$1 million from Facebook seeds Philadelphia Foundation’s new Black Community Leaders Fund

The Philadelphia Foundation is deploying $1 million it has received from Facebook to seed a new fund for Black-led nonprofits focused on the Black community, the foundation has announced.

Last year, Facebook said it would be distributing $20 million to support Black communities in the U.S. and joined with the foundation to address opportunities in the Philadelphia region.

The foundation said it would expand the new Black Community Leaders Fund to at least $5 million over time.

Phil Fitzgerald, the foundation’s executive director of grant-making, said that the goal is to achieve “better resourced Black-led and Black-serving nonprofits.”

“Reports and studies have shown that these organizations generally are undercapitalized,” Fitzgerald said. “They don’t have a lot of flexible funding and don’t have access to the same networks that white-led organizations have access to. So the goal is to really make sure that they are resilient and able to weather challenges, such as what COVID-19 did to a lot of marginalized communities, specifically Black communities.”

In addition to the money from Facebook, the foundation is contributing $500,000 from its discretionary funds to the effort. Support of $200,000 over two years has also been provided by the Barra Foundation. Another $100,000 is coming from the S. Albert Fund of the Philadelphia Foundation.

Grants will provide selected nonprofits with operational and capacity-building support to enable strong leadership, resilient operations and finances, and greater infrastructure to weather unexpected adversity.

“Through this focused effort, we want to raise awareness of the critical roles that highly effective Black organizations play in Black communities and how important it is to invest in their resilience and leadership,” Pedro A. Ramos, head of the foundation, said in a statement.

“We’re providing funding directly to the Philadelphia Foundation to build on its track record of supporting Black-led nonprofits and ensure that people locally are making the decisions about where these dollars are most needed and can have the most impact,” Marcy Scott Lynn, Facebook’s director of global impact partnerships, said in a statement.

The deadline for organizations seeking funding is June 30. Grants are expected to be distributed by September.