Eligibility

Welcome!

The first step in applying for a grant from the Righteous Persons Foundation is to ensure your program’s eligibility. As a private foundation, we can only provide grants to 501©(3) organizations. If your organization does not have tax-exempt status, you can submit an application through a 501(c)(3) organization serving as your fiscal sponsor.

While our work always begins with the question What’s possible? we know that it is helpful to have a clear sense of our funding priorities before taking the time to create and submit an application. So we’ve detailed some areas of focus below.

Before diving deeper, please note that the Righteous Persons Foundation has limited funds and is unable to provide grants to all of the many worthy programs that are eligible and match our priorities; as a result, a small percentage of the LOIs we receive advance to the proposal stage.

What We Fund:

Guided by the belief that the 3,500-year-old Jewish Story has resonance today, RPF supports efforts to build a vibrant, just, and inclusive Jewish community in the United States. While past grants have been made in a number of areas, the Foundation is currently focused on organizations and projects that are national in scope and:

• Contribute to a fuller, more expansive Jewish Story by shining a light on the vibrancy, complexity, and diversity of Jewish life and the meaning it holds
  
• Express the Jewish value of human dignity by building relationships across religious divides to reduce antisemitism and racialized hate
  
• Strengthen faith-rooted moral leadership and advance social justice
  

What We Don’t Fund

We do not fund the following types of organizations and initiatives:

• Those that are not national in scope
• Programs or organizations that service individuals and communities outside of the United States
• Direct aid to individuals
• Individual synagogues or day schools
• Conferences, seminars, and workshops
• Capital and/or building campaigns
• Scholarships and university programs
• Fundraising events and/or mass mailings
• Endowment funds
• Support to cover an existing deficit

In the rare case that RPF provides funding to establish an endowment, the Foundation prohibits any deduction from the endowment to cover overhead, indirect expenses, and/or administrative fees.