FACT ~ About

© Photography by David Bacon. All rights reserved.

In order to have a greater impact during the lives of its founders, FACT plans to completely distribute its endowment no later than 2012. In April 2011, the foundation made final grants to its portfolio of U.S. grantee organizations and will close its U.S. program at the end of 2011. The program in France will close a year later.

Our mission is to help develop and sustain the field of progressive community organizing and advocacy. We believe we can meet this objective more effectively by giving more to address today's problems in a single generation rather than giving less over several generations.

FACT believes that everyone is entitled to fair and just treatment, basic living standards, equality of opportunity, and a voice in the decisions that affect them and their communities, and that individuals and institutions should be accountable for their actions. Our model of long-term, systemic change seeks to help individuals to fully realize their power by organizing at the grassroots level and forming democratic, community-based groups to advocate on their own behalf to develop public policies that serve their collective interests. We support multi-issue organizations that seek to prevent rather than simply remediate the root causes of social inequality and injustice in the U.S. and France.

Theory of Change

In order to create a more just and participatory society, we believe the following elements are needed:

Politically educated and organized constituencies of people;
Strong and effective constituency-led organizations that prioritize leadership development, organizing and advocacy at the state, regional and national levels with a global perspective;
Policy solutions defined by impacted low income and communities
of color;
Strategic alliances with like-minded organizations in different sectors;
Collaboration with other organized sectors such as faith, labor
and advocacy;
Voter education, registration and get out the vote work that is integrated into the work of the organization; and
Political leverage and power to create and sustain change at different levels of decision making.

To support those efforts, we provide $3.5 million in annual grants to democratic, community-based organizations (see our funding guidelines). We seek to leverage our dollars in the philanthropic community by elevating our funding and capacity-building models and showing their merits. We seek to advocate on behalf of our grantees by elevating their work and successes and by helping to fund them fully. We seek to collaborate with our foundation allies by building on our shared knowledge and experience to support the internal systems and sustainability of organizations to create a larger movement for justice.

FACT Services, Inc. oversees the Trust’s administrative, financial, grant making, and legal operations from offices in San Francisco, New York and Paris.