Liberty Hill Foundation
OVERVIEW: The Liberty Hill Foundation is an important source of support for grassroots organizations in the Los Angeles area. Recent grantmaking has focused on addressing environmental justice through urban clean energy initiatives, affordable housing, civic engagement, racial equity, immigrants’ rights, economic opportunity, LGBTQ rights and more.
IP TAKE: The Liberty Hill Foundation is an important grassroots social justice funder to know in Los Angeles. It is relatively accessible, inviting prospective grantees to complete an interest and alignment questionnaire on its website. Your proposal must center on community organizing to pique this funder’s interest. While more than half of Liberty Hill’s funding prioritizes SoCal, the rest of its grants invest in national organizations focused on social justice. If you’re a national organization, you’re more liking to secure funding here if your work also serves SoCal.
PROFILE: Sarah Pillsbury, Larry Janss, Win McCormack and Anne Mendel used their inherited wealth to establish the Liberty Hill Foundation in 1976. Since its early days, the Los Angeles-based foundation has “[c]hanged national policies, launched social change movements, transformed neighborhoods, and nurtured hundreds of community leaders who respond to the experience of injustice by fighting for their rights.” The foundation’s overarching goal is to “build power in communities most impacted by systemic injustice to achieve social justice and equity,” and its grantmaking spans across civic engagement and democracy, criminal justice reform, racial justice, climate change, housing and public health.
At any given time, this funder may run as many as ten grantmaking programs, several of which serve the Los Angeles area exclusively. Its current grantmaking programs are the Liberation Fund, Bold Vision Initiative, Fund for Change, Rapid Response Funds, emPower Outreach, Liberty Vote!, Our Kids Our Future, the Public Health Councils Program, Stay Housed LA, Ready to Rise and the Bertha Wolf and Lance Miller Families Fund for Community Service.
Grants for Civic Engagement and Democracy
Liberty Hill makes grants for civic engagement and democracy through its Fund for Change and Liberty Vote! programs.
The Fund for Change represents a $3.34 million two-year commitment to Los Angeles’s “local grassroots and community organizing ecosystem.”
Working in tandem with the Fund for Change, the Liberty Vote! programprovides operational support to groups involved in “community and electoral organizing” in Los Angeles County.
Recent grantees of these two programs include the Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment Action, the Ground Game Action Fund, the People Power Action Fund and Strategic Concepts in Organizing and Policy Education (SCOPE).
Grants for Criminal Justice Reform and Women and Girls
Liberty Hill’s focus on criminal justice reform has increased in recent years and prioritizes programs for youth development and effecting change in California’s youth justice and correctional systems. Grantmaking is conducted through the Our Kids Our Future and Ready to Rise programs.
Our Kids Our Future works specifically “to end youth incarceration as we know it in Los Angeles County.”
The Ready to Rise program, meanwhile, is a collaboration between Liberty Hill, the California Community Foundation and the Los Angeles County Probation Department that aims to improve outcomes and reduce involvement with the justice system for high youth.
Grantees from these programs include the Anti-Recidivism Coalition, the Arts for Healing and Justice Network, the Children’s Defense Fund of California and InnerCity Struggle.
The foundation also supports girls and gender expansive youth in the criminal justice system through its Liberation Fund grants program, which works to “provide an opportunity for community-based organizations who are experts in youth development, legal advocacy, and organizing to prioritize the unique experiences of girls and GE youth, and create strategies that meet their needs, while simultaneously addressing the systemic failures and practices that harm them.”
Grants for Racial Justice and Indigenous Rights
The Liberty Hill Foundation supports organizations pursuing racial justice across all of its grantmaking programs. The foundation’s Rapid Response Funds, however, were created specifically to support “community organizations pressing urgently for police accountability and committed to racial justice in Los Angeles with a focus on Black communities.”
Recent grantees working toward racial justice in the Los Angeles area include the Black Freedom Fund, which supports Black power-building and movment-based organizations” with sustained funding and resources,” and the Black Women for Wellness Action Project which aims to “use policy, electoral advocacy, and the power of narrative to reimagine a just new future where Black women and girls thrive.”
Liberty Hill’s partnership with the Bold Vision Initiative works “to ensure that L.A.’s Black, Native American & Indigenous, Latinx, Asian, and Pacific Islander youth thrive and meet their fullest potential.”
Grants for Climate Change and Clean Energy
Grants for climate change and clean energy are mainly sourced through Liberty Hill’s emPower Outreach program, which helps Californians “overcome barriers to sustainable energy usage commonly experienced in low-income and working-class communities of color.”
The initiative names sustainable home energy, “clean transportation and energy discounts and savings for households as areas of priority.
Through the initiative, Liberty Hill has partnered with and supported organizations including the Community Power Collective, the Coalition for Clean Air and the South Los Angeles Transit Empowerment Zone.
Grants for Housing, Homelessness and Community Development
Liberty Hill’s Stay Housed L.A. campaign focuses on vulnerable Los Angeles residents and supports organizations that help people to afford and remain in existing homes.
The foundation works with community organizations to increase public awareness about tenants and homeowners’ rights and to outreach and legal services to people in danger of losing their homes.
Recent grants and support from this program have gone to Burbank Tenants Rights, the Chinatown Community for Equitable Development, Housing Long Beach and Pomona United for Stable Housing.
Grants for Public Health
Liberty Hill supports health initiatives in Los Angeles County across all grant making areas. Health equity and access has been a focus of several of its grantmaking programs, and during the COVID-19 crisis it launched its Public Health Councils program, which provided community organizations with grants, education and technical assistance designed to help low-wage workers in various industries to understand and protect themselves against unnecessary health risks related to the pandemic.
Recent public health grantees include the Filipino Migrant Center, the Hospitality Training Academy, the Labor Community Strategy Center and Physicians for Social Responsibility Los Angeles.
Other Grantmaking Opportunities
Liberty Hill’s remaining grantmaking program, the Bertha Wolf and Lance Miller Families Fund for Community Service, provides grants of $6,500 to six individuals between the ages of 18 and 25 working for nonprofit organizations in Southern California. While this program has run an open application program in past years, it is unclear if the program will continue past its 2022 grant cycle. Check the program’s web page for updates.
Important Grant Details:
The Liberty Hill Foundation makes approximately $2 million in grants a year. Grants have been as large as $500,000, although most grants range from $5,000 to $50,000.
This funder mainly supports Los Angeles-based grassroots organizations, with only a few grants going to national organizations or organizations in other areas of the country.
This funder conducts most of its grantmaking via its Fund for Change and Liberty Vote! programs and invites prospective grantees to complete its Interest and Alignment form by a date in the middle of February each year. Full applications are accepted by invitation only.
The foundation makes contact information for its staff members available at its website.
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