San Diego County’s Office of Equity and Racial Justice, which was established in 2020, has set aside $2 million to invest in 20 small, local nonprofits over the next two years.
Applications are open now and will close on Jan. 26. They plan to announce the first cohort of ten recipients in early March. Each organization will receive $100,000.
The program defines “small” as fewer than five employees and an operating budget of less than $500,000. They are targeting organizations working in social and racial justice fields in the following areas:
- Education
- Civic engagement and movement building
- Arts, media and culture
- Housing, community development & mobility
- Restorative justice and alternatives to incarceration
- Health and healing
- Financial literacy & economic development
- Food systems and environmental justice
The office’s director, Andrew Strong, said most of the area’s small nonprofits tend to come from BIPOC communities.
“A lot of times these folks may have full-time jobs and they're also running a nonprofit, and they're doing it pretty much for free,” Strong said. “We have a social responsibility to invest in those nonprofits, to invest in those people who have the lived experience. They have the deep, profound knowledge of why this work needs to happen.”
Strong said these organizations have historically been edged out of county funding by larger nonprofits. Partly because they can’t compete with the numbers impacted. And because they don’t have the same time, staff or resources to navigate all the red tape of grant applications and government contracts.
Strong said they’re working to make this application process as accessible as possible.
“We actually had a nonprofit called us, and the woman who runs the nonprofit is actually homeless themselves,” Strong said. “And she was asking if she could have, could she have a paper application because she didn't have access to the internet.”
The Office of Equity and Racial Justice will also be providing capacity-building training to the recipients. And unlike traditional contracts, the county will share the responsibility of meeting the grant outcomes.
They partnered with The Nonprofit Institute at the University of San Diego to oversee the process. Informational sessions are planned for January, date still to be determined.
Strong said they plan to evaluate the program with the intention of asking the county for more funds to continue after the second year.
