The Peace Development Fund has three primary foci in providing services to our Community Partners – grant making, capacity building/technical assistance, and fiscal sponsorship. Since 1981 PDF has been able to provide to peace and social justice organizations across the United States and internationally over $26.7 million in Program services. This includes over $19.8 million in direct grants to almost 2200 community organizations.

In addition, PDF has provided trainings to over 3100 people representing more than 1200 community organizations across the United States and Mexico.

The Peace Development Fund makes grants to organizations and projects working to achieve peaceful, just and equitable relationships among people and nations. We believe that the change in values needed to establish a more just and peaceful world can come about only if it is strongly rooted in local communities that value the importance of building movements to create systemic social change. These are communities that view everyone, especially young people, as a vital force in the transformation of society. We recognize young people’s ability to reshape our society politically, spiritually and culturally.

The Peace Development Fund is committed to supporting organizations and projects that recognize that peace will never be sustained unless it is based on justice and an appreciation of both the diversity and unity of the human family. We understand peace to be a consequence of equitable relationships—with our fellow human beings and with the natural environment of which we are a part and on which we depend.

Recently we have witnessed the negative effects of the United States as the world’s sole superpower, neo-liberalism and the globalization of capitalism, the limiting of civil liberties in the U.S. and abroad, decreases in funding for social services and the continued strengthening of the Right. Some of these consequences include the widening gap between rich and poor, heightening militarization and use of US military violence, increasing incidences of hate crimes and increasing poverty and unemployment. This is evidence that some of the institutional and structural causes of injustice, whether physical, social, or economic, remain largely intact.

Challenging those causes and developing community-based alternatives that promote a more just, nonviolent society is at the heart of our grant-making program. 

To see where PDF has funded, click here. To read more about groups supported by our grant-making programs click here to read their stories in our Annual Report and Newsletter.