A grantmaking program of Project Animal Freedom

The Animal Freedom Foundation

Project Animal Freedom’s grantmaking program: the part of our budget built to move money outward, to our own chapters first and to the wider movement next.

The plainest thing first

The Animal Freedom Foundation is a grantmaking program of Project Animal Freedom. It is not a separate legal entity. It has no separate board, no EIN of its own, no staff of its own, and no endowment. A gift to the Foundation is a gift to Project Animal Freedom, designated for grants.

We are naming it while it is small on purpose. It is easier to build the discipline of grantmaking, published criteria, written decisions, conflict-of-interest rules, and a report at the end, when the sums involved are in the thousands than to improvise it later when they are in the hundreds of thousands.

One of our own board policies says that no initiative may be described publicly at a stage above the one it has evidence for, so here is the stage. The Foundation is being formalized in 2027. Structured grantmaking begins in 2028. What exists today is the practice it is being built out of, and this page describes that practice honestly rather than dressing it up as a program.

The practice it is built out of

Two things Project Animal Freedom already does are, in substance, grantmaking. Neither is currently run like it.

We invest in chapters from central funds. A chapter organizer in a new city does not start from zero. Roughly $5,000 in direct seed funding supports a chapter’s first year of local programming, and the fully allocated cost of supporting a chapter, once central staff time, technology, insurance, and mentorship are counted, is closer to $18,000. Those are two different numbers measuring two different things, and we try to say which one we mean every time.

We give money to groups that are not ours. In 2025 we directed roughly 3% of our revenue to other organizations fighting for people, animals, and the planet. It is a modest sum on a $113,875 year. It is also, as far as we can tell, unusual for an organization our size, and it reflects something we actually believe rather than something we could afford.

What neither has is criteria published in advance, an application anyone can see, a written record of why one request was funded and another was not, or a report at the end saying what the money did. That is ordinary for an organization run on volunteer leadership. It is not good enough for an organization that intends to move real money through the Midwest. The Foundation is the name for fixing it.

Where the Foundation fits in our theory of change

Our theory of change rests on one wager: thriving local vegan communities are the foundation every other form of advocacy stands on. Build the community, and outreach, retention, activists, campaigns, and chapters follow from it. The fifth stage of that system is Multiply, where what works in St. Louis becomes something another city can run.

A chapter cannot multiply anything without money. So the theory of change carries a money layer, and it has two halves.

The first half is earned revenue. Every ticketed event we build in St. Louis is packaged so a chapter can host its own version, promote it to its own segment of one shared supporter database, and keep what it raises. That is deliberate: an organizer who has priced a ticket, asked local businesses for donations, filled a room, and closed the books has learned a skill that decides whether their group still exists in five years.

The second half is the Foundation. Earned revenue is the destination. Very few chapters arrive there in year one. Grants are the runway that gets an organizer from the first meeting to the first fundraiser, and they are what keeps a good chapter alive through a bad quarter. A movement that only funds groups already capable of funding themselves is not building anything new.

It also follows from something we have said since long before we had a name for it. Recruiting, training, and above all sustaining activists is foundational work that benefits the whole movement, not only the organization doing it. We think money should travel the same way our toolkits do.

What it funds first: our own chapters

For its first phase, the Foundation is primarily an internal grantmaker. Nearly all of it goes to Project Animal Freedom chapters.

That is a deliberate narrowing, for two reasons. The first is a theory of leverage: in a metro where we have not been able to identify a qualifying local animal rights organization, a few thousand dollars can pay for the first public events, the first table, and the first local mailing list that city has ever had. We think that money does unusually durable work. We have not measured it against every alternative use of the same money, and we are not claiming we have. The second reason is honesty about capacity. Moving money to independent organizations well requires governance we have not built yet, and doing it badly is worse than not doing it.

Internal grants are transfers within one corporation rather than regranting in the legal sense. We intend to run them with the same rigor anyway, because the discipline is the point.

Four shapes are under consideration for the first grant cycle. They are decisions we have not made yet, published here as intent rather than as an open program:

Seed grants for a new chapter’s first year, so an organizer can put on real events before anyone has heard of them.
Program grants for a specific event, campaign, or piece of local infrastructure a chapter has planned and costed.
Matching grants against money a chapter raises locally, so the grant rewards fundraising instead of substituting for it.
Small opportunity grants, decided quickly, for the thing that came up three weeks from now and will not wait for a quarterly cycle.

None of these are open. There is no application, no deadline, and nothing being solicited. Criteria will be published before the first window opens rather than written after the requests arrive, which is the same rule we hold ourselves to everywhere else.

This is new, and it is critically underfunded

We would rather say this plainly than let a donor work it out later.

There is no fund behind the Foundation. Project Animal Freedom has never had a dedicated grantmaking fund. Chapter investment has been financed out of the operating budget, the same money that pays for catering, insurance, printing, venues, and the campaigns themselves. In 2025 that budget was $112,597 in total expenses for the entire organization, across six chapters and more than a hundred events. Gifts restricted to a chapter or a program stay with that chapter or program. What a grant program would spend is unrestricted money, which everything else we do is also competing for.

There is no dedicated grantmaking reserve, no endowed fund, and no pool of assets set aside for the Foundation. We ended 2025 with very little cushion of any kind. In practice that means a grant we make in March is a program we cannot run in October, and that trade-off is currently invisible to everyone except the person making it.

Grantmaking is one of the hardest things a small nonprofit can raise money for. Donors fund what they can picture: an event, a chapter, a campaign, a person. Money we hand to somebody else sounds like overhead to people who have not thought about it, and like duplication to people who have. It is neither. It is the difference between an organization that can respond to an opportunity in another city and one that can only watch it pass.

This is why the Foundation is named on this page well before it is impressive. Underfunded is not a marketing posture here. It is the actual condition of the program, and it is fixable by exactly one thing.

What it grows into

The Foundation is the vehicle for a giving philosophy we already practice at a scale too small to matter much. Four things it becomes, in rough order:

Outward giving with a line in the budget. The roughly 3% of revenue we direct to other groups is currently a decision made once a year by one person. It should be a budgeted, criteria-driven, reported line that a donor can look at.
Grants to organizations that are not ours. The Midwest is full of groups doing serious work on almost no money. Some of them will always be better placed than we are to do a given piece of work in a given city, and we would rather fund that than compete with it.
Support for organizers as people. The alliance names an emergency assistance fund for organizers as long-term work, subject to legal and program-policy design. It is the kind of thing the Foundation would eventually carry, and it is genuinely difficult to do properly, which is why it is named here as ambition rather than as a feature.
Durability. The end state, years out, is a redistribution mechanism that keeps working when the people who built it have moved on, endowed rather than improvised.

Two boundaries we are setting now, before there is any money to argue about. Neither is imposed on us. Both are policies Project Animal Freedom is adopting for the Foundation, which is the point: the time to write a rule like this down is while you are the only one in the room.

Measurement does not decide funding. Project Animal Freedom runs the Midwest Animal Rights Index through the Animal Freedom Lab, and MARI will eventually assess organizations across the region. The organization holding the tape measure should not also be the one deciding who gets paid on the strength of it. So, as a policy of this program: MARI assessments will not function as an eligibility screen for Foundation grants, and being counted, mapped, surveyed, or named to the annual Top Ten will neither qualify an organization for money nor disqualify it. This is a firewall the Foundation is adopting, not a rule the alliance handed us, and it is written here so that it exists before the first time someone would benefit from it not existing.

Grants outside Project Animal Freedom are not ours alone to hand out. The Midwest Animal Rights Alliance names regranting as long-term work subject to independent governance, and commits that if the alliance ever distributes funds, those decisions sit with a multi-organization committee under conflict-of-interest rules rather than with Project Animal Freedom staff. That commitment governs the alliance. We are choosing to hold the Foundation to the same standard for any grant to an organization we do not control, whether or not it runs through MARA, because the reason for the rule does not change depending on which letterhead the money leaves on.

Where it sits in the four-year plan

The Foundation is classified as a Service in the Animal Freedom Renaissance portfolio, which means maturity is measured by whether other people can operate it from documentation rather than by how large it gets.

Phase	What the Foundation does
2027 Institution	Formalize. A published program description, a written scope, and the first criteria. This page is part of that.
2028 Infrastructure	Structured grantmaking begins: a real cycle, with applications, decisions, and reporting.
2029 Inspiration	Support replication. The Foundation funds work that other organizations run, and the model is documented well enough to be copied.
2030 Ideology	A durable redistribution mechanism rather than a discretionary line, backed by an endowment.

MARA organizes the movement, MARI measures it, MARM maps it, MARS brings it together, and the Foundation moves money toward the parts of it with the least.

What the Animal Freedom Foundation is not

Not a private foundation. In nonprofit finance, a foundation is usually a separate grantmaking entity with its own board and assets. This is not that, and we say so on the page rather than in the fine print, because the word does real work in a donor’s head.
Not open for applications. Not from chapters, and not from outside organizations. When that changes, it changes here first.
Not a way to move restricted gifts around. A gift restricted to a chapter or a campaign stays with that chapter or campaign. Foundation grants come from unrestricted funds and from gifts given for this purpose.
Not a loyalty program. A grant buys work for animals, not agreement with us. Organizations we disagree with on strategy are exactly the kind we should eventually be able to fund.

Fund the Foundation

If you want your money to go past the organization you are giving it to, this is the line item that does that. It funds chapters in cities where we have not been able to identify a qualifying local animal rights organization, and over time it funds groups whose logo is not ours.

Talk to us about a major gift See where the money goes

Project Animal Freedom is an IRS-recognized 501(c)(3) nonprofit, EIN 83-3007847. Contributions are tax-deductible to the extent allowed by law.

Frequently asked questions

Is the Animal Freedom Foundation a separate organization?

No. It is a grantmaking program of Project Animal Freedom, with no separate legal existence, board, or EIN. We use the word Foundation for the function, not the corporate form.

Can my organization apply for a grant?

Not yet. The first phase funds Project Animal Freedom chapters, and even that program is not open. Criteria and windows will be published before anything opens, and this page is where they will appear.

Do you actually give money to groups that are not yours?

Yes, at a small scale already. In 2025 roughly 3% of our revenue went to other organizations fighting for people, animals, and the planet. Formalizing that, and growing it, is much of the reason the Foundation exists.

Does MARI decide who gets funded?

No. The research program measures the region; the Foundation moves money; a firewall between them is a policy this program is adopting. Keeping them apart matters more the better our research gets, and we would rather commit to it now than be asked about it later.

Who decides which grants are made?

For now, Project Animal Freedom’s leadership and board, against criteria published in advance, under conflict-of-interest rules that keep anyone from voting on a grant to their own chapter. Grants to organizations we do not control, whether made through the alliance or directly, would be decided by a multi-organization committee rather than by our staff.

Is a gift to the Foundation tax-deductible?

Yes. It is a designated gift to Project Animal Freedom, EIN 83-3007847, deductible to the extent the law allows. You will receive a receipt by email.

What happens to my gift before the grant program opens?

It is used for chapter investment, which is the same purpose under a less formal name. If you would rather your gift wait for the first published cycle, tell us and we will hold it for that.

Why build this before you can afford it?

Because a giving practice is a habit, and habits are easier to build small. We would rather be an organization that gave away 3% when 3% was a few thousand dollars than one that discovers generosity after it becomes affordable.

A grantmaking program of Project Animal Freedom, not a separate legal entity. Last updated September 2026.
Spot something wrong on this page? Email info@projectanimalfreedom.org and we will correct it.