The vast majority of Cypress Fund’s grantmaking is given through Movement-Advised Grants. These grants are given to groups and individuals doing grassroots, community organizing in North and South Carolina. We strive to make grants that provide general operating support, as well as seek to give multi-year grants that will support our grantees from year to year. We give grants to a range of groups – individual organizers, 501c3 organizations, and fiscally sponsored groups – because our goal is to support social justice movements regardless of what stage of development they are in or what tax status they hold. Our Movement Committee, which consists of leaders within social justice movements from the Carolinas, advises Cypress Fund on this grantmaking.

Building a Leader Filled and Powerful Movement across the Carolinas

Movement Infrastructure Fund

Cypress Fund is committed to moving resources to support building powerful and leader-filled movements across the Carolinas. We recognize that movements need continuous general operating support funding and access to learning communities in order to develop and sustain movement infrastructure necessary to shift systematic oppressive systems. Cypress Fund’s Movement Infrastructure Fund provides multi-year general capacity funding for organizations and movement leaders building.

At the core of Cypress’s mission is a commitment to reparations through our donor organizing and grantmaking practices. Cypress’s grantmaking praxis is rooted in Black Queer Feminist theory as the central guiding principle. Black Queer Feminism utilizes an approach and political praxis that critiques the systems that reinforce racism, heteropatriarchal classism, and capitalist practices that create and systemize marginalized identities. Cypress’s grantmaking strategy focuses on supporting people with marginalized identities to have access to various forms of capital to become more self-determinate. These communities are recognized and invested in as Community Generators for developing just financing systems, new projects and experiments, ideas, institutions, and alternative structures and income that embody the liberatory future they seek to build that shifts ownership and capacity of resources to communities.