Programs & Grants

The Peace Development Fund has five programs – grantmaking, capacity building/technical assistance (The Sustainability Project), donor and community advised funds, special initiatives and fiscal sponsorship. Since 1981 PDF has been able to provide to peace and social justice organizations across the United States and internationally more than $38 million in grants and program services to 2,686 emerging and social justice-focused organizations.

To learn more about our recent work, take a look at our 2023 Impact Report.

In addition, PDF has provided trainings to more than 3,100 people representing more than 1,200 community organizations across the United States and Mexico.

Program areas

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.

We have witnessed the negative effects of the United States as the world’s sole superpower, neo-liberalism and the globalization of capitalism. Recently, the limiting of civil liberties in the U.S. and abroad, decreases in funding for social services and the continued strengthening of the Right have serious consequences for our society. Some of these consequences include the widening gap between rich and poor, heightening militarization and use of U.S. 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, inclusive and nonviolent society is at the heart of our grantmaking program.

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