Funding community groups to help them create meaningful change

In New York City and throughout the state, when legislation is finally passed, it can often be traced back to a handful of scrappy community groups – sometimes even just one that did the slow, hard work of knocking on doors, rallying on the steps of City Hall or in front of the Capitol in Albany and getting lawmakers to sign on to their agenda. But that methodical work takes money, for everything from printing posters and leaflets to hiring a few key staffers to keeping a campaign moving day-to-day. 

That's where North Star Fund comes in. According to its website, as of June 2023, the organization, founded in 1979, has awarded over $117 million in grants to over 2,800 organizations, via donor-advised funds and philanthropic partnerships. “We fund work that is led and enacted by people directly affected by an issue,” reads its website. "If you see a group of New Yorkers on the steps of the state Capitol or in the streets demanding their rights, we probably fund them now or have funded them in the past."

On August 6, New York Nonprofit Media spoke with Jennifer Ching, a lawyer who has led North Star Fund since 2017, about how her own New Jersey upbringing led her into social justice work, how North Star Fund works, what a typical day is like and what her goals for the organization are in the years ahead.

Thank you for talking with us today. If we met at a party and you told me you ran North Star Fund, how would you explain it?

We at NSF call ourselves a social justice fund because we're rooted in the values of social justice. That means that we're community-based, community-led and we only support work that is led by communities that are the most impacted by whatever injustice they are seeking to structurally transform – injustices that keep people poor and without access to resources. We think of ourselves as a people's foundation. We're not a foundation with a huge endowment from XYZ corporation or billionaires. We're out there raising money every day from people across race, class and identity, and from institutions of all kinds and sizes. Then we pool the money we raise and community organizations that volunteer with us, including our current, former and prospective grantees, sit on our committees and help us design our grant-making and move our dollars into all kinds of grassroots groups, such as those led by formerly incarcerated people seeking to end incarceration, or families of people killed by the NYPD seeking to move taxes into community care, or LGBTQ people fighting to end violence. 

We have grantmaking committees in New York City and in the Hudson Valley, and we have one called the Let Us Breathe fund, which gives grants to Black-led organizations. And we do this in part via a donor-advised fund, which is when individuals who've earned or inherited wealth, instead of starting their own foundation, they can open up private accounts with us and sort of outsource the foundation work to us.

I noticed that one of your grantees is Release Aging People in Prison, which works to do just that, and whose director, Jose Hamza Saldana, we interviewed about a year ago.

RAPP is a great example of a group that NSF has funded for a long time. We're known as a seed funder of very emerging groups. We're often the very first formal funder a group of people might work with when they're building an organization. So we also offer leadership –  or capacity – building programs for these groups to have the resources they need to build out a program. 

We also have a gala in the spring that people call the "Social Justice Prom." Over half our tickets are comped so that activists and organizers can come and meet one another. 

What is your grant-giving process like?

We try to make it as streamlined and accessible as possible. We'll do it however folks need – phone calls, video calls. We want to hear about how they're centering the leadership of people who are the most directly impacted. And it's our community-funded organizations that help us think through how to allocate the grants, which are unrestricted and multiyear. We're trying to remove structural barriers for grantees, who often have to spend half their lives writing grant reports, which takes time away from engaging in their mission. In fact, we just launched a statewide fund.

So currently our grants are $20,000 for all grantees. That can help groups hire an actual staff person. They'll also interact with us around building campaigns. If they're Black-led, they may be eligible for two of our funds: one of the location-based ones and also “Let Us Breathe.” We really want to counter the idea that community organizers are solely disruptive chaos agents. Organizers are what keep New York safe and have allowed it to be one of the most progressive states and to have a safety net. Our groups are fighting for affordable housing, healthcare, and for New York to stick to its climate change goals. Or, again, take RAPP. When they first started, we just accepted that elderly people would perish in prison. It really takes deeply impacted people and their allies to come together and say no to the status quo like that.

Other than RAPP, can you tell a story about how NSF money moved the needle for a specific grantee?

We have a commitment to not try to highlight specific groups, because we steward over 150 of them. I'm not trying to avoid the question, but—well, I can give you an example. We were the first funder for an immigrants rights group that, at the onset of the Trump administration, developed ways to build greater community safety for undocumented immigrants in a potentially very hostile climate. The common trajectory of an organization is that they will receive funding from us and use it to pay staff, then they become connected with other groups in the ecosystem, develop collaborations, learn about other projects and participate in other programs, like leadership-building. And then they will begin to fundraise and get other dollars.

Can you tell us about groups you've funded who've had a clear win?

We've both funded and are the fiscal sponsor for Communities United for Police Reform. They drove the campaign for the How Many Stops Act [which requires the NYPD to log all public interactions, in an effort at further NYPD transparency], which was passed earlier this spring [when the City Council overwhelmingly overrode Mayor Adams' veto of the bill]. But we often stay with groups after they have a legislative win because [there are often legal or other efforts to stop implementation], such as the mayor doesn't want to implement things that win. In New York City Hall, in Albany and across the state, you can often have very Pyrrhic victories. But we're not fly-by-night. We're in [these campaigns] for the long haul. They're usually very unglamorous, very technical, very hard-fought. But when you win and you can build something like paid sick leave – that's our bread and butter.

Can you tell us about your background?

I was raised in New Jersey in a family that experienced economic insecurity. I grew up with the contradiction between what I was told the American Dream was and what I saw, which was everybody working so hard and nobody getting ahead. Then I went to Harvard, where I randomly found a flier for a youth organizing training program and signed up for it – they provided stipends – and it changed my world. It taught me an analysis about where power is and how to think about power and how to actually win. Then I came back to New York City and worked for the Human Resources Administration because I wanted to understand how government works. 

Then I went to NYU Law, because I believe in the power of civil rights. I was amassing these experiences that taught me that if we don't actually change money systems and center the role of money across democracy, if we don't make that the plain work, then we don't understand how society works. So I practiced in all types of law, like the private sector, immigration, labor, international human rights, then I ran Queens Legal Services for almost a decade. But how we move money in the nonprofit sector – it's so broken.

What do you mean?

Because people in the field, who are changemakers at heart, don't feel that they can take the risks they believe are necessary to change structural conditions, because the world of philanthropy forces them to adhere to goals set by someone in a room far away from the community where you might work. And then you have to design this entire infrastructure around the business of raising, keeping and regulating the money. You're almost like a factory of widget reporting. Why should the powerful and wealthy, who are so divorced from the reality of poor people, set the agenda for what structural change should look like?

So you're saying that NSF says to grantees, "Use this money for whatever you think you need"?

Yes. We just ask groups what's important to them and then give them unrestricted general operating grants.

Do you ask them to give you follow-up reports?

We'll do scheduled phone check-ins but we don't ask for reports. We'll even accept a grant application they prepared for another funder [to save a potential grantee time].

What did your job as head of Queens Legal Services entail?

It's the largest civil legal services provider in Queens, based in Southeast Queens – a tremendous organization providing legal aid to thousands of low-income residents every year. It has a long history of partnering with grassroots groups, such as culturally competent groups for victims of domestic violence. It also has a really robust disability justice practice. It was a perfect job for me because I see poverty and injustice as a multi-issue space. We don't lead single-issue lives. I oversaw about 30 staff when I started in 2009 and that was over 80 staff when I left in 2017.

What did you learn in that job that you took to NSF with you?

I learned to really think about power differently and to understand that how we exercise power in all parts of our lives also has a very deep impact on everyone we touch. So, to me, it's not enough to work for an organization with a laudable mission. I'm not the kind of leader who's on a podcast every day. I want to be the kind of leader that is building a healthy and powerful workplace. We can do so much more if we center in our workplace the same social justice values [that our workplaces are striving for in the world]. 

At QLS, we thought hard about professional development for our team. We addressed anti-Blackness and anti-racism in the organization. You have to walk into all the conversations. I was fair and transparent about what dollars were coming in and where they were going. It's important as a leader to learn to listen and be clear about what you can and cannot do. And it's important for people to be heard. 

Can you boil it down to the single greatest skill you took away from there?

I think a lot of leadership, myself included, are often – we often feel like, "Okay, hey, I'm the leader in this room, the decision-maker." And I think the best thing I learned both at QLS and at NSF is that the best and strongest leaders are on an active path of unlearning all our deeply held practices – and the best leaders are willing to experiment and encourage what we traditionally call failure, but it's actually opportunities to exercise new muscles. I love being a leader who builds the leadership of others. Sometimes it's uncomfortable because they don't necessarily want to try a new thing. But I see such tremendous potential across generations in our workplaces. 

Can you tell a story that illustrates what you're talking about?

In the time I was at QLS, the example that sticks out for me is a partnership we started between the social worker practice, the immigrants' rights practice and the family law practice to create a new curriculum that brought together women who'd been victims of violence to become skilled themselves at preparing immigration petitions. And then training these women around power and community dynamics. We created a self-help legal clinic that was rooted in a really transformational approach to empowering ourselves around what cycles of violence look like. That's one of my favorite projects that we did.

And how did you come to NSF?

I'd known about NSF because I was an organizer in New York City in the ‘90s and the ‘00s. When the 2016 election was happening and we knew that a Trump administration was possible, a lot of the professional community I was in were like, "Okay, it's time for the lawyers to save the day." And I wasn't quite as strong a believer in the rule of law anymore. During the George W. Bush administration, I’d litigated a number of serious cases about the reach of state power, both related to Guantanamo and to the conduct of the Department of Defense in their treatment of Muslim communities in the U.S. and abroad. So by the eve of Trump, I'd already seen the chaos and the lack of constitutional principles and didn't believe in the sanctity of the courts. So I really wanted to be in a space supporting more people-led movements. That's what I was thinking in the fall of 2016, and then friends told me about the opening at NSF.

What is a typical day like?

I live in Brooklyn and have two teenagers, so I get up during the school year by 5:30am. I also live with my elderly parents and my father has late-stage Alzheimer's. So the morning is getting his food together and my kids out the door. I also probably spend too much time in bed doing the New York Times word puzzles. I'm on my longest crossword streak ever now, so please wish me the best. [laughs] 

Then my workdays are usually that home-office hybrid. We have a midtown office but I still largely work from home. I have the omnipresent Zoom calls, but I love meeting people in person for coffee, or at our office or the offices of our peers. I've really tried over the course of my professional life to never say no to anyone who asks me for a professional conversation. That's because, as a young person, I wanted to lead a mission-driven life but I had so much student debt and family obligations that I wondered "How am I going to survive?"

I sit on a number of boards so in the evening, I might have a board meeting or some event. Or I'm home and I support my mom with my dad. I might go for a run. Our dog just recently passed, but we're about to adopt a new one.

When does your day wind down?

Recently NSF instituted a 32-hour workweek – not a straight four days, but we ask our staff and team to schedule 80 percent of their work time within the business hours of Monday through Thursday and self-schedule the rest. So I will typically log off around 5:30 but I might be doing some checking in or some writing after that. The older I get, the more I understand that workaholic culture starts at the top. I've long learned not to email people at 10 p.m.

I love to read at night. I'm always reading three to four books at a time. I'm not really a nonfiction reader. I love sci-fi and I love period mysteries. I just finished a series set in Victorian England about women with mysterious powers who fight vampires and werewolves. I also love a good procedural. I just finished The Hunter by Tania French. She's a class act.

What are your goals for NSF for the next three to five years?

We received a substantial gift from [philanthropist and Jeff Bezos ex-wife] MacKenzie Scott last year, so we're embarking on a process to really listen to all our constituencies. Not just our grantees but also our funders. We're really working toward how we can strengthen and grow our role in supporting a healthy grassroots ecosystem in New York City. How do we continue to grow our fund to be the most community-led, democratic model in the world? We want to show that not only can we change policy outcomes in New York State but also change the way people give and relate to the nonprofit sector generally.