“North Star”. A human figure with hands in the air holding an abstract diamond or star.
About us
The Partnership Fund and Partnership Action Fund (collectively the funds) is a c3/c4 pooled fund focused on building independent political power. We understand power to be the ability to define reality, set an agenda, win it, implement and maintain it. We believe no one organization can do this alone. Our key strategy is to build co-governing ecosystems in states rooted by membership based organizations.
North Star Vision
The Partnership Fund invests in member-led organizations and networks because they are necessary vehicles to develop and exercise independent political power. We prioritize organizations that center the leadership and lived experiences of people most impacted by inequality and historically excluded from democratic practices. This is rooted in our belief that systemic inequalities, including racial and gender injustice, are most effectively addressed when driven by the lived experiences of and leadership of impacted communities. As such, the Partnership Fund is committed to building independent political power through organizations that center the leadership and experiences of directly impacted communities, including Black women, immigrants, women of color, and LGBTQ people.
Our Approach
The Partnership Fund’s community works together through the framework and vision of developing independent political power (IPP) that is rooted in, and accountable to, multi-racial and multi-class bases within states. Since 2014 our commitment has been to trusting general support commitments to grantees: through election cycles, transitioning leaders, shifting priorities in philanthropy, and an entrenched divisive political and social climate.
In each state we work in the Fund supports one or more ‘anchor’ organization who center strategic alignment and collaborative work across a host of advocacy, voter-engagement and related capacities to build a robust movement building ecosystem. The Funds further support those anchor-organizations’ core collaborators to align multi-racial base-building efforts, civic engagement, policy and corporate campaigns as well as special-opportunity projects that accelerate a cohort’s ability to make and sustain change in their state.
We believe that racial justice organizations are key anchors in the struggle to win true democracy and liberation. The Partnership Fund’s anchor organizations are membership based, anti-racist in their approach, collaborative and focused on building and exercising governing power. Our core investment strategy centers deep investments in organizations led by people of color aligned with pre-existing infrastructure. We know these organizations are under-resourced and believe that investing in Black, Latinx, Indigenous, undocumented and gender non conforming leaders and organizations is necessary for democracy to realize its full potential and to strengthen and deepen existing state infrastructures. This moment calls for investments that build multiracial ecosystems in states at a scale that can build and exercise independent political power.
Funding Strategies
Building Independent Political Power through membership
We support movement building ecosystems in Virginia, Minnesota, New Mexico, Michigan, Ohio and more recently in Florida and Missouri to build Independent Political Power. We support membership based organizations and their closest allies in these states. We back the sophisticated leaders in these states who know best what they need on the front lines through multi-year general operating support.
Conjuring the Infrastructure of the Future
The Partnership Fund has been studying progressive state-based infrastructure in our grantee states. The cores of our modern progressive political infrastructure emerged in 2003 when a famous powerpoint was presented by Rob Stein became a clarion call among national organizations, foundations and among the consultant class to build infrastructure to mirror the rights massive coordinated network of funders, media, leadership develop organizations, networked outreach organizations etc. The infrastructure was designed to increase coordination, reduce duplication and increase scale.
While the infrastructure developed over the last decade has had significant impact - it has also had major challenges with diversity and inclusion. Our core strategy and aim is to work with BIPOC organizations to evolve and develop the infrastructure for the next decade rooted in meeting the needs of the communities closest to the pain. We are called by the leadership of our grantees to invest in infrastructure to promote wholeness through an intersectional analysis, and to ensure we examine our own role at the funds as infrastructure and ensure our approach is helping usher in a new paradigm of infrastructure the field needs.
Independent Resource Generation
Over the past several years, funders including Solidago, the Ford Foundation, the Open Society Foundations, and The Evelyn and Walter Haas, Jr. Fund, have funded individual organizations’ experiments, as well as new intermediaries tasked with working with groups in the field on the issue of alternative resource generation. We have heard from grantees the critical importance of autonomous resource generation to true independence. As a grantee of the Amalgamated Foundation’s Independent Resource Generation Hub, The Partnership Fund supports this experimentation and is particularly focused on supporting BIPOC membership based organizations to develop enterprise experiments (membership development, cooperatives, small community based businesses etc). As part of this commitment, we’re supporting a new program, the collective courage fund, supporting experiments and explorations into building black political power with cooperatives. Learn more about our approach to cooperatives on our collective courage fund page.
Emerging Southern Strategy
When we think about the transformation of the United States and the desire for a racially and economically just America, our only option is to first consider the south. As the historic heart of the slave economy in the United States, again and again white liberals have proved unwilling to deal with the question of race necessary to true political and progressive power building in the region. In 2020, in collaboration with the Southern Partners Fund, we are exploring what a funding strategy that centers healing and economic wholeness to right these historic wrongs and build true black political power in the south might entail. Read more on our emerging southern strategy page.
The Partnership Fund is a project of the New Venture Fund – a section 501(c)(3) non-profit organization. The Partnership Action Fund is related to but should not be confused with The Partnership Fund. The Partnership Action Fund is a fiscally sponsored project of the Sixteen Thirty Fund, a section 501(c)(4) non-profit organization.