Strategic Grassroots Empowerment Fund

Requests For Proposals

Background

Clean & Prosperous America (CaPA) believes that a future with a healthy climate and a healthy economy are not mutually exclusive. With the right leadership at local and national levels, we believe it’s possible to achieve net-zero carbon emissions while building a healthy and sustainable economy. Historically, CaPA’s grant program has focused on turning out young and BIPOC voters in rural and suburban areas who face barriers to voting. This program is now being taken to scale, with support from CaPA and Movement Voter Project, by Rural Democracy Initiative’s new Rural Youth Voter Fund. CaPA’s 2024 grant program was run through our new Strategic Grassroots Empowerment Fund, which recognizes that – for better or for worse – many donors are often motivated to give late in the election cycle. The Strategic Grassroots Empowerment Fund is committed to helping these late-moving electoral investments move quickly to grassroots organizations with underutilized capacity that are directly engaging voters in the most competitive electoral geographies. This financial support can be used to engage a broad range of strategic demographic targets.

What We Fund

We regularly launch Requests for Proposals that invite organizations in targeted geographies to apply for funding. While the Strategic Grassroots Empowerment Fund supports a diverse range of organizations and tactics, we generally prioritize programs that are:

• Community-based and grassroots
• Focused primarily on direct voter contact, e.g. doors, phones, texts, and relational organizing, rather than indirect voter contact (TV, radio, digital, etc.)
• Led by and engaging constituencies that have historically been marginalized or under-contacted, including but not limited to communities of color, working class, indigenous people, youth, veterans, people with disabilities, LBGTQ, and immigrants 
• Organizations under-the-radar of more established funding partners and coalitions

We accept proposals from c3, c4 and PAC organizations.

Connecting with our team

If you have questions, please email CaPA’s Grant Program Director, Page Atcheson, at page@cleanprosperousamerica.org. We also invite you to reach out if you would like to be included in our landscape documents for any particular geographies, which will lead to you getting email notifications of related RFPs. Due to limited capacity, we are generally unable to hold unsolicited 1:1 calls with prospective grantees and encourage you to apply for funding through our RFP process rather than requesting a meeting. We look forward to learning about your work and connecting with you for more information as appropriate. 

If you are seeking long-term movement building resources specifically focused on engaging young voters in small towns and rural America, we encourage you to connect with the Program Manager of the Rural Youth Voter Fund, Danny Diaz, at daniel@rural-democracy.org.