U.S. Human Rights Fund

The U.S. Human Rights Fund (USHRF) arose from a sense shared by a group of foundations and individual donors that greater U.S. adherence to the principles of human rights and humanitarian law benefits not only the United States but the wider world as well. The USHRF is a national funding collaborative, launched on July 4, 2005, to provide strategic, field-building support to U.S. human rights work.

The USHRF seeks to promote human-rights organizing and advocacy in the United States and to increase awareness of and support for this work among its own members and other donor partners. The Fund focuses in particular on domestic social justice groups actively engaged in U.S. human rights work and, more generally, to their links to the U.S. rights, legal and policy communities.

The USHRF provides support to domestic human rights organizations in four strategic areas that the field has identified as relating most directly to its core capacity needs:

  • Human rights education and training
  • Regional and national networks
  • Communications, and
  • Strategic thinking and advocacy

The USHRF also supports donor education on effective U.S. human rights grantmaking including research and reports such as Voices From the Field: Building Capacity in the Social Justice and Human Rights Movements in the United States, an of field organizations and funding strategies to meet their needs (Summer 2007).

Grantmaking

The Fund is a five-year initiative that seeks to raise $10 million. Since June 2005, it has raised over $13 million and has made grants totaling more than $5 million to over 40 organizations. Grants range from $25,000 to $75,000 per year, with some limited multiyear support. (See below).

Key donors

The USHRF is comprised of eleven general and three sub-fund donors. Current members include The Atlantic Philanthropies, Butler Family Fund, Ford Foundation, Four Freedoms Fund, Fund for Nonviolence, The John Merck Fund, The Libra Foundation, Mertz Gilmore Foundation, Open Society Institute, Otto Bremer Foundation, The Overbrook Foundation, Shaler Adams Foundation, Starry Night Fund of the Tides Foundation and an anonymous donor. The USHRF Steering Committee consists of representatives of each foundation.

For more information about the Fund and its work, visit the USHRF website.