever filling out a grant application. The fund does not send out a request for proposals for its Community Impact grants. Instead, the public nominates groups, and an allocations committee made up of community members interviews the leaders and the people they serve. The fund’s 2023 grants followed what it calls “Requests for Conversations,” which replaced written applications so that grassroots leaders could keep their time for their own organizations.

It is a small detail, but it shows what happens when the people closest to a problem help control the purse. The questions philanthropy usually answers from the top—namely who is trusted, who carries the risk, and who makes decisions—get answered differently.

A different map of philanthropy

The oldest example of this model at the national level is the Ms. Foundation for Women, founded in 1972 by Gloria Steinem, Patricia Carbine, Letty Cottin Pogrebin and Marlo Thomas. A 1995 case study by Kathleen D. McCarthy from the Center for the Study of Philanthropy at CUNY describes it as the first multi-issue national women’s fund and asks how a foundation like it can bring women of color and low-income women into decision making alongside wealthier donors. In 2018, the foundation announced a five year strategic plan that set aside $25 million for organizations led by and for women of color. In 2021 it reported that 90 percent of its grantee portfolio was made up of organizations led by women and girls of color.

Trust, in this model, is built into the structure: you are giving alongside people you know, to causes you have debated.

In the traditional model, grantees are often asked to prove themselves through applications, reporting requirements and short grant cycles, all of which assume that the funder needs protection from the grantee.

Community funds work from a different assumption. The Ms. Foundation makes general operating support grants, which let organizations decide for themselves how to spend money rather than tying it to a funder’s chosen project. It also does not accept unsolicited applications, working primarily through an invitation-only process, which is one way a women-led fund keeps its own gates.

The Boston Women’s Fund, founded in 1984 as the first women’s foundation in Massachusetts, describes itself as participatory and tries to give grantees funding that runs over several years wherever it can. Its allocations committee decides by consensus. In 2023 it granted more than $400,000 to 22 grassroots organizations, a 44 percent increase over the previous fiscal year. All were led by women or gender expansive people, and 95 percent of those leaders were people of color. In July 2025 it announced more than $475,700 in grants, supporting 19 grassroots organizations. These are not large sums by the standards of national foundations, but they are growing.

Giving circles extend the same idea to individual donors. Members pool their money and decide together where it goes. Research by the Collective Giving Research Group found that giving circles tripled in number between 2007 and 2017, reaching about 1,500 groups that had given as much as $1.29 billion since their founding. In 2020, Jason Franklin reported in NPQ that almost half of all circles were women’s circles, with significant growth in Jewish, Asian and Pacific Islander, African American, and Latinx circles. A follow up study found that circle members give more and give more strategically and proactively than non-members. Trust, in this model, is built into the structure: you are giving alongside people you know, to causes you have debated.

How risk is shared

In conventional philanthropy, risk often falls on the grantee. Funding arrives in short cycles, with heavy reporting, and can disappear when a foundation changes its priorities.

Native Americans in Philanthropy (NAP), founded in 1990, has documented what that looks like at scale. A report it produced with Candid found that Native communities, which make up about 2 percent of the U.S. population, received on average only 0.4 percent of total annual foundation funding. Only 20 percent of large foundations gave to Native communities and causes at all, and many of those gave intermittently. The report said this instability makes long-term relationship building between Native communities and the philanthropic sector very difficult. It tracked giving from 2002 to 2016.

NAP’s response has been to ask funders to commit more. Its Seeds of Connection initiative, launched in early 2025, held four gatherings in the Southwest and West with 65 participants, set up a community of practice, and awarded $300,000 in challenge grants to four community foundations. The grants come with matching requirements, so the foundations must direct their own funds to Native communities as well.

Collective decision making also spreads responsibility. When a committee or a circle decides, no single program officer carries the whole judgment. The Boston Women’s Fund, for example, says it supports both startup and ongoing grassroots efforts, including groups that conventional funders tend to overlook.

Accountability matters

Traditional foundations are accountable upward, to boards, donors and regulators. Community funds add accountability sideways and downward, to the people they fund.

The Boston Women’s Fund puts community members on its all-volunteer allocations committee and describes its approach as informed, responsive, participatory and transparent. The Ms. Foundation, which was started by four white women, has since built its grantmaking around organizations led by women of color. NAP’s work with community foundations is, in the words of its funder the Mott Foundation, aimed at improving equity, accountability and inclusion for Native communities. It follows a 2023 NAP report assessing how community foundations interact with Native communities.

This kind of accountability is harder to measure than a financial audit, but it may change behavior. A fund that has to explain itself to the neighborhoods it serves may be less likely to drift toward the preferences of its largest donor.

What changes when the purse changes hands

None of this is a replacement for large philanthropy. The numbers are modest next to the budgets of the biggest foundations: The Boston Women’s Fund’s yearly grantmaking is in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. Participatory processes take time, and not every community is equally easy to reach through nominations or circles.

There is also a risk in treating these funds as a feel-good side story. If large foundations point to community funds as proof that the sector is changing while their own giving stays the same, the model becomes cover rather than challenge. The figures on Native funding show how real that danger is.

Yet taken together, these funds suggest a simple lesson: The rules of philanthropy are not natural laws. Who is trusted, who carries the risk, and who is answerable are design choices, and they can be made differently.

The women’s funds, giving circles, and Indigenous-led networks described here are not asking large foundations to give more generously in the old way. They are showing what it looks like to change who decides. For a sector that has spent years talking about power, they offer something more useful than another statement of principle: working examples.